How to Create a Marketing Strategy That Responds to Disruption
The COVID-19 pandemic has made us more and more detail orientated than ever before. That makes marketer’s jobs even harder than it already was. Marketers now need to find new and inventive ways to attract customers, what used to cut it now no longer does.
What does that mean when it comes to your marketing strategy? It means things have to change. There is no longer room for a marketing strategy that was introduced back in 2018, a lot has changed since then.
So where to from here? We’re here to help you create a marketing strategy that responds to disruption. Read more
Why Now Is The Best Time To Re-evaluate Your Marketing Approach
Amidst the most unpredictable times of our generation, being able to adapt and adjust is now more important than ever. Focusing your attention on re-evaluating your marketing approach will provide you with the critical direction you need to stay competitive.
Healthcare Marketing In The Post-COVID Era
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a time of great change in our social lives as well as in our professional. The healthcare industry has been at the forefront of fighting the virus and has had to change the way they operate. Whilst many feel that marketing would not be the top priority for healthcare providers, experts think it is the ideal time to connect with patients virtually and serve as a reliable source of health information.
Rethinking Your Marketing Strategy
During a time of such uncertainty, it is likely you’ve thought about rethinking your marketing strategy.
With reduced demand for your product or services, the thought of perhaps saving some money has likely crossed your mind. It is important to remember that your competitors are likely to be facing the same challenges so during these times of uncertainty there may be several opportunities to rethink your marketing strategy for the better.
There are so many tools available to help you listen to and understand your target audience.
Government restrictions have meant that many individuals are spending more time online, which presents an opportunity to engage your potential target audience by creating useful content.
By continuing your marketing efforts it’s likely your target audience will remember you when some form of normality is resumed.
Below are some key points to consider when rethinking your marketing strategy.
1. Measure your current progress
Before you set out to make any significant changes to your digital marketing strategy, take a measurement as a benchmark to compare to later on down the track.
Aim to measure your progress against both your objectives and your competitors. Consider measuring channel growth, audience demographics, engagement level, social traffic and conversions.
Doing so will allow you to assess who you are engaging with and ultimately what works when targeting certain demographics.
2. Identify Your Audience
If you’re able to clearly identify and understand your target audience, you can better create engaging content that will be useful for them.
Think of it this way, the better you know your target audience the more cost-effective they are to target and convert. Ask yourself an important question, who is my target audience? Doing so will allow you to think about demographics like age, gender, city, country, languages.
This will then prompt you to think about their interests and challenges, which will ultimately lead to what content and platforms they engage with.
3. Create more effective content
Remember creating great content across a range of different digital channels will help engage users and drive them to your website.
All of your digital marketing efforts promote your website and are measured and improved using analytics.
To identify what content people are looking for, start with keyword research. Tools such as Google Analytics enable you to find what people are searching for and how users are behaving on your website.
People digest content in different ways, so to make the most of your content, create a content plan and calendar. Targeting 2-3 channels and doing them well is much better than making half-hearted attempts at numerous channels.
4. Rethink Offerings
In the current climate, there is no doubt rapid changes in customer behavior and market dynamics have occurred. During these times its imperative businesses monitor brand communication and quickly adapt to changing circumstances.
Operating in a timely manner and understanding the importance of changing market conditions will allow your business to remain relevant and succeed during times like this.
Aim to keep tabs on the growing situation as this will allow your business to make any significant alterations to business operations and ultimately better serve your customers.
5. Personalize your message
Remember personalization is one of the most important expectations of customers today. Personalization can significantly reduce acquisition costs and increase not only revenues but also the efficiency of marketing spend. Ultimately personalization benefits your bottom line.
When you rethink strategy it’s imperative to think about personalization. You want to aim at delivering real-time responsive messaging and offers that respond to where the customer is in their journey on their preferred device and in their preferred media.
