Can you believe January is almost over? That means our month-long discussion on marketing strategy is also coming to an end. To summarize what we've discussed so far, we wanted to provide you with a marketing strategy checklist. Review the items below to help make sure all your marketing strategy elements are in order.
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You know your overall business goals for the year and have the metrics necessary to marry your marketing to these goals (average revenue per client, close rates, etc.).
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You know your primary target market and have taken the time to define a persona for that target.
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You know what your secondary and tertiary target markets are and you've defined their respective personas. |
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You know what “pains” these people have in their day to day lives.
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You know how to “solve” those pains for your clients.
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You know how to make your solutions remarkable by offering services, features, or solutions that NO ONE else in your market space can match.
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You know how to tell short, easily-relatable stories about what makes your business remarkable.
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You know the “whys” behind your business. Not the “whats” or “hows” associated with your delivery but the emotional backstory as to why you are even in business to begin with. This story is a large part of what people are buying and you need to be able to articulate it.
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You know all the places the people in your target market hang out, the websites they visit, blogs they read, emails they subscribe to.
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You have thought about or created some of the content you need to help your target audience (e.g. videos, reports, tip sheets, webinars, special offers, assessments) and you have developed No Risk, Low Risk and Direct Business offers to guide them through the conversion process.
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You know how to convert visitors to your website with landing pages, personal content, and compelling messages.
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You know what other marketing tactics are necessary to complete your Marketing Machine™.
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You know how to benchmark marketing performance and track improvements weekly, monthly, and quarterly.
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ACTION ITEM – Take a bow! You are well on your way to seeing significant improvement in how your company performs. Marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. So the results will NOT be instantaneous but, over time, you will see significant improvements if you follow the directions outlined above and in our previous blog posts.
To learn more about how set up your marketing strategy consider attending our webinar, click here for more information.
Square 2 Marketing – Leading the Reality Marketing Revolution!
We have been talking about marketing strategy for the entire month. This was a conscious decision on our part to focus all our content development on a particular theme. Marketing Strategy. Why? Because that is a specialty of ours, and it is a highly searched term, one we would like to rank on. See the connection?
In February, we will move on to Website Strategy or Social Media Strategy.
I can tell from the analytics that marketing strategy isn’t the most popular topic. Our daily views of the blog are off by about half. But the fact that I can tell the popularity of a topic is relevant to our marketing strategy conversation.
Marketing isn’t an art anymore. Now it is a science.
The analytics available to us, as marketers, has never been more powerful. Your marketing strategy and your marketing tactics must be directly linked to your analytics. This empowers you to make changes, adjustments and tweaks to always be improving the performance of your marketing program.
ACTION ITEM – Get the analytics you need. Check out HubSpot. But there are a variety of other marketing analytical tools available to you. Even free tools like Google Analytics provide you some insight. There are a handful of key metrics you should be looking at.
Website traffic – this should be going up each month and you should be doing something to get that number up.
Leads – also known as conversion forms submitted on your website.
Conversion rate – website traffic divided by the number of leads, this should be going up month over month too.
Reach – followers, friends, connections, views on YouTube, and reviews. Your marketing should be actively encouraging and cross promoting these sources.
Subscribers – the number of people who actively request notification of new blog posts or request your regular email newsletter, this should also be going up each month.
Content – the number of offers available on your website, no risk, low risk or direct…the more offers the more leads.
Just start here, track these data points weekly, and review them monthly. Make changes monthly to drive performance.
To learn more about how to track the performance of your marketing program, consider attending our webinar, click here for more information.
Square 2 Marketing – Leading the Reality Marketing Revolution!
One of our blog subscribers asked us this question in a private email so we thought we would discuss it here. The size and scope of your Marketing Machine™ is directly related to your business goals and the state of your current marketing.
Reality Marketing teaches “goal oriented” marketing is the only way to go. That means your overall business goals are directly related to the amount of marketing you need. As an example, if you are a $10 million dollar business and want to get to $15 million in the next 18 months, you are going to need a lot of traffic to your site; you are going to need a lot of conversions, which means you need a lot of content and offers. If this is your scenario, you need a fairly large Marketing Machine.
Likewise if you are just starting out and don’t have a website, Facebook page, videos on YouTube, or other foundational marketing tools, you still need a sizable Marketing Machine.
On the other hand, if you already have a website with decent traffic, strong messaging, engaging differentiation and effective sales tools, you might not need too many additional marketing tactics-a more modest Marketing Machine will be fine as long as your business goals are also modest.
Of course there are a set of basic marketing tactics that every company should be executing. I discussed a few of those in this blog post. So, as you create your Marketing Machine, make sure your tactics are in line with your current marketing and your business goals.
