When it comes to marketing, the best course of action is to make your strategy complete. Although it might be easier said than done, it is ideal if you want to be successful with your marketing efforts. Holes and gaps in your marketing strategy can make you stop midway and rethink your strategy, which could prove wasteful.
While it couldn’t be helped to miss out some important things in your marketing efforts, the next best thing to do is to make adjustments and backup plans as you continue with your marketing. With that in mind, this article will help remind you of 10 things you may be missing in your marketing efforts, and how you can adjust and refine your approach.
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1. Prepare Status Reports
Time is an essential factor when it comes to your marketing plan. Whether you handle the marketing efforts internally or with an external workforce, both ways value the concept of time. Targets for achieving results are effectively set and will be more feasible to meet if there is a set timeline. Let’s not forget that although setting a timeline for the possible accomplishment of a task is needed in any marketing campaign, the means of reaching that goal will not always be smooth sailing.
Bumps, forks, and obstacles are bound to be encountered along the way, and it is imperative to have an effective means of status reporting. Both your internal marketing or your hired marketing agency need to realize the importance of status reports as a way of giving the marketing team and the business a picture of the current status and progress of the marketing journey. Stopping or pausing to fix problems and assessing how much more you need to push forward in order to reach your marketing goal is a necessary step.
Some business owners tend to forgo status reports thinking that they’re still on track to meet their deadlines. This can be disadvantageous because of the possibility of not fully meeting the marketing objectives or even failing at some point during the campaign.
2.Using the Omnichannel Approach
By undertaking a marketing campaign, you may already have an idea on the importance of user experience (UX) and how it will help you achieve more conversions and sales. Going with a single-lined approach is no longer ideal in this technologically expanding world. Modern users are already aware and exposed to many technological advances, especially when it comes to making purchases.
We no longer live in a society where every purchase transaction is cash-based. We have moved on to the electronic and cashless transactions and multi-platform purchase methods, and therefore, our marketing approach should cover all the possible platforms and channels for the customers. We very well know that customers can shop online through computers and mobile devices and they also go to land-based stores and malls to do shopping.
The omnichannel approach allows you to reach out and cater to your customers in all the available channels that they are using and improve their purchase experience. If you haven’t considered this approach, now’s the best time to apply to experience better customer conversion and less abandoned shopping carts.
3.Redefine User Personas
Most marketing strategies would look into the demographic information of the customers and conveniently create segments from the data. This has been the standard approach for a long time, and is still fairly effective. However, to get the most out of your campaign, you need real and useful insights about your customer and create a more effective segmentation. Instead of segmenting as “28-year-old male professional”, you can make it more detailed like “28-year-old sales associate, single, travels 4 times a year for business, goes on vacation twice a year and drives an SUV”.
Knowing more about your customer takes extra effort and research, but it also allows you to redefine the personas of your customers to market your business to them better. It would be good to break out of traditional steps once in a while to get better results.
4.Do Not Ignore Your Site Content
Most business owners and managers tend to focus on how to market to consumers and other businesses that the site contents of their businesses become unattended. Remember that customers constantly access your website as you are conducting a marketing campaign to expand your customer base or to look for a new target market. Your marketing approach should be balanced and should leave no holes that could bring you to a certain disadvantage.
A good approach is to designate a dedicated team that handles your site content. This way, they can independently work on improving and monitoring your site content. You should also instruct your content team to make content always dynamic, interactive, and relatable. Keeping the customers interested and satisfied with your web content is indirectly an asset to your marketing campaign. You are keeping your customer base solid, which prevents a possible breakdown of your sales and revenue should your marketing efforts go south.
5.Learn from Previous Purchases
Do not take for granted and immediately discard the purchase history of your customers. There is a wealth of insight you can gain from their previous purchases which you can use in your marketing strategy. The numbers when it comes to sale volume by product or service can tell you a lot about the buying preference of your customers. Those with high numbers mean that they are satisfactory products that customers like.
Those with low numbers are products or services that you need to work on to improve their quality and should be focused more in your marketing campaign. Payment methods for the past purchases made by customers can be very telling of how technology has progressed in the business world. You may notice a rising number of online purchases and credit card transactions compared with cash purchases direct from your store or retail outlets.
This trend can show that there are plenty of possibilities and opportunities in online marketing and sales, and you can capitalize on it in your campaign.
