A Guide to Kicking off Effective Marketing
Retail Shops to Corporations: Making your marketing approach
Everyone is familiar with the term “marketing,” but unlike other corporate functions, marketing is one whose nature is more subjective. Everyone has a different definition of what marketing is, what purpose it serves and how it’s utilized — and it naturally differs from business to business. However, not all opinions in this sense are created equal, and most businesses would greatly benefit from adding more clarity and structure to their marketing approach.
Often business owners fall in a hole of predisposition to their company and business development approach. Simply put, if it is not working as well as you think it should, then it’s okay to tweak or even totally reinvent your strategy. The starting point for any business to establish — or re-establish — their go-to market approach is to answer three main questions that will ultimately guide the most effective process.
The important questions
How do you define yourself? — If you could grab attention of the whole world and tell them in one sentence the value your business provides, what would it be? What feedback do you get from the market on what you’re best at and better at than others? This will help lay a foundation for your value proposition and help drive a strong brand to instill in the marketplace.
What are your goals? — every project large or small within every business should always start with defining where you want to be. Visualize yourself a year from now looking back at the year; what would you want to be able to say you’ve accomplished? Be specific. Growth in size and revenues are good answers, but have explicit goals too that include benchmarks and time frames.
- “Increase foot traffic in store by X percent within next 6 months.”
- “Increase web traffic by X pageviews/month by the end of fiscal quarter.”
Even include objectives that you may think — or have been told — are impossible; they’re always possible.
What is your budget? — Visualize your main goals and establish a specific amount of money that you are willing and/or able to spend to get there. Estimating the eventual returned value of accomplishing goals could help in quantifying a reasonable investment number.
How are you performing? — With perceived goals and budget in mind, if progress (or in some cases, regress) in your business continues at its current rate, is it reasonable to predict you’ll hit your goals.
Why or why not? — What is working in your business that conceivably bring you to your goals? What is not working that needs improvement or act as obstacles? What new could you be doing to get you there?
What are you going to do about it? — Lastly, what should the course of action be. You have goals, a budget in mind and you know how you’re performing against them and what could be continued, fixed or added to the mix to get you there — now how do you do it. Whether you’re the project manager, someone else internally or an external consultant, a detailed action plan should be generated that lies out: Here’s what we’ll do, here’s how we’ll do it, and here’s a schedule of how we’ll execute it.
Once you have these answers, confirm they are answers that you’re comfortable with. Sleep on it, or let it sit for a weekend then revisit, then do so again until you’re totally comfortable. Crafting a strategy for marketing — even one that’s long-term — is much easier with these answers than attempting to do so without. First, establish the goals, then visually back-up into the process to achieve them and then to where to start.
These questions are basic and general but oftentimes surprisingly difficult to answer, even for very involved business owners. Knowing generally where you want to be is easy for some, visualizing how to get there gets tricky and often forces professionals to reinvent the strategy wheel. While best strategies will differ for different companies, in most cases, what gets companies from A to B quickly and effectively is establishing and optimizing all of the main, relevant marketing channels. These channels could eventually be very firmly established and then maximized, even using a shoestring budget.
Where to start
Website
A website is the virtual face of your company if you are a brick-and-mortar business. If you’re an e-commerce business, it is the face. A site should be professional-looking, engaging and inhibit a favorable action.
It’s imperative that a website strongly captures brand essence consistently with your other materials — be them printed brochures, ads, look and feel of the store — this perpetuates your identity.
A site must communicate a clear message of who you are, what you do and why visitors should be interested. Great messaging always communicates “what’s in it for you,” and not merely “here’s what I sell” or worse “here’s what I want from you.”
Clear primary call to action is incredibly important. Busy sites with multiple options of where a user navigates are confusing and usually ineffective. Guide traffic over to main areas that will trigger behavior that will support your goals. Funnel attention down to your contact information, over to your products page, over to similar products when viewing one, etc.
Clear secondary call to action is important as well. These are less compulsory actions that support your goals often indirectly. One CTA that every site should include is to sign up for more information. Some people are intrigued by your site but it’s something that might be relevant later. Rather hoping they remember you, give them the option to be reminded. If you want to push visitors to view your products page main CTA, perhaps they will rather at least click a social media icon and follow you, or sign up for more information from you. This way, the main CTA could come later.
Optimize your site by complying with best practices in SEO, and drive additional traffic to your site with other search-engine marketing techniques. CreativeBloq put together a list of brialliant and responsive websites here.
Social Media
Set up on social media, even if you’re not tech savvy or feel your customers don’t use it. Companies that make the jump to the social media world are often shocked at the value they receive compared to their expectations. Social media also has a market perception that helps business appear modern and relevant.
Post regularly, or schedule out posts. Messaging through social media should not exclusively be product-focused or promotional, although impulsively that’s where we intuitively want to go. The key is to build a following, and people want to follow those who provide them value, not just try to sell them. The common law of digital marketing is to share one self-promotional post for every at least four non-promotional. This helps followers feel they’re not just trying to be baited. Non-promotional content could include articles or videos that are relevant to your industry, inspirational quotes, fun facts, or random thoughts. These things add personality to an otherwise cold, corporate persona. Social media publishing tools — like HootSuite — allow you to manage and schedule posts, and are usually free at the basic level.
Interact with people. Don’t just post, but communicate. Repost compelling material that others have posted, reply to comments or questions, engage in discussions that are relevant to your industry. This grows audiences even further and helps your brand be viewed as a thought leader.