ACTION ITEM – Take your list and assign expected results to each of the tactics. For instance, if Getting Found is important to you, identify the number of visitors you expect the site to see as a result of your Getting Found tactics. Clearly a website with strong messaging, conversion tools and a blog are critical, but how many LEADS do you expect from your site?
This is calculated by taking the total visitors and applying a conversion rate, typical conversion rates are around 1%. If this isn’t enough, you need more traffic OR a higher conversion rate. Conversions are driven by the Trio of Offers (No Risk, Low Risk and Direct Business Offers). The more offers, the more conversions.
Each tactic should contribute to helping you reach your business goals. If they don’t add up, your machine is too small. If you want to have us look at your Marketing Machine and give you guidance, email me at mike@square2marketing.com or click on the "Let's Talk About Your Marketing" button below.
To learn more about how to create a Marketing Machine for your business, consider attending our webinar, click here for more information.
Square 2 Marketing – Leading the Reality Marketing Revolution!
We graduated from talking about marketing strategy to marketing tactics. In today’s blog post we show you exactly what a Marketing Machine™ should look like when its complete. This is everything you need to create a Reality Marketing Strategy and deliver a Marketing Machine for your business.
First, you have to create a strategy that includes planning, voice and tone creation, and analytics benchmarking of current performance so we can track the improvements.
Next you have to develop the content that includes the Trio of Offers; no risk, low risk and direct business offers. We have to plan for and create the video content required to tell your story. What are the webinars, eBooks, and free reports going to be? You need all of this to drive visitors to your site.
Don’t forget your blog. Yes, you need a blog. The blog adds pages to your website which helps in search. The blog attracts people to your site. The blog positions you as a thought leader and the blog subscription gives you another no risk offer for new visitors.
Your business has to be found to be successful. Find the list of keywords or keyword phrases that people are using to search for your business. Consider search in your overall marketing plan. This means you have to use these terms in your content, on your site pages, in your social media campaigns, videos and more.
Speaking of social media, you need it. So create a plan for Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Yelp, Flickr, and other important sites. One way is to post all your new content on these sites and encourage people to share it with others.
Finally, you need lead nurturing campaigns. Email marketing nurtures your prospects monthly and a few more tactical lead nurturing campaigns keep people who reach out to you engaged while you follow up and deliver information they requested.
Do all this and you will have the beginnings of the Marketing Machine you need to drive leads for your business. Tomorrow a discussion about your Sales Machine.
ACTION ITEM – Take the list you made yesterday and compare it to the suggestions here. Add or remove as needed. Make sure your final Marketing Machine list has at least six marketing tactics in it. Now start at the top and create a short action plan for the first tactic. Make sure your due dates are no later than 30 days from now. Nothing on this list should take you longer than 30 days.
P.S. To learn more about how to create a Marketing Machine for your business, consider attending our webinar, click here for more information.
Square 2 Marketing – Leading the Reality Marketing Revolution!
Now that you have a better understanding of how to create marketing messages and how to build a remarkable business, there has to be some discussion about how to get the word out. While customers and prospects will talk about your remarkable business, we have to help them spread the word.
We do this by building a Marketing Machine™.
The machine metaphor helps us avoid a common marketing mistake: Starting one tactic and, when it comes up short, stopping it and starting another. Then, when that second tactic comes up short, stopping it and starting a third tactic. Marketing doesn’t work like this.
Marketing done right includes a collection of organized, integrated, tightly connected marketing tactics – a Marketing Machine.
To build your machine consider these basic building blocks.
Sourcing is a necessity in 2012. It means we have identified all the blogs, emails, websites, and web pages your target market is visiting during a normal week. Then we are offering these sites our content to help their visitors get more educated on our industry. This drives new traffic back to our site.
Content gets a visitors attention, so you are going to need a lot of content. Tools like Free Reports, Webinars, Assessments, eBooks, and Videos are going to be critical.
Conversion is a necessity to turn visitors into leads. This means you have to think through the experience visitors will go through on your website and create the landing pages, copy, and follow up emails required to give them a remarkable experience.
Website design is the cornerstone to your Marketing Machine. Your new site must have the right messaging and strong conversion tools. Prospects must feel safe when they visit and understand in 5 seconds (or less) that you have the solutions to their challenges.
Wrapped around these four critical elements are additional marketing tactics like search, video, email, lead nurturing, sales support, collateral, events and more. Each of these individual marketing tactics must be designed up front, to work together with all the other tactics, so one plus one equals three and your marketing delivers results.
ACTION ITEM – Start simple. Create the list of marketing tactics you think you need for your Marketing Machine. Make sure some of those discussed above are on your list. If you need help creating your list, don’t hesitate to ask us. Tomorrow we will look at paring the list down and planning for the implementation.
P.S. To learn more about how to create a Marketing Machine for your business, consider attending our webinar, click here for more information.
