Marketing can be an overwhelming and complicated concept to get your head around. With so many platforms and channels, techniques and strategies at your disposal, we decided to simplify things to help you make a clear plan to achieve your goals.
Each of these 5 steps for marketing your business has a level of complexity and skill involved, however, the basic concept of marketing is simple. Get the attention of the right people in the right place with great content.
Your marketing strategy is your game plan for achieving each of these 5 steps:
1. Establish and understand your target audiences and key messages. Every business should have multiple audience segments within their target audience. Profile them, understand their behaviours and motivators so you can create valuable content specifically for them. Tailor your marketing messages for each audience, speak their language, relate to them and engage with them directly.
2. Create awesome content to engage your community. Content is your currency and you use it to get the attention of your audience. Create as much content as you can, make it worthwhile, make it entertaining, make it educational, whatever you do just make it!
3. Set up smart execution strategies across your marketing channels. Here’s where it gets fun for marketing geeks like me. This part of the process is where most businesses need assistance to get the results they are looking for. First off, pick the right channels (look for where your audience is), then take the content you have created for that audience and promote it in a way that engages people and makes them take action. This involves creativity, experimentation, optimisation, perseverance, patience and a few other big words.
4. Convert marketing leads into sales. Undoubtedly the toughest part of the process. Here’s where we get sophisticated with ad funnels, remarketing, and sequential advertising. Sounds complicated, and it can be if marketing is not your primary skill set, however, platforms like Facebook make this type of marketing reasonably straight forward - if you know what you’re doing. This stage in the game, also relies on the skill of your sales teams, website performance and to be blunt - how good your product or service is.
5. Do such a good job people will tell their friends about you. When you nail the first 4 parts of the process, you can bask in the glory of the best type of marketing - word of mouth, referrals and brand advocates! It’s all well and good to say your product or service is great, but when others testify to the fact that you offer something pretty special, then you’re on to a winner.