In the past, we have been able to make changes gradually. In today’s market, however, tomorrow is often too late. Proactively rethinking your marketing strategy will allow you to stay at the forefront of your target audience’s mind. Although change cannot happen all at once, taking small steps to rethink your marketing strategy, can help win today’s consumer.
How to Develop a Marketing Strategy in 5 Easy Steps
According to Bob Hoffman, “Without strategy and planning, marketing is useless.” This is a belief shared by all marketers in which businesses cannot move forward in the right direction without careful preparation and tactical approach. Subsequently, this is where developing a marketing strategy is essential – a practical research methodology that can provide guidance in terms of focus and direction for marketers, marketing consultants, and businesses alike with informed decision-making comes into play.
A marketing strategy provides a roadmap to enhance reputation, engage with customers effectively and persuade potential customers on the unique value of a business through identified key messaging.
Here are five steps to develop your marketing strategy easily:
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Initiate a situational analysis – An internal look into yourself
Before looking at practical advances and the manner of execution, research must be the priority in order to truly understand the foundation and situation of your business.
Primarily, characterizing your business altogether, the products or services you provide, the customers you pay attention to, also identifying the unique value proposition which positively differentiates yourself from your competition. This would be regarded as a “situation analysis”.
Effective situational analysis requires a SWOT analysis which is the summation of the business’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Specifically, the strengths and weaknesses indicate the attributes that are currently present within your business, whereas the opportunities and threats belong to outside elements.
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Outline the marketing objectives and sales you want to achieve
The marketing objectives and the number of sales are interconnected aspirations for a business to achieve. Marketing consultants along with businesses should document the range and the expectancy of these outlined objectives within a short to a long-term period of time.
Your marketing objectives should be concentrated internally or externally varying on your situation. These objectives should be written in the SMART format to safeguard responsibility. SMART comprises of Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-bounded. These marketing objectives should facilitate improvement in sales.
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Recognize and understand your target audience
Target audience is the specialized segmentation of your ideal niche market with the intention to position your product or service competitively. Identifying your target audience is a wide-ranging process of asking the right questions where marketing consultants need to recognize the underlying desires, challenges, and expectations of an ideal customer to know them better.
As a business or a marketing consultant, you need to be conscious of your target audience’s daily lives and how those concerns can be answered all through your products or services. To meet these client assessments involves the utilization of buyer personas. Buyer personas are depictions of your ideal client centered on demographic information, online behavior also speculated motivations and apprehensions that make them who they are.
Nevertheless, to effectively distinguish your constructed target audience for in-depth insights, attempt to narrowly characterize the meaning of your ideal customer within your marketing strategy.
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Evaluation and implementation of marketing tactics
In the preceding segments of the marketing strategy, you have pinpointed the customers you are targeting, and what you can provide as a business. As a result, you must feature the marketing tactics you will implement in order to connect with your customers and reach the marketing objectives you want to achieve. The listed marketing tactics should compromise with the allowance of your budget and how much you are willing to spend. Examples of these marketing activities may comprise of:
- Paid marketing: television, print and online publications, websites
- Publicity: press releases, testimonials, and referrals
- Sponsorships: community events, local charities, sport endorsements
- Promotions: direct mailings, coupons, sales, point of purchase displays
The marketing tactics you decide on should reach your ideal customer when they are highly interested in your message.
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Assessing the implications of your marketing strategy approach
Determine which marketing tactics are useful and modify your marketing strategy development. The best way to achieve this is through moderated feedback. By asking existing customers about the impact of your business and pursuing which marketing activities were most effective and generated the most sales.
5 Reasons Why it’s Time to Rethink Your Digital Marketing
It’s almost 2021 and it’s impossible to think of marketing without digital marketing. If you are a business owner, you are sure to be using at least one form of digital marketing in promoting your products and services. According to DigitalMarketer, “Digital marketing is the act of promoting and selling products and services by leveraging online marketing tactics such as social media marketing, search marketing, and email marketing.” Here are five reasons why it may be time to rethink your digital marketing strategy.
