- 17/04/2018
- Posted by: Erez Borowsky
- Category: Business Strategy, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Marketing analysis, Marketing Strategy, News, PPC, SEO, Traditional Marketing
Laser Focused Marketing is an ever-changing scene, with marketing strategies spanning multiple channels. The key to a successful marketing strategy is to build brand while building and maintaining client relationships. To stay focused and relevant, each and every company must conduct marketing audits from time to time.
At EZB Consulting, we’ve learned that mistakes can cost you time and money. Use the following Laser Focused Marketing strategies to maintain your marketing strategy with your brand growth.
The Pareto Principle
You’ve no doubt heard the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle: 80 percent of the effect comes from 20 percent of the causes. The key point is that most things in life (effort, reward, output) are not distributed evenly – some contribute more than others. But are you using it in your marketing?
Whether your focus is on content marketing, social-media marketing or email marketing, 80 percent of your effort should be spent upholding value to your audience. That leaves 20 percent of your effort for promotional activity, keeping your audience engaged, and building a long-term relationship.
Retention marketing
Retention marketing should always be the mainstay of your marketing strategy. Retention marketing is never going to completely replace acquisition marketing that is focused on bringing on new clients. The two methodologies need to be used in parallel. Think of ecommerce marketing as a sport. Some teams are good at offense, and some are good at defense. But will a team ever win only playing one or the other? After all it’s easier to sell to someone you’ve built a relationship with, and it’s more profitable to sell to your existing customers.
Your existing customer base is a veritable gold mine of not just sales opportunities, but free goodwill and promotion as well — not to mention that having lots of happy customers makes your job much easier, as you have more consumers to choose from to support your marketing goals.
As billionaire investor Warren Buffet so perfectly put it at a Goldman Sachs event, “Any business that has delighted customers has a sales force out there that you don’t have to pay. You don’t see them, but they are talking to people all the time.”
- The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 to 70 percent.
- The probability of selling to a new prospect is somewhere in the 5 to 20 percent range.
- Acquiring a new customer costs six to seven times what you’ll spend to retain an existing one.
Once someone converts into your customer, don’t stop marketing to them. Customer loyalty is tough to come by nowadays. It always comes down to creating and maintaining a valued relationship so they’ll remain customers for life.
Construct your message wisely
This is the single-biggest mistake marketers make. They simply don’t pay enough attention to crafting the message before they push it out to an audience. Remember it’s about building brand, relationships and creating a Laser Focused Marketing strategy.
Carefully think through what you want your customer or potential client to believe. Whether you’re writing a blog post, composing an email, writing a Facebook status update or creating popup copy, every word you write should convey your message clearly and convincingly.
Great messaging has common themes. Clients’ time is important to you as well as to them, Get to the point. Make sure you understand how important the clients are, take the customer’s viewpoint. Speak the clients’ language, use familiar language. Allow the client to be at ease, write informally. Say something original and have little need no further explanation. And finally, if you can, make your clients smile.
BTW: The examples of weak marketing messages are adapted from real ones that people have sent me. The “brilliant” marketing messages came from my own imagination and were influenced by this great list of legendary tag-lines.
When it comes to marketing, it’s not just channel that matters: it’s also the message. The future of marketing will be highly complex, and it will reward only those who can provide meaningful experiences to customers.
Using Email as a marketing tool
There was an era in email marketing when emails were used solely for promotional purposes. Modern professionals know email marketing plays a critical role in building trust-based relationships to engage, convert and retain customers.
With more and more consumers going mobile, they’re now staying connected to their personal inboxes 24/7, wherever they go. This e-commerce study, surveying 1,000 U.S. adults, found that email marketing’s value in the mobile era can be broken down to three major factors:
- Everybody loves a bargain and promotional email marketing is an effective way to drive engagement, especially around popular shopping holidays when consumer interest in making purchases is higher. Deals such as discounts and special offers are very helpful for consumers, signified by 62 percent of survey respondents saying these promotions have aided them in making shopping decisions. It’s also worth noting that offers for free shipping (41 percent) and “buy one, get one free” (37 percent) are the most attractive for consumers.
- People are too busy (and impatient) to shop and Online shopping is more convenient than ever before. Ultimately, online shopping has become a significant method for consumers to conveniently make purchases, particularly among people between 27 and 45 years old, whom Zeta found are most likely to do the majority of their shopping online.
- Mobile phones have revitalized email, Zeta found that 34 percent of conversions came from mobile devices.
Take the leap from personalization to individualization
Heard about personalization? Marketers still struggle to create Laser Focused Marketing strategy and meaningful customer experiences. The two most important introspective questions are:
- Are you still doing mass-level personalization by simply inserting your customers’ first names?
- Are you taking personalized insights into account?
Every time a person goes online to research or find a solution, they’re leaving behind data clues to what they’re currently interested in or need. This data can tell marketers not only what they’re looking at, but provide insights into why they’re looking at a specific product. That’s powerful information for marketers to have, and as you collect all this consumer data, it’s your obligation to deliver valuable, individualized marketing that meets the current needs of that consumer.
Research reveals that only 6 percent of marketers worldwide report having a single customer view across online and offline channels. If you don’t fall in this narrow bracket, your marketing isn’t targeted enough, and you haven’t created a Laser Focused Marketing strategy.
Document your content-marketing strategy
Content marketing currently is your best bet to rise above the noise. No wonder it’s employed by 94 percent of small businesses, 93 percent of business-to-business (B2B) companies and 77 percent of business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations. Contrast that with the markedly smaller proportions of groups with a written content-marketing plan: 37 percent of B2B marketers and 40 percent of B2C marketers.
Document your content-marketing strategy before you start creating stories and other materials around your brand. It will make content creation and distribution not only easier but more effective, too.
Channels and Platforms
The most successful companies do what they can to leverage each and every marketing channel. They don’t just persist with the same old channels and strategies. According to a Harvard Business School study, retailers that took advantage of multiple channels were more profitable than those employing only a single channel.
The digital world constantly is evolving. Adopting the relevant, emerging marketing channels are paramount to communicate with a wider range of existing and potential clients.
