Power Up Your Marketing
Tired of Adverts that Don't Work? Feel like your marketing efforts are letting you down?
Don't smash your computer, blame the market or get angry - instead..... let's "Power Up Your Marketing Results?"??
Common Approach to Marketing
A common approach small to medium businesses (SME) make with marketing is not knowing the right ways to generate leads into their business. Without a general understanding of the difference between a marketing strategy and marketing tactics, it's likely money will be wasted on marketing activities that don't work.
The first place to start is to identify your target market and understand what motivates prospects to buy the products and services you offer. The second step is analyzing how much money you can afford to spend on advertising or marketing campaigns.?
When I ask the question, "I want you to generate 10 extra leads this week." The answer is almost always... "I'll stick a few ads in the paper, perhaps do some Facebook advertising.... "
Oh dear - this is the number one fail for many small to medium business owners. Resorting to "Spray and Pray Marketing Tactics!"
When marketing campaigns fail, there is a tendency to blame the marketing medium: the radio, newspaper, TV, Facebook etc without any regard to how good or bad the strategy was behind it.
What is Spray and Pray Marketing
Spray and pray marketing is a term that we use to explain a random approach to marketing. A business owner finds themselves short on cash flow and they know they need sales on the board quickly. What they do next is literally throw some money at advertising without any research or thought as to if the message or channel will reach their ideal audience.?
We call this spray and pray marketing because this approach means they throw an advert out there, cross their fingers and pray it will work.
This really is a hit and miss approach and costs a business big time. If you don't want anymore of your marketing campaigns to fail - then here's what to consider.
Marketing Strategy Vs. Marketing Tactics
It’s important to understand there are two main components to any marketing plan. Strategic marketing and tactical marketing.
Power Up With Strategic Marketing
When marketing campaigns fail, it's often due to a lack of strategy. Strategic marketing is the content of your message. Strategic marketing takes into account everything you do and say from your values, to customer service delivery and your advertising messages.
?It’s what you say and how you say it. This includes things like your brand image, your brand personality, and your brand tone of voice. Yes - brands have a personality.
Brand Personality
Your brand forms part of your marketing strategy. This includes the concepts that you choose to focus on, the words and images you use to communicate those concepts, and the tone in which the message is delivered.
For instance, when you look at the brand personality triangle, the tone of voice you use in your marketing material says much about you.
For instance, a spa will engage a low key relaxing personality and use relaxing meditative imaging in their advertising and marketing material. Their tone of voice will be soothing and somewhat passive. Their colors are likely to be more muted and the fonts soft and reflective, building trust and confidence.
Whereas a discount store might be more aggressive with their brand and tone of voice. Colors are more likely to be red or yellow with big bold print offering discounts in large lettering. Their tone in their advertising copy would be more direct with a strong call to action.
To be effective, your marketing strategy will depend on your brand and how you position your business in the marketplace.?
What is an Effective Marketing Strategy?
All marketing needs to begin with a marketing plan or strategy. The strategy will identify your niche, your ideal customers, what their problems and opportunities are. This should happen BEFORE launching into any forms of promotions or advertising. An effective marketing strategy should achieve the following:
Marketing Tactics
Marketing tactics has to do with the execution of the marketing strategy. This includes building your website, placing advertisements in the paper, signage on your vehicle, attending trade shows, sending out direct response emails etc. It could also include activities like setting up a Facebook page, posting photos on Instagram, running Google ads or radio ads.
When we talk to most business owners, they confuse marketing tactics with with a marketing strategy. They are almost always working from the tactical side of marketing.
Both of course are important - like two sides of a coin.
The key to effective marketing is to master the strategic side first and NOT the tactical. What you say, and how you say it is always more important than where you say it.
Here’s a quick review of the Marketing Bow Tie that gives you a greater understanding of strategic marketing.
The Marketing Bow Tie
The Marketing Bow Tie is a model that will help you understand a marketing strategy and where advertising fits into the tactical side of marketing.?
Because you can’t be everything to everyone, you need to work your way from the left of the marketing bow tie to identify your target market to create the right marketing messages to reach that market on the right-hand-side of the marketing bow tie.
Choosing The Right Customers to do Business With
Starting on the left hand side of the Marketing Bow Tie, choosing the right customers to do business with is critical to the success of any marketing strategy. It’s vital that the products and services you offer meet the demands of your target market. It defines how, where, and when you will compete in the marketplace.
Defining The Market
Firstly you need to define the market you wish to compete in. This describes what industry you intend to do business with, along with companies and industries you are already operating in.?
Segmenting The Market
The next step in the marketing bow tie is to segment the market.??
Segmentation?means to divide the marketplace into parts, or segments, which are definable, accessible, actionable, and profitable and have growth potential. In other words, you would find it impossible to target the entire market because of time, cost, and effort restrictions.
How you segment the market in your industry will depend on your market research.?
Selecting The Target Market
Once you have identified the industry you are in and segmented the market, it’s time to drill even further into precisely who your target audience is. Creating buyer personas allows you to drill down even further into your target market to identify your target audience.
Buyer personas identify their background, demographics, likes and dislikes, challenges, fears, and likely objections. The more specific you are when you create your buyer personas, the more likely you can create the right marketing messages delivered through the right marketing channels at the right time to reach your target market.
Once you have identified exactly who your target market is, you are ready to move to the center of the marketing bow tie, your brand and positioning statement, and onto the marketing bow tie’s right-hand side.
Your Brand
When we talk about branding and positioning, we are talking about building equity into your business. It's like a home, the more equity you have in your home, the more you are protected by market fluctuations. As you brand gets more well-known, you are also building equity in your brand.?
Acquiring Growing and Keeping Customers
The right-hand side of the Marketing Bow Tie is where the value process takes place. A value proposition or sometimes known as a USP (Unique Selling Proposition) identifies what is unique about your products and service offerings and why prospective customers should do business with you.
Creating Value
The products and services you offer must add value to your target market, or they won’t buy from you. Developing a strong value proposition identifies what is unique about your products or services and determines the value and benefits you offer. It gives your prospective customers a reason to buy from you and not your competitors.
Your target market has problems they would like to resolve or opportunities they would like to realize. By developing buyer personas, you will identify their possible problems and opportunities and the benefits they will receive from using your products and services.
Communicating Value
This is the segment of the marketing bow tie where advertising and promotions fit into. Its the tactical side of marketing, executing the strategy.
This is also where many people confuse advertising with marketing. Communicating value is how you get your marketing messages out into the marketplace. In addition to advertising, it includes channels like radio, television, cinemas, social media, personal selling, and any other means to get your message out to your target market.
This is the segment in the marketing bow tie where you communicate the value and benefits of your products and services offered through a marketing channel to reach your target market.?
Delivering Value
Delivering value is the last segment of the marketing bow tie.?
This is where you now have paying customers. The customer gets to receive the benefits of using your products and services. Here is where the customer is all-important. There is no point selling your products and services if it doesn’t match your buyer’s expectations and doesn’t deliver what you say it will. If you don’t, it creates an unhappy customer.
Research tells us that it costs, on average, six times more to attract a new customer than it does to retain an existing customer.
Key Steps For Creating a Marketing Strategy
Here are the key steps for putting together a marketing strategy.
On a final note
Measure, measure and measure again. Constantly seek feedback on how your marketing strategy and tactics are working. Develop post-sale follow up systems or an ongoing email campaign to keep the lines of communication open with customers and build on your current relationship which increases future purchases.
Did you know that if marketing is not your thing, our world class e-Learning system can give you a head start on where to start generating those extra leads you need and want. Head over to the Strategez Academy Website where you can learn more about how to fast track your success.