MY MARKETING SUCKS! WELL, ARE YOU LOOKING AT THE RIGHT PLACE TO BEGIN WITH?
The past few months have turned the world of business as we know it upside down, forcing those who followed more traditional concepts to consider new ways to evolve and survive.
Business owners have come up with some of the most creative ways to generate business. From using apps like Zoom and WhatsApp to follow up on leads to social media live streams to keep their audience engaged throughout the lockdown.
Even fast-food joints & cafes, something we consider as an outdoor activity came up with new DIY coffee/donut kits for you to experience your favourite treat from the comfort of your own home.
This brings us to our topic today. What about you? Are you focusing on the right areas to market your product and services? Do you still think your marketing sucks? Even after putting in all the efforts and financial resources that you thought would be enough?
Although the above-mentioned examples may be the work of a brilliant team or a very enthusiastic employee. Irrespective of what you do, there are a few common denominators among all of these examples that lead to a successful campaign and most importantly provide a good ROI.
So, let’s talk about the most common question we hear “why is my marketing not working?”
The answer to this isn’t as simple as you would think.
Given the burst of competition and different platforms, a number of reasons can affect your marketing strategy and numbers. Today, you need a holistic approach to marketing with multiple touchpoints to reach out to your target audience. The fundamental of marketing need to be in place before you can truly evaluate if the marketing campaign is working or not.Take a look below for some common factors you should consider for the poor response:
1.What is your buyer persona?
Identifying your buyer persona is a big part of marketing planning which unfortunately many small and medium businesses fall short on. This is the first place to look at while evaluating your marketing campaign. You should identify your buyer persona with granular detail and only then go after that target market. This will not only save you time and cost but also significantly enhance your conversion ratio. Identifying the market persona is a discovery process that includes understanding the market, conducting research, and evaluating who will benefit the most by your product/service. Define the person by demographic information such as location, company size/annual income, title, interests and more. Once you have defined the persona then identify where and how are you able to connect with the target persona. For instance, which social media is that demograph more likely to use, what events they attend, which online resources they trust for industry news and more. These intel should dictate your marketing planning, activities, and budget.
2. Your company has a social media account and a website. But that’s it!
Most brands today start off with a website and a social media handle. That’s not enough. Irrespective of your company size creating a buzz is still a very “marketing friendly” thing to do in order to create business opportunities. Yes, an aesthetically pleasing social layout and witty tweets can get you some traction. But focusing on adding value to what you share online, keeping it genuine and replicating the same offline at events or expos or even a night market helps get those leads, create actual sales and customers.
3. Single platform presence.
Consider this, your product best suits the needs of teenagers today. But your brand has a profile on Facebook and nowhere else. While single platforms are a good way to start off it has to be based on the demographics. This means, where your target audience spends the most amount of time is where you should be as well! In this case, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok.
4. You haven’t created a Holistic Marketing approach.
A holistic marketing approach is done through various channels. This includes
- e-mail marketing
- lead generation strategies,
- social media platforms, and
- reaching out to contacts.
This allows you to cover more ground. Thereby, giving you a larger lead generation pool.
5. You haven’t implemented online “and” offline strategies.
While online marketing may seem easy and tempting (after all it does allow you the comfort and data all through a few clicks), the traditional marketing approach still holds its value. Applying both online and offline strategies for a business is very important. Notice any large company you see on a day to day basis. While they have a good online presence, they still come up with offers and value services that are aimed at winning their customers over.
Create marketing strategies on two primary goals –
- To get sales and leads, and
- Develop brand value in the minds of customers
6. Motivators and Demotivators
What factors influence decision-making for your target market? You should observe and identify key motivators and demotivators. Don’t be shocked, as harsh as the term sounds it’s not. Those who offer high prices for a quick service for example the express shipping for a faster delivery are motivators. They could also be the ones who run on a scarcity tactic that leads customers to think they will miss out on an opportunity (example a sale that says “limited stocks”). Whereas, a demotivator persona offers lower prices and a longer wait period on the service.
The issue with your marketing could simply be that you are targeting customers who want the service quickly or the opposite, who are willing to pay and wait for a better service.
