STEP 1 "TOUCH": No one knows how good you are until they know you.
Business owner or marketer, the same applies - Do not jump to actions just for the sake of having digital marketing activities running and hope that something comes back. Instead, do the necessary self-discovery and find out what you offer to put you above and beyond your competitors.
Ask yourselves, “Why Customers should know you?” and from that, define “What do we say.” and “How do we say it.” This step is important to be relevant to customers.
Much of this comes back to being differentiated in a market where many are offering what seems to be the same core services and products...
Put yourselves into a customer's shoes - How many times have you heard the same spiel about how many years someone has worked in the industry, doing high quality work …
Do you feel like these general statements help you to understand the company more? How big a role do these blanket statements have in convincing you? Don’t just depend on stuff you already put out there on your website and now after months or years of nothing - suddenly you think someone is going to read it. Truth be told, we all do it to satisfy ourselves - not our customers. Do it like successful people - focus on the customer.
Short excursion on the topic of self-finding. Customers text me “OMG... workshop” and already see themselves getting very tired in a web conference debating their time away. And yes, I still believe in working through frameworks like the “Value Wedge'' you can license from companies like Corporate Visions. But for all those smaller businesses out there, you don’t have to get carried away. To get on track without hiring external help, forget about the sophisticated methods, an easier way for you to work this out by yourselves is by thinking about 2 dimensions. Pick either one. Mixing both could water things down.
Market based view (as an external perspective - what is going on in my market, what might has not been covered by my competitors or at least not covered very well)
Resource based view (as an inward perspective to your business - what investments have we already made e.g untapped skills - what resources special things can we source from our team, capabilities, connections e.g. to partners, your other businesses or reusing something from your recent customer engagement. Again look for things which competitors don't provide in the same way or likely fail to imitate easily)
Only once you get yourselves organized around this, I would move on to think about step 2 "TELL".
STEP 2 "TELL": No one cares that you are good, until you tell them how you are good FOR THEM.
This is the step that most start from and later retrofit step 1 ‘Touch” to improve their creative work after efforts didn’t yield or customer responses came back differently than expected. Instead of doing this, tell your story by using what you documented down under “How do we say it.” Ideally you have already cemented the feel around your brand and the verbiage that is directly derived from the decisions you’ve made in Step 1.
Now, think about where you would reach your target audience, and from there work out the mechanics of which channel to pick. Business inclined services might reach more relevant prospects on LinkedIn, while a visual product finds more relevance in advertising on Instagram or Pinterest.
But even before that, take care for what prospects are going to see. Is your website going to be found, do the headlines and text you’ve created rank high on the relevant topics in Google? All of this can be found by doing a little research around Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Also don’t get confused between how many prospects you possibly can reach via organic versus paid search results i.e. just being listed on Google compared to what is the hard truth of paying for Google ads to appear higher up in the search results in the paid section. Both have their place and there is a very strong foundation in getting found by people that already search for you, your offering or at least a related phrase. Again, do a little research on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and there will be plenty of good insights on how to grab the attention of those potential customers that have an indent and look for someone just like you.
STEP 3 "SELL": Being good is not enough to get people to buy. Make buying from you easy.
How do I make my brand present, once customers are ready to convert? The idea is to reduce the friction to convert, and improve the utility of your digital tools to be as optimal as possible. It is not all about using tools, the customer service also has to be as seamless as possible. While it’s natural to worry most about what your texts and pictures and videos convey, don’t forget about the hidden mechanics that make everything work and determine if you just create a colorful show for lots of people or actually reach and engage those who will buy from you. And be prepared, like it or not - it can get very technical as soon as you are serious about selecting and understanding your target audiences, tracking how your campaigns are performing and how the website or shop is being used. Retargeting is often forgotten, but ironically it will give you the most sales conversions as you execute more and more digital marketing campaigns. Make sure to retarget prospects to encourage conversion after your target audience has been warmed up by recognizing your mere existence.
Doing a nice piece of content work, putting your face on it, uploading it to your website feels good - but all too often it is as good as putting up a billboard in your living room - hoping someone will ring your doorbell to discuss your product.
You might do digital marketing, but selling digitally also means preparing your setup behind its facade, i.e. all tracking of campaigns, data capture and all efforts you drive together with your team to attend to customers in the real world eventually. Remember the crusty old economy person that ignored everything that came through online and you had to call them three times before you (the customer) could buy from them? Don’t be one of them - never!
Congratulations, now you are meaningful, you are relevant and present to your customers - but also don’t forget to be informed!
BE INFORMED: You need to keep up.
As a last and ongoing step, ensure you have reporting and analytics implemented to know what is happening, learn, intervene and improve how you reach your customers over time. The truly beautiful thing about digital marketing is that you can start extremely small, you can turn it off (hopefully not) and adjust it to better versions anytime and this without larger cost implications. Think of your digital marketing efforts as a learning journey of how you and your customers start interacting and learn trusting each other through digital channels. Therefore it is key to capture once customers interact, respond and how well they do so.
If you start from scratch, you will not have the data and insights - so start small instead of not at all.
Once started, grow, test, adjust and repeat - using the advantages of digital channels you have the chance to iterate and design your efforts easily to be more meaningful, relevant and present over time. So use this flexibility advantage of digital marketing!
I hope you enjoyed reading these steps to start to touch prospects, tell your story and sell more! If you have any questions - don’t hesitate to reach out.
by Norman Ernst, Sales & Business Development @datahof
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