Reason #1: COVID-19
If it weren’t already obvious, COVID-19 has created waves all across every industry, the digital marketing space included.
According to Bernard Marr’s Forbes piece, COVID-19 has resulted in many businesses depending largely on their digital marketing strategies, even to the extent that it may, in many cases, “be the deciding factor in whether they make it through the tough times ahead.”
Many businesses rely on having face-to-face meetings, attending and hosting events, conferences and tradeshows and entering awards to market their brand. However, with these avenues being entirely blocked from access due to the pandemic, it’s time for marketers to get creative.
Marr explains that B2B companies particularly depend on tradeshows and exhibitions to network and build customer relations. While larger companies may be investing equally in online efforts, they would have no doubt lost millions of dollars due to canceled events. This means bringing back the focus to social marketing, content marketing, SEO and influencer-led campaigns.
Reason #2: Your digital strategy lacks clarity
Smart Insights finds that many companies (regardless of whether they have a digital strategy or not) tend to lack direction in terms of their online marketing strategies. This could be a lack of clarity in terms of their digital strategy to gain customers, retain existing customers or any other marketing goals they may have.
If your digital marketing strategy lacks direction, it’s time for a digital marketing refresher.
Start by thinking of your digital marketing objectives. Taking a SMART approach is one way to articulate this – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely.
Reason #3: You’re missing adaptive content
Adaptive content is simply the opposite of static content. While static content stays the same throughout all social media channels, adaptive content is content that is tailored to each digital channel, whether it is your blog, website content, EDM, social media or other channels.
While the substance of your content can stay constant, it is really important to use the correct style, structure and length to meet each digital channel. For example, while blogs are allowed to be long-form, someone browsing your content on Instagram is not likely to read an extravagantly long caption.
Reason #4: It builds credibility
A clearly defined digital media strategy starts with your target audience.
This involves ideating and creating buyer personas to be able to target your market better – ensuring that your message reaches each target segment effectively through appropriate channels. For example, while Instagram has seen a heavy increase in popularity among people up to the age of 30, if your product is mainly aimed at people in their 40s, the message will be lost through this channel.
Similarly, Twitter users are more likely to buy a product promoted by an influencer, rather than based on a television ad. Therefore, targeting your audience appropriately can help with solidifying your brand image but building trust.
A clearly defined online customer value proposition targeted towards each target segment will help you articulate the value you can add through your online services. Develop a competitive content marketing strategy to generate new leads and keep existing customers loyal.
It’s all about getting the right message out at the right time, building trust and credibility and consequently, boosting sales.
Reason #5: It can make or break your business
The present is online, and the future will be online. Marketing without digital marketing can be equivalent to running on a treadmill – you’re putting in the work but not really getting anywhere.
According to Digital Marketer, having a strong digital marketing strategy will help to create awareness and engagement both before and after the sale, build brand loyalty and allow consumers to promote your content too.
So, if you haven’t already begun to rethink your digital marketing strategy, now might be a good time to start!
How Artificial Intelligence is Building The Future of eCommerce
Source: Jeff Bullas
eCommerce won’t be the same after this year’s events.
While the whole planet was frozen by the coronavirus pandemic, offline stores found they couldn’t compete with even the smallest online stores when people’s lifestyles were limited by their homes or neighborhoods.
But those who have just started online sales this year will quickly find out what to do to sell efficiently on the internet. This is why the overall competition will rise.
Wondering how you can gain a foothold at this moment? Take a look at modern technologies – artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and big data analysis.
There are numerous applications, services, and programs created on these technologies, but not all of them are equally applicable to online retailers. And they’re quite expensive to implement.
So before you go adopting some fancy new technology, let’s have a look at ways AI can improve eCommerce growth, increase conversion rates, and improve the customer experience.
Source: Jeff Bullas