7. You expect an immediate ROI
What’s important to remember even before we get on to the technical aspect of what works and doesn’t work for your business, it is setting the right expectations. Marketing strategies are a long-term aspect of every business operation. When the company starts off in its cycle you can’t expect it to be a success overnight. But through persistent efforts, dynamic management, and the right strategies these investments pay off. The same applies for marketing, invest in a long-term plan for your business. This can help in more ways than you could imagine. From understanding customer preference to nurturing leads that convert into customers all of this is a part of the process that comes with time.
8. Lastly, your brand doesn’t have a persona
Is your brand telling your story? Every business is an entity. In the eyes or law and more so in the eyes of the customers. When they interact with your employees when they buy a product or service the brand voice and vision should have an active role in it. Your website should be at the front of this as the door to your business. It’s design and content should align with the offers and message you wish to convey. Social media presence should also be aligned with it so should all your other digital marketing campaigns.
When you have something good to offer it’s equally important to let your audience know who you are.
Show them
- your brand can be trusted (brand authenticity),
- it’s well recognized (brand voice), and
- the brand image they can associate the product with.
All of this can be brought together by investing in a good marketing strategy that defines and analyses the market, it’s trends and your current strategy. Based on which experts will then suggest what method or approach will work best!
ARE YOUR LEADS SOCIAL DISTANCING FROM YOUR MARKETING CAMPAIGN?
Often times we come across businesses with a lot of potential which unfortunately doesn’t get fully realized. Although they seem promising not all business ideas translate into success.
Although there can be many reasons why a business can’t make a profit and why your leads aren’t converting. If in the initial stages there’s a drop or no customers the first thing we often look into is their strategy. Marketing strategy often comes under scrutiny during this evaluation.
Often, it’s the marketing that wasn’t done right. In a small or medium business, a marketing team’s goal is to provide a bridge between the idea (aka value of your product or service to the customer) and customers (the goal).
If you are on this blog it’s because you are concerned your business isn’t generating leads or your marketing isn’t creating the leads you would like it to.! Which is a valid concern for many small and medium businesses in the GTA.
The problem lies in the ways you market and that’s exactly what this blog will help you understand. Read on.
Top reasons your marketing isn’t generating leads.
1.You don’t do Passive Marketing
What’s passive marketing you ask? Glad you did! Passive marketing is a constant effort to be seen as a brand. Remember those billboards or radio ads? For starters, that’s what it is but over the years this has evolved in social media and active efforts to spread brand awareness.
Although this makes it easy for a small business to enter a market, the market is saturated and that’s where our next point plays in.
2. Is your website generating leads?
We have observed a lot of SMBs missing out on lead generating opportunities through their website. Consider your website as part of your sales team and invest time and budget as you would on your sales resources. One of the common mistake businesses make is by undermining the potential of their website just because they may not have generated any leads from their website in past. There could be multiple reasons behind this and in most cases, it is simply down to lack of clarity on the purpose of the website in first place. If you consider your website to be a lead generating tool then you must invest time to review the content, keep it up to date, and more importantly present your brand the way you would when you are in front of a client. Your website should tell your brand’s story and include information about your business, product/services, and why should they consider your company. If your service/product can be sold or subscribed virtually then make that facility available with eCommerce capability.
Most of your website visitors are anonymous and as part of your lead generation measures, you must make efforts to identify them:
- Direct your website visitors to a concrete next step by adding Call-To-Action buttons through-out your website
- Add resources and materials such as eBooks, Infographs, Product Brochure for visitors to download
- Add Chat feature to instantly connect with you
- Create easy forms for visitors to submit
- Analyse website traffic to monitor performance of each webpage and content
- Make sure your website is mobile friendly and easy to navigate, and more.
3. What is your nurture strategy?
Not all leads in your pipeline will convert. Some leads may become cold over a period of time What are you doing about those leads? Nurturing leads is as important as generating new ones. You should maintain a lead funnel and closely monitor the progress of your leads. Many of your leads may not be actively in the market and that is OK. It is your responsibility to keep nurturing them to maturity. Here are some common ways to nurture your leads:
- Send them monthly emails with new updates, offers, resources, etc.
- Set a reminder to drop them a call periodically
- Send them personalized mailers if and when possible, for instance during the holiday season
- Try to connect with them on social media so that they can view your posts
4. You haven’t started generating leads through passive marketing techniques
One of the greatest gifts of digital marketing in today’s day and age is the gift of social media ads! Targeted ads that use Sophisticated tech and algorithms that would cost us a fortune are available at our fingertips for free. Condition you invest a bit in them and use them the right way. Now you may be wondering how do I generate leads with social media ads? We’ll answer that, you can run ads with:
A/B testing– this lets you run two separate ads and gather results based on your target audience preference. All you have to do is run two ads you think will work and see which fares.
