Is Your Marketing Strategy Right?

Let’s get to the point in two simple examples:

You’re in the year 2002. The internet is an expanding bubble and the TV is your true guide to the outside world. A new bar of soap launches in the stores and the TV put up an enticing two-minute-long advertisement to get you to buy. The soap is now literally everywhere. On the TV, on the radio, and on every big billboard you pass as you drive to work.

Of course, at this point, you don’t have influencers or the internet optimizing your buying experience. No, this is the era of traditional marketing. And traditional marketing has always been about getting one product to as many customers as possible.

Fast forward a decade and we have our example number two:

Pizza hut launches its new App through Apple’s app store. The app isn’t your regular ordering service though. It’s a real-time experience optimized for the customer’s comfort and benefit. The consumers can build their own pizzas on their iPhone or iPod Touch using the device’s accelerometer and touch interface, resize the pizza base, drag and drop toppings, select their choice of sauces, crust and cheese quantity, put aside add on for wings or garlic bread, and let your GPS bring the nearest branch you your order. 

Pizza Hut emphasized on customer experience over product promotion. And the results showed why that was important. In eight months, they had 1.2 million downloads. Their mobile sales had gone up by 20% and the app generated over $1 million in three months.

Today digital marketing is reaching the corners traditional marketing cannot hold. User experience is at the forefront of all decisions. It’s no more about shelling out money to promote products. Today’s market is all about cultivating customers and providing them with the best experience possible. Instead of pushing one product to many, today digital marketers understand and study customers’ needs and provide value and experiences the customers want at any given time.

Your digital marketing strategy can make or break your brand. The money and the budget are important but it’s all a waste if you are burning cash on the wrong side of the road. Here are three questions you need to ask yourself.

What is the Purpose of My Marketing Campaign?

Often enough, digital marketers lose themselves in the hoopla of applying every trick and gimmick available in the book. But good marketers know designing a strategy is really about curbing yourself to certain, specific rules to maximize results. Every campaign has an end result. Which is why it’s important you know what do you want? More customers? Too vague. Be more specific. Do you want to increase your customer reach by 20% in the next quarter? Better, but can still use some work. Do you want to increase your customer reach on Facebook by 20% in the next quarter?

Learn to be specific. Is it sales you want? What is the purpose of the funnel? What purpose does your latest advertisement serve? Once you’ve nailed down your purpose, you’ll know what kind of tricks and strategies to implement. You’ll know what works, given the metrics and data, and what doesn’t.

How am I Maximizing Customer Reach?

Once you’ve narrowed down your purpose and made a strategy plan that would work best, it’s time to ask yourself another question. What is the most effective way of getting to my customers? Do they respond better over one social media channel compared to another? Do they respond better to graphics or text? Should I offer them a freebie? 

Maximizing your customer reach is all about understanding your customer’s journey. How do they go from a passerby to an active devotee of your product? What journey do they take from coming across your product to actually clicking the purchase button? How much of a role do word of mouth and active advice play in the promotion and sales cycle of your product?

Once you understand your customer’s journey, you can optimize it for their convenience and comfort. If they use one channel over the other, how well augmented is the channel for their use? Does it have the buying guide? The call to action? All the information they’ll need? What’s the site’s loading time? How well in reach are the pages they need?

If it’s purely content curation, how informative or entertaining is your content? What do you offer that others don’t? And what kind of experience are you providing to your customers?

The customer reach is all about using metrics to lock down how well a customer responds to something, tweaking the strategy and handles to improve their experience and creating an all-around optimal level of surfing.

How Can I Create A Better Experience for the Customers?

Data analytics plays a key role in creating great customer experiences today. Grocery stores use user data, surveys and metrics to find out what two pairs of products customers buy the most and optimize suggestions for them based on that. Stores in the UK found the consumption of alcohol increased for men who’d just became fathers because they were staying at home and started sending them gift cards and suggestions and discounts based on that. Today festivals like the world cup, Eid and other major events drive many strategies because people respond openly and buy more during such events.

Creating a customer-based experience is all about knowing your target audience and giving them what they want at the time they need it. Amazon and Facebook do it best. The internet giants use algorithms and user data to optimize the customers’ buying and surfing experience based on the choices they’ve made in the past. Like a certain genre? Let Amazon suggest to you more. Love gadgets? Facebook will suggest some of the best tech pages follow.

Lock It Down 

All in all, how is your marketing strategy integrating customer nuances and inputs? How well are you creating an environment where the customer not only buys your product but also becomes an active evangelist for your brand? Nurturing a strong connection with your consumer base is the foundation of all your strategies. Go wrong there, and no amount of money will save you.