Do you have a hard time making marketing actually work? We’re going to help you with that.
Follow these seven tips and you’ll have a marketing strategy that delivers.
Always start by defining your buyer persona. The buyer persona is a summary of your ideal customer.
Your ideal customers are the ones that:
Creating a buyer persona is a quick and fun exercise that creates clarity on who you’re targeting.
Some aspects of a buyer persona if you sell to businesses are:
Meanwhile, if you’re a business to consumer company you might look at:
Common targeting factors, regardless of your business type, are age, and gender.
Here’s an example of how a buyer persona is used.
Let’s say you’re a financial management company and you’re targeting men of retirement age that make more than $200,000 a year. The imagery that you want to show on your website should evoke success to the people that are looking at those pictures – like a man on a yacht.
On the other hand, a picture of a 20 something-year-old lady having fun at a music festival might not send the same message. That’s not going to connect with your audience.
HubSpot has a free buyer persona tool that we highly recommend.
Now that you’ve defined your buyer, you want to make sure that your marketing message is clear. This is an outline of your company’s unique value that helps you engage your customers.
Many companies fall into the trap of talking about themselves. Instead, they need to demonstrate how their ideal customers will succeed if they follow their plan.
This is the StoryBrand framework – which we love. You can use their free Brandscript tool to define the message for your company.
Think of the buyer journey as a list of every opportunity to connect with and impress your ideal customer.
Let’s say you’re doing a 60-minute podcast. One thing you want to make sure is that you’ve defined your calls to action, so you can use those throughout the podcast. If you’re just giving great information in your podcast with no calls to action, you’re doing the world a great service, but you’re not really helping your business. If they’re in the Decision stage of the buyer journey, this reminder to include a call to action is critical.
Next, think about how you’re going to use that podcast beyond the initial format. You can break that podcast into four 15-minute segments that you can then repurpose into blog posts. That way, your podcast is evergreen and it’s working for you on Google. By planning ahead of time, you’ll focus on the podcast as segments instead of as a whole and create content for the Awareness stage of the buyer journey.
If you think about the buyer journey as an opportunity to connect with the buyer in different stages, you can plan one piece of media to do a lot of different work.
Marketing channels are a list of the different ways you can market to your buyers. Some of them might be a perfect fit, and others might be less so.
Some examples of marketing channels:
For example, not a lot of people talk about billboards anymore, right? But maybe billboards are one of the marketing techniques that work for you. You analyze the list so you can target your efforts.
Targeted efforts are starting to become a theme here...
A marketing calendar is critical to your campaign’s success. This is a publication schedule so you can create consistency and reliability in your marketing.
Too often we see people doing social media in a super random way. It’s really difficult to create an audience or a following when you are posting content on an unreliable schedule.
So, what you do here is list all the different marketing techniques and channels you’ve decided to test from step four. Then, you write down on a calendar the times and dates for how and when you’re going to release content.
Also, remember seasonality. For example, if it’s wedding season, event planners probably aren’t advertising for weddings because people are already having them and they take a while to plan.
But, they may be advertising for trade shows because that season is coming up.
Also, using the mortgage and real estate world as another example, summer is the prime time for when people buy homes. So, businesses need to make sure most of their advertising budget is available during the summer.
Being aware of seasonality gives you a leg up on your competition.
Finally, a marketing calendar helps you create most of your content in one day. This can save a lot of time and money for you and your team and can ensure your marketing publication schedule never skips a beat.
We’re about to get geeky, so hang in there. It’s time to talk about Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). These are statistics that move the needle for your company.
There are two types of KPI’s, leading and lagging indicators. They’re important so you know what’s working for you and what is not working for you.
So, let’s say — and hang in there with me, this will take a little bit of math:
You have a goal of 10 new sales per day
(100 * 10%) * 50% = 5
You’re making 5 new sales per day
You either need double the visitors from SEO, twice as many visitors reaching out for more information, or a 100% close rate. So, the easiest opportunity here will be to double the number of visitors that are coming to your website from SEO. That’s why leading indicators are powerful, they let you make decisions that impact your lagging indicators before it’s too late.
Monitor your marketing channels and fine-tune them. You want to do this methodically to save money and to increase effectiveness.
One tool that you can use for these marketing techniques is Hotjar, which is free. It’s as easy to install as Google Analytics. Unlike Google Analytics, which mainly reports on how visitors got to your website and what pages they visited when they were there, Hotjar shows what your visitors are doing on your website.
You can take this feedback and improve your website.
User Insights and UserBob are two other tools we love. You can survey your ideal audience and ask them to do a video review of your website, which will be about one minute long. They will tell you what their first impression of your website is. It’s eye-opening.
The final tool we love is SurveyMonkey. Remember the tip 3 (the buyer journey)? The final stage is Support — or, paying attention to your buyers. SurveyMonkey helps you reach out to your buyers for feedback so you can improve their experience.
AV Club Marketing offers a monthly marketing reporting and consultation service. It’s a simple and affordable package that helps business owners spend their time where it’s most valuable (which is not trying to figure out how marketing works).
In the package, you get a 90-day plan, a monthly meeting, and a weekly check-in.
If you follow these 7 marketing techniques you’ll find yourself on the path to success. If you find yourself anywhere dark or unfamiliar, just let us know. We’ll bring flashlights.