Lead generation objective– platforms like Facebook and Google will run specific campaigns. These ads come in different categories, from ads to get more leads to ads aimed at getting more attention to your page. Let’s say you choose lead generation as your target for running an ad. The algorithm will then direct your ads at the users it determines will be best suited for this purpose creating more sign-ups or visibility on those users’ profiles.
5. You haven’t targeted the right persona
Marketing online is not about targeting the entire 2 billion people online but targeting a niche that relates to your brand and its product. This helps you create leads easier. Simply put, targeting a persona among your audience and aligning a similar brand persona to match it helps the audience relate to your brand and create your own orbit in which you can engage and generate leads for your business. An easy example could be new moms, based on their searches and active groups or following your business can attract new moms with offers that they may be interested in. Offering services that align with their needs and marketing strategies that attract them towards your product or services.
6. You aren’t active on social platforms
Having a presence is very important when it comes to creating leads. Not only offline but even online customers look for businesses they feel are genuine. When they visit your page or look you up your business should showcase active presence digitally. This helps a customer trust the fact that you are an active business that will provide to their needs. Regular social media posting, updated blogs and websites help create this with minimal effort yet promise valuable lead generation.
7. You don’t strategize lead generation activities
Online presence in itself can’t offer 100% lead gen. Your marketing strategy has to involve a conscious effort to generate leads and there are a number of ways to go about it.
Our main picks:
Ad campaigns– running ads as we mentioned generates interest among your niche audience and helps them convert to active customers. Running ads on different platforms or for starters even on Facebook alone can create a huge buzz as Facebook uses its AI and algorithm to pick among its users who will most likely opt for your product or service.
LinkedIn campaigns– a growing number of small businesses especially B2B generate a good amount of their leads through LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator helps you target business owners and directly pitch your services/ product to them be it for a vertical or lateral line of connections.
E-mail campaigns– are a good way to nurture the current leads to remind them of your business and those who are warm or cold leads without having to cold call. Most marketers agree email campaigns still generate leads on par with social media and offline efforts and in fact are still a very valuable resource and cost-effective for a small business.
8. Maintain and build relationships
A business needs its clients at every stage of its cycle. This is why building and maintaining relationships become so much more important. Social media gives you easy access to stay connected, and so does email. You don’t always have to have a product on sale but offering discounts or sending newsletters on what your business is currently doing helps build trust and a personal relationship with its customers. This creates a human bond between the business and its customers which is the most important factor here. Empathy and making them realize their connection are valued helps customers build brand loyalty in the long run.
9. Your page isn’t showing up on the search engine
Customers search for a brand, it’s reviews and website. SEO, as we mentioned above helps get your page a higher ranking on search engines. Irrespective of whether the customer is looking for your brand in specific or just typing in their requirements. Having the keywords and blogs/ content that match their search will help search engines show your business as one of the options. However, with so many competitors online, ranking on the first page is very important. We have dedicated an entire blog on how to get your website SEO friendly to be sure to read that if you need more insight on this point.
10. Add videos.
The last point we would like to address is videos. With the audience being subjected to a host of information online it’s no surprise that the general audience’s attention has been said to be around a few seconds. These few seconds will determine whether they turn into leads or ignore your product. Add short videos to help get your customer’s attention!
What these do in general is give your brand a voice and give all the necessary information about what it is that your business does without the audience having to spend more than a few seconds to make that vital decision of whether they buy from you or not.
To conclude, it doesn’t matter how big or small your business is, creating a brand image and a strong brand presence is critical to your lead generation measures. Some of these activities are passive and may not directly lead to generating opportunities, however, they are crucial in complimenting your sales campaign.
MARKETING HACKS SMALL BUSINESSES SHOULD NOT IGNORE IN 2021
It’s being prophesied that the world will go artificial in the next 25 years. Cars will be automated, cities will become smarter and currencies will go corporate. Researches by futuristic organizations such as the UN and the World Economic Forum have predicted the vanquish of digitization over everyday living. So let’s ask the favourite question of every interviewer. Where do you see yourself in the next 25 years? Where will your business stand among humanized robots and chatbots?