Include your social media links everywhere that makes sense. On your website, in your email signature, on your business card, in your ads/brochures/menus, in your store. Be creative. Here are some innovative social media placements in a blog I wrote for my website.
Targeted Advertising
Putting out ads in places that you know are exposed to your target audience is a great approach. The more specific the placement are, the more bang you traditionally get for your buck. If you’re a New York City restaurant, an ad in the food & beverage section in a local paper will have strong value for the investment as opposed to a more expensive general ad in the news section. However, ads are expensive, and there are other ways to exposure your business too.
Get on Google Maps for your location if you are a brick-and-mortar store or your headquarters if you are not. If you haven’t been put on already, getting added is easy through Google Maps for Business. Simply put in your details and Google will mail you a confirmation with a webpage and a code. Visit the webpage and enter the code and you’re in. Google Maps helps customers discovery your location. The go-to approach for many modern people who are looking to make an in-person purchase is to search Google Maps. If you’re an office, placement on Maps makes your business look established and professional.
Sponsoring local events or other events that you know potential customers attend is a great way to expose your brand and also meet prospects face-to-face. Charity events are particularly effective as they add an ethical touch to your persona.
Direct Marketing
Email marketing should not be confused with SPAM, although the two often get batched together. Simply put, email marketing follows best practices and complies with the CAN-SPAM Act enforced by the FTC, while SPAM does not. Gather names and emails of your clients and contacts and have them consent to receiving electronic mail from you, and offer a clear method of unsubscribing at any time. Customer data gets collected using web forms, paper forms, contact forms, sales transactions and other methods. If people consent to receiving your email, they’ll be more likely to view it. If they don’t consent, then they are probably not relevant or won’t be interested, so they wouldn’t be worth the time anyway. Email marketing should follow the same rule as social media when it comes to content; offer mostly material that will be valuable to the contact, then soft promote, then hard promote. Just promoting is normally too aggressive and turns people away. Sign up with an email marketing platform that collects data and executes sends. These platforms range from free to very expensive. MailChimp and Campaign Monitor are some great lower-cost platforms, but have limited capabilities. Marketo and Hubspot are on the higher end and offer robust features.
Direct mail could be another great channel. While physical direct mail is a bit of a dated approach and commonly viewed as ineffective, there are ways to do it wisely. Usually including coupons, sale information and other incentives make them worthwhile. Bed, Bath and Beyond does a great job of garnering shoppers using this method. Include a digital element in direct mail to bridge paper with technology by including your website, your social media handles and perhaps even a dedicated landing page for the promotion. This helps you gauge the conversions and see how effective the approach was.
Keep customer data organized. Email and direct mail is not easy if you don’t have organized customer and contact data. Make sure your web-signups and customer data is sitting in the same repository. Merging the two will make it easy to organize, append and use strategically when needed. Customer relationship databases that act as this platform range in cost from free to very expensive, usually depending on the amount of contact you have. Salesforce and Nimble are a couple great services. Insighly.com is a great up-an-comer, geared towards small business, who offer their CRM service free up to 2,500 contacts. Collect as much data on your contacts as possible, even hobbies and interests if possible. This helps you communicate to them using the right message at the right time; for example, if a customer notes they bought an item for a spouses birthday, ping them around the same time next year with birthday gift suggestions. Smarter data goes a long way in relationship building; here is a piece I wrote in response to a recent Inc. article on this topic.
Blog
Blogging has a huge effect on business, so it’s no wonder a myriad of big corporations have one. Blogging might seem silly at first, but look through its bad wrap. Like social media, blogging adds a personality to your brand but more in-depth. Social media — often dubbed as micro-blogging — allows you to share snippets of information to your market. Blogging allows customers to really get into your head and (hopefully) like what they see. If you touch a person in some way through your blogging — like teach them something new, make them laugh, impress them with your knowledge — when it comes time they have a need for a product or service that you sell, they are likely to remember you and patronize your business. Blogging also acts as fuel for social media and email marketing; instead of just blasting out promotions, send new blog updates. Blogs also sometimes get picked up by other blogs or media organization. A recent blog I wrote was picked up and tweeted by two major marketing software companies exposing it to tens-of-thousands of viewers; equatable to thousands in ad spend.
Share your blog with people and make it easy for them to find your business from it. A great place for a blog is on your website. If somewhere else (like Medium), make sure people know who you are and what you do and provide direction to your site or location.
Let your employees blog either on your company’s site or their own. This is often frowned upon by traditionalist businesses, but the modern market likes a personal connection, not a cold, corporate one. Let your employees share thoughts, experiences and images that involve your business. Many fear negative content surfacing; but in the digital age, if an employee is disgruntled and wanted to broadcast their anger, they will do it on their own regardless. Give your employees a mouthpiece through blogging and social media and let them feel like a bigger piece of the business.
Other channels will often apply in your business, but all share a common underlying goal. Establish, optimize, maximize, then capitalize. For example, it’s not enough to merely establish a Twitter account. Optimize it by gathering targeted followers, maximize it by syndicating great content to followers, then capitalize by judiciously promoting to your newfound relationships.
Accomplishing goals using strategic marketing often requires support. Taking a stab at an ad hock approach is often unstable and ineffective. Adopting a consulting partner to help recreate or lay the marketing foundation to build off is a major tool utilized by small businesses all the way up to Fortune 500 corporations.
Contact me at any time for information or with any questions.