Square 2 Marketing – Leading the Reality Marketing Revolution!
Buyer behavior has changed. No longer are we (as consumers) waiting for a sales person to call on us, we aren’t driving from store to store looking at competitive products. Now we are starting our pre-purchase research on the internet, asking for a referral or posting a request for referral on social media sites. Click here to learn more about the changes in buyer behavior.
This means our marketing strategy has to change too. The graphic below highlights the changes you need to consider when putting together your 2012 strategic marketing plan.
1. As we have been saying, you need a Marketing Plan. Messaging, differentiation, and an integrated set of marketing tactics planned out for the entire year. This isn’t optional. If you want to grow your business you need this today.
2. Part of that plan has to be an understanding of the Audience Source Strategy. What websites, blogs, and emails are the people in our target market utilizing on a regular basis? Your prospects are looking for information on relevant websites. They are subscribing to blogs, emails and downloading information. They are talking about your solution right now. We need to be part of the conversation.
3. What Content Strategy do we need to create to get their attention? We need to create No Risk Offers, Low Risk Offers, and Direct Business Offers that move them to identify themselves. Creating the right content gets us into the conversation and it helps us position ourselves as a valued resource.
4. We need a Conversion Strategy so when they visit our website they feel safe, welcome and interested in learning more. How should our Landing Pages be organized to optimize conversions? They need to understand that downloading information or signing up for a webinar will help them, not put them on a list for a sales call. This experience needs to be personal and about them. Not about us.
5. Conversion, Content and Marketing Strategy all feed a well thought out Website Design Strategy. Websites are no longer static electronic brochures. They need to provide personal experiences that, counsel, advise and educate visitors with helpful information. Websites need to provide rich, multi-media experiences that engage visitors to the point of interaction. Video has to be prominent.
6. Finally, websites need to drive conversions to drive sales growth. So our Sales Strategy must be tightly integrated into our overall approach. What is the sales experience? How do we reuse content in the sales experience to help prospects feel safe? This can be thought out and created in advance to deliver a remarkable experience even before the prospect selects your company.
ACTION ITEM – Don’t try to boil the ocean. Look at your current marketing and make one simple improvement in each of these areas.
- Identify one source where your prospects visit regularly.
- Think about one potential Free Report (No Risk Offer) that you can post on that site.
- How will that report drive traffic back to your website and how can you capture visitor contact information? Create a single landing page for that offer.
- Take a good look at your website, make sure it speaks to your prospects and educates.
- Last but not least, look at your sales process and make one simple adjustment. Instead of constantly asking for the appointment, try sending educational information.
See what happens when they call you and ask you to come in.
To learn more about how Social Media contributes to the new marketing strategy, try attending our webinar, click here for more information.
Square 2 Marketing – Leading the Reality Marketing Revolution!
If we all agree that people need to be safe before they make a purchase decision and we agree that most purchase decisions are made emotionally, then it is safe to say compelling stories go a long way in accelerating the sale.
How? Let me illustrate five ways stories contribute to strong sales and marketing strategy.
1. Stories are much easier to understand, remember, and share than complex details. Features and benefits cause our brains to work hard and ultimately like all our organs, brains that work hard need to rest. Stories, on the other hand, are processed by a different part of our brain. That’s why good ones are so easy to remember.
2. People actually like sharing stories. Good, bad or ugly, they like having information that they think other people will find valuable. That’s why bad experiences are shared 10 times more than good experiences. We are trying to prove our value by helping others stay away from bad experiences.
3. Social media accelerates story sharing. In the old days (three years ago) people told stories to other people. Today, people post stories, they blog about their experiences, they convert stories into reviews and those stories are carried across the web and out through a variety of social media.
4. Stories are told in a variety of mediums. There are three different learning styles, visual (learn by seeing and looking), auditory (learn by hearing and listening), and kinesthetic (touching and doing). Research shows that 43% of the population are visual learners. This means stories need to be visual and written. So when you create your stories, keep YouTube in mind.
So, what does this mean for our marketing strategy? Check out this live web event next Tuesday, January 24th, to see first hand how stories become a critical tool for sales and marketing.
Here is your action item for today.
ACTION ITEM – Proactively create an inventory of stories for your business. Make sure they are easy to tell. Make sure they are interesting enough for people to want to share them. Go back to your remarkables and use them as the starting point. Everyone in your business should be able to share these stories. After you share them with your team, you might need to spot check. “Quick, tell me the story of our best client!” See how that works and make sure you are always adding new and compelling stories to your inventory.
Square 2 Marketing – Leading the Reality Marketing Revolution!
There is a secret connection that comes from KNOW, LIKE and TRUST. Some people call it the “buy button.” In order to press the buy button, you have to make your prospects feel safe. Believe it or not, all this time you have been marketing and selling, your goal has been to make them feel safe.
