9 Steps To Successfully Market Anything

Phil Masiello
Aug 27, 2017 · 9 min read

In my new book, Think-Engage-Thrive: Marketing Actions To Skyrocket Your Brand In the Digital Age, I put forth a new framework for successful marketing.

Most of the existing frameworks, especially the 4 P’s, are flawed because they don’t focus on the customer. All marketing begins with the customer. My framework concentrates on a more modern approach.

THINK About Your Customer

Step 1 — Everything Begins With The Customer

Customers are the foundation of any business. Without them, you have no business.

To connect with yours, make sure you know them intimately so you can build your marketing programs around their needs, wants, and loves.

Keyword Planners, Google Trends, Social Media all provide real insight into the customer. Think about what you see in this data and build a customer personality framework for your business.

Creating a customer persona is a major step in marketing. When you know your customer well enough to build a persona, you are no longer marketing to an abstract set of demographic but an actual person.

Here are some fundamental questions you need to be able to answer about your business.

Who is your customer?

Why do they need your product?

What is the key benefit the customer gets from using your product?

What can you say about your business that the competition cannot?

What inspires the customer?

What will bring them to your brand?

Your business is ultimately about them, so start off on the right foot and get to know them before they even walk in the door, so to speak.

Step 2 — Develop Your Strategic Marketing Framework

Think about this concept for a moment.

Average marketers think in terms of weekly campaigns. Great marketers think in terms of an overall strategy.

Your strategy guides your marketing campaigns. Each campaign should be focused on one of the following goals:

• Awareness

• Engagement

• Retention

When developing your marketing strategy, focus your campaigns and budget to address these three goals. Keep in mind that awareness and engagement mean little if you can’t keep your customers around after their first purchase.

How much of your budget is allocated to awareness campaigns?
How much to engagement?
How much to retention?

For consumer product companies we recommend an allocation of
25% Awareness
50% Engagement
25% Retention

For B2B companies we recommend
40% Awareness
40% Engagement
20% Retention

Step 3 — Develop Your Brand Story

What is your Brand Story?

Brand storytelling is the WHY of your company.

Why do the customers need you and what value do they get from your brand?

Why does your company exist?

Don’t confuse your brand story with your company summary. Your brand story is about your customers. It is a major step in marketing because it will determine your brand voice and how you will speak to your customers.

Your story will guide your brand’s website, social, and content strategy as well as your overall marketing messaging.

If your customers see you as a young hip brand, your content is written in that voice. If you are a serious brand, then you will want to communicate in a serious voice. The best marketers figure out ways to get the customers to tell their brand story.

Two great examples of using customers for your brand storytelling are Weightwatchers and Proactive. When you review their website, content, video and social strategies, you can see a cohesive storytelling approach from a customers perspective.

Develop your story, and let your customers own it.

Step 4 — Build Your Presence

You have defined your customer, and you know them intimately. You have your marketing strategy planned, and you have created your brand story. It is now time to use this information to build your website, social media pages, and advertising.

You want all of these customer touch points to have a coordinated look, feel, and messaging to your customers. Even your 404 Error pages can be put to use to show off your attention to detail.

Whether you are consumer-focused or business-to-business, hire a user experience designer. They will take your customer profile, your marketing goals and your brand story to create a design and flow that helps convert visits to buyers.

Begin with the mobile experience first. How will you be able to express your brand on a mobile phone or tablet? It is always easier to expand content and add features for a desktop experience than it is to take away unnecessary elements for mobile. When you think about the customer today, mobile it becoming the first screen.

ENGAGE

Step 5 — Get Traffic To Your Site

Once you understand your brand’s reason for being and have built your site, it’s time to engage. Here are a few basic ways to get traffic and customers to your site.

Paid Advertising — There are plenty of paid advertising opportunities online and offline. The most common online are Google AdWords, Bing, and Yahoo, which are keyword driven text ads. There are also keyword driven display ads, content driven native ads, retargeting ads and direct buy ads to name a few.

Paid ads can be a very effective awareness building and engagement channel. Paid advertising is also highly measurable so carefully track your spend and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) in each campaign.

Search Engine Optimization — SEO is a highly effective engagement method using online search traffic. Your objective is to be the first response when customers are asking questions online related to what you sell. This is one of the best engagement channels as customers are searching for the solution that you provide. This is a lot of work, requires SEO expertise and is an ongoing effort. But when done correctly, it is the most profitable method.

Social Media — Social Media is not about direct selling. This is the biggest mistake brands make. Remember your brand story? This is where you want to use that story to start conversations with customers. Engage with your customers in a way that reinforces why they should buy from you.

Here is a way that I like to explain the social strategy to my clients. Think about social media as a party that you are invited to with thousands of guests whom you don’t know. Would you begin a conversation with someone by handing out coupons for $5 off your product or are you going to strike up conversations and get to know the others at the party?