6. Explore Other Areas of Social Media
There is so much potential that social media channels can hold and most businesses are only scratching the surface. It’s not just a tool for advertising and promoting your products, brand and your business, it can be an area where your business can establish a better social connection with customers. Your marketing efforts will definitely make use of various social media platforms to reach a wider audience.
In order to effectively reach out to your target market and audience, show your audience first that your business is made up of human members who also use social media as a way of connecting with other people. Simply using this reverse approach can do a great deal in establishing your business in the social consciousness of your customers. With them being able to perceive your business as accessible even through social media, you are ensuring yourself of a more accepting and accommodating audience when you make your marketing campaign.
Social media should also enhance the social connections of your employees and you should encourage them to have active accounts. In their own unique ways, they can also help endorse your business and products to their circle of friends, which can help create a dispersed but viable network of new customers.
7.Mind Your Competition
It is a good thing to focus on the preparations for making your marketing campaign, but you should also keep an eye out for what your competitors are doing. It doesn’t mean resorting to underhanded tactics like spying to achieve that. You can simply take an observational approach to the current activities being done by your competitors. Check out their webpage, their site content and look up their social media posts for any developments on their part.
You can then examine your current marketing status and progress and what courses of action you will take. Will you be taking their approach head on and do better? Will you choose a different path and present a unique selling proposition to your target market? Will you take the lead in creating innovative products and services? These questions and more cannot be possibly addressed if you do not have a reference data gathered from your competition.
You and your competitors may also be targeting the same market so always be open to redirecting your campaign to an adjacent market or somewhere beyond their scope. Overlapping campaigns may diminish your chances of gaining new customers and providing better exposure for your new products or services.
8.Do Not Underestimate the Human Approach
Make your marketing approach as human as possible to appeal to a wider audience, including those you may not have thought of reaching out. Don’t be too focused and engrossed and about making sales projections, great product launches and other business-related marketing approaches. Include the human aspect of your business by showing your new market and audience and your established customers that you care for other things than selling and making profits.
Show the various advocacies and humanitarian efforts that your business has been supporting through the years, include the community events or non-profits that your top brass management or your business as a whole has represented, or include various corporate social responsibility initiatives (CSR) that your business has undertaken. This is also a good way of setting your business apart from your competitors because you are establishing a level of intimacy and trust between your company and your customers and prospects.
You can even conduct more open-house events to encourage customers and families of your employees to explore the establishment firsthand and see for themselves how your workplace looks and feels like. While these activities are not directly connected with marketing, they can help build a solid foundation for a good business-customer relationship.
9.Put Your Tracking Assets in Place
Your marketing campaign will mostly be done online so you need to have your tracking assets put in place before launching your marketing campaign. This is one of crucial steps that some business owners, managers, and marketers fail to take into account. While forgetting to perform this task doesn’t translate to loss of profit per se, it does prevent you from gaining opportunities for expanding your market or improving your sales.
When you fail to tag your pieces of site content or place tracking URLs across different platforms, you are losing key analytical data that can help you in formulating great marketing strategies. For example, you failed to create a tracking URL on one of your social media posts. This oversight will cost you valuable data on the clicks visitors took to get from your social media post to your business website.
Even if you do manage to edit your post and add the tracking URL, you may retrieve some information from a couple of hours ago, but not everything. Thus, it always pays to double-check on every single detail of your marketing campaign no matter how seemingly small it is.
10.Have a Follow-up Plan Ready
Following through after your customer or prospect has performed a favorable course of action on your business website is an essential practice. However, some marketers and managers tend to stop once the customers make a purchase. Your marketing mindset should be about continuous and sustained success and not just a one-time success. Thus, with every successful purchase made by your customers, you need to have a follow-up plan in place to continue a good relationship with your customers even after the conversion.
A true winning move for any business is to develop customers into lifelong advocates and fans of your products or services and establishing lifetime customer value. It could be tempting to settle for a single instance of mass purchases, but the possibility of repeating such a feat for an indefinite number of times is a more attractive prospect.
There are various important considerations in your marketing campaign that you should not overlook or fail to take into account. In the world of e-commerce business, time is money so use it wisely to carefully formulate your marketing strategy and to recheck for essential steps that shouldn’t be overlooked. Also, keep in mind to make a multi-angled approach and a backup plan for your marketing efforts. The road to marketing success is not always smooth, so be prepared for obstacles, bumps, and diversions.
If you are interested in even more business-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.
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