Your prospects all have problems, challenges, pains that they need remedied. They are anxious about this pain. After all, there is stress in challenge. Their boss could be yelling at them, they might get fired, their spouse may be upset, and there could be financial ramifications if the situation isn’t fixed. You and your business need to solve these pains and do it in a way that reduces their concern. Let’s see how this works.
1. Prospect visits your website, they connect, they relate to your company, they see you have solutions, your tone helps them feel like you might be able to solve their problem, and…
2. While they aren’t ready to talk with you directly, they notice you have a lot of educational information, so they download a Free Report and…
3. They get on your monthly email newsletter which also provides educational information and…
4. Promotes a free webinar for later in the month which looks like it might provide some insight into one of their key issues and…
5. They notice the blog, which after reading a few posts they subscribe to the blog to get regular updates and…
6. They actually attend the webinar, where they see other clients who had similar issues and they see firsthand exactly how you helped them deal with their issues and…
7. They reach out to you to speak with someone about their situation…
8. The person who talks to them doesn’t try to sell them, but helps them make a good purchase decision and…
9. The prospect is feeling safer, and safer, and more emotionally connected to your company to the point where they WANT to hire you…now it’s your deal to lose.
This is how marketing works in 2012. To learn how to change your sales process and utilize the new marketing, check out this live web event next Tuesday, January 24th.
ACTION ITEM – Do a sales and marketing audit. Or think about it as a safety check. Look at all the items in the list above. How many of them do you have as part of your sales and marketing effort? Do you make your prospects feel safe? If not, then consider making some dramatic changes to both your marketing and your sales process.
Square 2 Marketing – Leading the Reality Marketing Revolution!
So, you have the pains of your target market and you know what makes you remarkable, you even did some quick competitive research. But you’re still NOT ready to start marketing. Why? You don’t understand the buyer yet.
People make purchase decisions emotionally and then spend the rest of the time rationalizing that decision until they are comfortable. Think about your own purchase decisions. That sofa you bought last weekend? You went into the store and you LOVED it! You could see it in your house, all your friends telling you how nice it was, emotions right?
Now comes the rationalization. Can we afford it? Will it fit in our room? Is the color the perfect match? Will Pringles the cat mess up the fabric? If all is go, the sale is made.
Business sales are the same way. You meet a new accountant and he is so nice, he asks you all about your business, he really seems to understand you, he is friendly. You are now connected emotionally. You want to hire him. Rationalization works here too. How much will this be? How will we work together? What is included? Everything sounds good…let’s get started! The decision was already made during the first few minutes of the meeting.
The emotions we are going for are KNOW, LIKE, and TRUST. Your sales process and all your marketing must deliver KNOW, LIKE and TRUST in order for your sales and marketing effort to be effective.
ACTION ITEM – Take out that list of emotions I asked you to jot down. Look at your own site. Do you get KNOW, LIKE and TRUST from your own site? If not, then you have to change your messaging, add more remarkable solutions, and give more validating information on the home page. Video and testimonials are a great way to get TRUST on the home page.
Do your sales people know how to deliver KNOW, LIKE and TRUST without buying the prospect lunch and talking about the weather for 15 minutes? Information is the perfect way to deliver TRUST. By providing information that helps the prospect excel at their job, they TRUST that you want to help them, not sell them. What information can you use the help them?
Square 2 Marketing – Leading the Reality Marketing Revolution!
Over the weekend you worked hard to make sure your business ISN’T INVISIBLE. You have been deciding if your business does anything remarkable and hopefully, you have been thinking about how to make your business even more remarkable.
Let’s not do this in a vacuum. Making sure you know what your competitors are saying, publicly and privately are very important. In fact, this check is something you should consider doing every single quarter.
First, start by going to their websites. Does it have any interesting messaging? Are they saying anything remarkable? Are they highlighting any remarkable features from their products or services? What emotions are stirred up when you visit their site? Anxious? Calm? Inquisitive? Safe? Happy? What emotions are stirred up when you visit your own site?
Next, find their contact information. Is it easy or hard to find? Then reach out. Make a phone call, or drop them an email from a generic account (Hotmail, Gmail, AOL, Verizon). See what that intake experience is like and make sure yours is so much better that it becomes a remarkable aspect of your business.
Action Item – Keep notes on these sites and the experience you have with the firm. Make a list of all your competitors and as you go through their sites jot down some of the feelings, or emotions we talked about. We will use these later this week. Also, note anything that looks or sounds remarkable. Remember, whether they actually do it or not, if they say they are….you can’t be remarkable with the same solution.
Remember, while you don’t need a fancy competitive analysis, you do need to have an idea of what they are saying and how they are saying it.
Square 2 Marketing – Leading the Reality Marketing Revolution!