Social media gives you the chance to really connect and engage with your customers. Reinforce why you are the brand that they should love. When executed correctly, this is a very effective awareness and retention channel.

Email — Build your email list through purchases and visitors to your website. Getting a customer to purchase is the best way. But not all visitors to your site will purchase. Be creative to get your visitors to provide an email. Give something away to get an email from a visitor. These are people who have shown interest in your product.

Buying a list is ineffective and costly. We never recommend this method. These are lists of people who have shown no interest in your brand, and conversions will be very low. Your hard-won email list is the most efficient retention and engagement channel.

Display — Display ads are most suitable for awareness building. When you know your customer very well, you will know the types of sites they will visit. You can use display ads on those sites to remain in their purchase consideration set. However, don’t expect a lot of engagement from these ads. They won’t generate orders, but they will get your brand message out and increase awareness.

These are the essential traffic generating methods. Once you have mastered these, there are many more. Here is a free e-book of 110 Traffic Building Methods for your Website on www.hounddogdigital.com that will give you other ideas for building your site traffic.

Step 6 — Conversion Optimization

Getting traffic to your site is costly and hard work. You want to make the most of it.

Here is a free e-book that provides 110 Great Digital Marketing Tools. Several of those tools are focused on conversion optimization for your website and your advertising campaigns. You should continually measure and optimize all of your traffic generating sources.

Many first-time e-commerce entrepreneurs are surprised at the conversion rates they achieve on their website. When we explain that for every one hundred website visitors you can expect three orders, they are shocked. Certainly, there are sites getting conversions in the double digits, but they have been in business for a long time, have a specialized product and have defined their customer with a bull’s-eye.

The reason we spend so much time working on site optimization methods is that you want to maximize your return. As an online brand, you want to make the best return on your traffic driving spend. Optimization takes time, effort and skill. You need to watch how your customers use your site and remove any obstacles to conversion.

Here is a list of the most recent average conversion rates by industry.

Auto Products 2.27%

B2B 2.58%

Consumer Services 5.00%

Dating & Personals 2.75%

E-commerce 2.91%

Education 4.13%

Employment Services 3.97%

Finance & Insurance 7.19%

Health & Medical 2.51%

Home Goods 3.68%

Industrial Services 2.58%

Legal 4.35%

Real Estate 4.40%

Technology 2.55%

Travel & Hospitality 2.57%

When you consistently test, measure, and tweak, your conversion rates can be optimized to a much higher percentage than these averages. Also, knowing exactly who your customer is and how best to engage with them, will increase your site above the average.

Step 7 — Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an often-overlooked segment of digital marketing, and it can be a very useful sales channel for most brands. It is a performance-based process, which rewards the affiliates for each visit, customer, or order brought to the brand by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.

Affiliates are simply other websites that advertise your product and are paid a bounty based on the agreed conversion. Affiliate ads can be anything from text links to extravagant skyscraper banners provided by you.

There are four parts to affiliate marketing. It begins with the brand or retailer; the network that manages the affiliates and the payments; the affiliate or publisher who lists your deal on their site; lastly is the consumer who takes advantage of the deal.

Affiliate marketing should average about 15% of your total web sales. This channel will grow as your brand grows and it can be a profitable channel when managed correctly.

THRIVE

Step 8 — Retention Marketing

Now that you have created a marketing system to deliver site visits and customers continually, you need to protect what you have built. Don’t make the mistake of taking customers for granted and believe they will always return.

Retention marketing is a discipline founded in continuous communication with your customers. The two best methods to employ in this channel are email and social media. These are your retention touch points and also enable you to advertise new offers to well-qualified leads.

There are auto responder emails systems that will automate this process and provide measurable and actionable retention statistics. Our favorite product is by Windsor Circle, which has quickly become a standard in the e-commerce industry.

Step 9 — Reviews

Reviews are essential to your success online. This cannot be understated.

Consider that 90% of consumers read reviews BEFORE visiting a site. So having your reviews on unbiased third party sites like Google, Amazon, Yelp, or Trustpilot is essential to thriving.

Here are a few more statistics to reinforce the point.

• 88% of consumers trust reviews as much as personal recommendations.

• 72% of customers will take action after reading positive reviews.

• Customers spend 31% more with companies that have excellent reviews.

• 86% of customers will not visit a site with negative reviews.

These nine steps, when executed correctly, will set your digital marketing on a solid foundation and allow your business to Thrive.

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Phil Masiello

Written by

Philip Masiello, Author of Think-Engage-Thrive! Marketing | Founder Hound Dog Digital Marketing | Entrepreneur | Amazon Selling Expert | Mentor to Startups

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