A THOUSAND VR CANNOT REPLACE A MOVIE THEATRE EXPERIENCE
Similarly, small businesses can be improved by automation, but can never be replaced. Howbeit, to stay relevant and constantly assure your leads and customer of your credibility, you’ll have to keep up with digitization, or as a millennial would like to call, the Kardashians of marketing.
KEEPING UP WITH THE K’DASHIANS
Digital marketing is as deep as the Mariana Trench. Different strategies and campaigns work for different businesses offering different services. Still and all, there’re a few campaigns that device the blueprint of online marketing for any and all types of small businesses. Some of the campaigns are a must if we want brand visibility as well as lead generation/conversion.
- E-MAIL MARKETING: Since the past one year was primarily online, there was an 80% increase in e-mail engagement. Added to that, it’s predicted that global email users will grow to 4.48 billion by 2024. So, it’s highly likely, that many small businesses will invest in e-mail marketing. In a customer-centric market, areas of investment will be on personalization strategies that ups engagement with both new customers and existing customers and email marketing automation that makes personalized campaigns easier to implement and manage.
Source: Matt Janaway | Business 2 Community
- CONTENT MARKETING: Content is the key to relevance. Whether through social media or advertisements, content is always created to fill the fine gaps between demand and supply. Your content can be personalized, empowering or simply educational, but it’s your content that will shape and narrate the story of your brand.
Some of the content marketing types to be staunched to in 2021
➔ Blog Content Marketing
➔ Infographic Content Marketing
➔ Podcast Content Marketing
➔ Video Content Marketing
➔ Social Media Content Marketing
- SEO: SEO will be one of the most important powerful strategy since everything on the world wide web is currently based on algorithms. The coming year will be no different, but the focus will shift from getting listings on the first page to SEO visibility in position zero. So what is Position Zero? Position Zero refers to Google’s featured snippet that’s separated with a small box at the top of the search results. Another key point is to keep in mind that your users may use virtual assistants to look-up businesses. Make sure your website is well-optimized with long-tail keywords and phrases to be listed on voice search. Don’t limit optimizing your website for text search. Make sure to explore voice search optimization for virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, or Cortana.
To know about the what, why and how of SEO marketing, check our ultimate guide to SEO, SEO- THE HERO OF YOUR DIGITAL MARKETING CAMPAIGNS.
- LOCAL MARKETS: Since we live in a universe that is on cloud both celestially and digitally, the sky becomes the limit. We aim for the entire 7 billion people when we tap a target audience, online. Although at a level 2 this might be a good approach to enhance brand visibility and outreach, it is important to take care of the low hanging fruits first. It is important to carefully craft a niche for our business based on demography, needs and other factors to strengthen the core. Ergo, building the business at the local tire is a must, first and a constant.
- CONVERSATIONAL MARKETING: Conversational marketing is a fancy term to define marketing using real-time conversations to convert your leads into buyers. One of the economic ways of implementing conversational marketing is via chat widgets. Website users can connect directly with you over any queries or to book a consultation session. When using chat widgets or similar applications, the key is to have a definitive path to the conversation. Define in advance how would you like your users to use the chat option. Is it to answer product/service queries, book appointments, help users buy products online, etc.? The more defined you are with your approach, the better user experience you can provide.
Dr Dave Chaffey’s Digital Insights suggests that the goals of conversation marketing include
➔ Sell – Higher conversion rates through offline channels provided by human interaction or human-style interaction enabled by a chatbot
➔ Speak – Conversations enable queries to be resolved more rapidly than static web pages
➔ Serve – Customer satisfaction ratings improved by better customer service
➔ Save – Cost savings from when fewer support staff interactions are needed
➔ Sizzle – The personal touch gives a better brand experience
BEFORE JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS
Unlike Kangaroos who jump for travel purposes, humans jump to conclusions. So, before we let you conclude, online marketing will be an extremely powerful gadget in 2021, when it comes to lead generation and brand visibility, but it is not meant to replace the personalized warmth of offline marketing. Both need to go hand in hand.
After all, all the delicious and quirky e-mails by Dominos is one ingredient, but the delivery boy’s heart-warming “Here’s your pizza, ma’am, have a nice day!” completes the entire recipe!
