How to be bold with your marketing campaigns
Jo Coxhill FIIC
I work with CEOs, HR, IC & EX leaders to improve performance and create happy, healthy and engaged teams through the power of employee listening | Top Voice Internal Communications | Fellow IoIC
Nearly two-thirds of UK businesses do not have a marketing strategy. No vision, no plans, no goals.
If your company falls into this category, this blog is for you: we outline three essential marketing activities that every business should do in order to be bold with their marketing campaigns.
Set your vision
Without a plan, you have no idea where you’re heading or when you’ve arrived. Establishing a clear marketing strategy and plan of action will allow you to plan your marketing campaigns and activities accordingly and will mean you are more likely to be successful in achieving your marketing objectives.
All too often we have clients contacting us saying they must run a new marketing campaign, get on social media, or launch a new website but when we ask them why and for what reason, they have no idea or what results they’re looking to achieve.
A clear and measurable plan will enable you to identify which marketing campaigns and activities you really need to focus on and when.
It doesn’t have to be war and peace but without a clear plan, you’re destined to fail.
Engage your audience
Staying in touch with your customers and prospects is an essential part of any sales and marketing engagement strategy. Fail to do so and you’ll risk losing out on future sales. Do it right and you’ll be able to educate, cross-sell and upsell at every opportunity.
Your existing customers are your most important asset, so planning your customer communications, sharing information, hints and tips and new product information on a regular basis is important in keeping them abreast of what’s happening within your organisation and most importantly the benefits to them.
Then there’s your prospect base: the contacts within your database who expressed an interest but didn’t purchase. They’re still potential clients, so as with existing customers, it’s important to keep them informed as to what’s happening within your business, what’s new and what other products and services you may offer. Maybe your product or service wasn’t quite right for them when they first enquired but now, you’ve enhanced it and included the features they were looking for…
Engagement is a two-way process and the time you have to grab your audience’s attention has reduced dramatically, to literally a few seconds. Couple that with the abundance of content that is being posted on the internet and social media every second of every day, what can you do to ensure your marketing content is more engaging than your competitors?
Be bold, be different and make sure that you are creating and sharing educational, informative and useful content. One way that you could do this is through the power of storytelling. Using stories to tap into the emotions and lifestyle of your target audience will surely grab their attention and resonate with them on a deeper and more engaging level.
In our increasingly social world, you also need to think about how you can engage your audience on social media. That doesn’t just mean passively posting information, it means actively working your social media channels and engaging in meaningful conversations on those channels. You could also look to strike up relationships with social influencers who may endorse and promote your products on their own social channels.
Nothing is more powerful that gaining social proof for your product or service. Think Tripadvisor. Make sure that you not only get your 5-star rankings but that these are also balanced with meaningful and detailed written or verbal endorsements of your product and service from real life users. The latter will always far outstrip your more passive 5-star rankings and the two together will certainly provide social proof of your offering.
But engagement is a two-way process, so ensuring that you engage in a conversation with your audience is critical.
Social media will enable you to engage with and influence your audience, gain trust, and increase sales. Selecting the right social media channels is important as is having a clear strategy for increasing followers and what to say to them. You could increase two-way engagement through arranging a Tweetchat or Facebook live event.
Don’t forget though that people buy from people and face-to-face engagement is still the number one and most essential way to connect with clients and prospects. In our hugely digital world full of email and social media, it’s easy to hide behind our screens but we encourage you to get out more. Attend exhibitions, conferences or social and networking events – you name it, we encourage it.
Measure success
You’re investing in marketing so it’s important to know what your return on investment is. It doesn’t have to be overly complicated but measuring Key Performance Indicators at regular intervals means you can adjust your strategies as needed to ensure you achieve the right results.
So, whether you’re launching a new website, running a lead generation campaign or measuring customer satisfaction, make sure you have the right metrics in place. From Google Analytics on your website to campaign viewer, engagement, lead generation and sales conversion rates for your lead generation and marketing campaigns.
We are also huge fans of running regular customer satisfaction surveys. These provide you with honest feedback from the people who matter the most, your clients. Take their feedback and act on it to ensure you take your business from good to great!
As a marketing consultancy that is passionate about achieving sustained and measurable business growth for our clients, we’d love to talk to you about how we can help you with your future marketing strategies and campaigns. Give us a call on 01908 900329.
CEO | Founder | Google WTM Ambassador
7 年Good advice Jo. Thanks
Founder and Director of Behaviour First Consultancy
7 年Excellent advice Jo. Thank you.
The Car Doctor - Car Body repairs
7 年very useful jo. thanks
Retired ????
7 年Excellent post Jo!