7 Marketing Techniques That Will Actually Work

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.

Tip One: Create a Buyer Persona

Always start by defining your buyer persona. The buyer persona is a summary of your ideal customer.

Your ideal customers are the ones that:

• You love working with
• Result in the best profit margins
• Make you want to wake up and work in the morning

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:

• The target company’s annual revenue
• Number of employees
• Local, Nationwide, or Global
• Job title

Meanwhile, if you’re a business to consumer company you might look at:

• Household income
• Number of children
• Years at their current job

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.

Tip Two: Define Your Marketing Message

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.

1. Identify the customer’s problem
2. Introduce your company as the solution to the problem
3. Give them a plan to succeed
4. Specify a call to action (this step is often missed
5. Highlight what success look like if they work with your company
6. Show what failure will look like if they work with your competitor

This is the StoryBrand framework – which we love. You can use their free Brandscript tool to define the message for your company.

Tip Three: Identify the Buyer Journey

Think of the buyer journey as a list of every opportunity to connect with and impress your ideal customer.

• Awareness: Your customer finds you on AdWords or an organic listing on Google or via an outbound marketing technique like a cold call.
• Consideration: When your customer is really introduced to your marketing message and is actively comparing you to your competition.
• Decision: When your customer decides whether or not they want to hire you – and when you close them.
• Support: The neglected step – now that your ideal customer is your actual customer how are you going to turn them into a Raving Fan and keep them forever?

A Good Buyer Journey Creates Efficiency

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.

Tip Four: Choose Your Marketing Techniques & Channels

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:

• Paid Ads (Google AdWords)
• SEO
• Organic Social Media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc.)
• Paid Social Media
• Billboards
• Bus Stops
• Networking Groups
• Press Releases
• Influencers
• YouTube
• …the list goes on and on

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...

Tip Five: Commit To a Marketing Calendar

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.

Tip Six: Define Your Marketing Techniques’ Key Metrics

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.

Lagging Indicators

• Impact your bottom line directly
• Difficult to adjust midstream
• Check on these monthly or quarterly
• Examples are sales or revenue numbers

Leading Indicators

• Impact your lagging indicators directly and your bottom line indirectly
• Easier to adjust midstream
• Check these daily or weekly
• An example is traffic to your website from specific marketing techniques or channels

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

• You’re getting 100 visitors to your website per day from SEO
• Your statistics indicate that 10% of those 100 visitors are going to reach out to you for more information
• Your close rate is 50%

(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.

Tip Seven: Test And Adjust Your Marketing Techniques

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.

• Mouse hovers
• Scrolling “hot zones”
• Where visitors stop scrolling
• When they’re trying to click on things that aren’t links

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 Marketing Techniques

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.

90-Day Plan

• Define the Wildly Important Goal (WIG) — what you’re trying to do, and what winning looks like
• Create the marketing calendar to show the big picture
• Ensure the strategy we’re executing is aligned with your success

Monthly Meeting

• Review key metrics — leading and lagging indicators
• Discuss upcoming opportunities
• Pivot the marketing calendar to reflect reality (this is kind of important)

Weekly Check-In

• Select bite-sized commitments — tasks for you to do to accomplish your WIG
• Celebrate your success — because you’re killing it!
• Adjust to account for any misses

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.