How Traditional Marketing Can Still Be Used in The Digital Era
As the digital age has revolutionized the way we interact with each other, marketing has evolved to meet the changing demands of consumers. This evolution came in the form of digital marketing. Digital marketing is any marketing that is done online, whereas traditional marketing uses channels such as posters, billboards, TV ads, radio ads, and newspapers or magazines. Digital marketing spends overtook traditional marketing in the US for the first time in 2019 and has remained on top since. But does this mean that traditional marketing is on the way out? Surely the techniques that dominated the marketing landscape haven’t been made completely obsolete by the advent of digital marketing. The short answer is no, traditional marketing isn’t dead yet, and the tactics and strategies that have been used for decades are still powerful tools that you can use in your marketing efforts.
6 Things Every Marketing Strategy Should Include
Businesses are constantly competing with one another to gain more customers and drive sales; therefore, it is imperative that key marketing strategies are carried out thoroughly and effectively. Without effective marketing strategies put in place, there is ultimately a lack of focus resulting in your ability to target any of your business goals to diminish.Read more
The 5 Critical Components of a Leading Marketing Strategy
A marketing strategy is one of the first steps when planning a successful campaign. Overall, the marketing strategy gives your business the opportunity of reaching consumers and turning them into clients of your own product/service. However when planning a marketing strategy, there are multiple components that must be considered. The internal and external components of your business and the market must be explored in order to identify the most successful outcome. Similarly, identifying what makes your business stand out against others, is crucial in establishing a leading strategy. Here are the 5 most critical components when planning your leading marketing strategy.
Your Strategic SEO Checklist to Building a High Traffic Website
Everyone wants a website that sees a lot of traffic, high engagement and a high conversion rate. Unfortunately, with over 1.86 billion websites online, creating a highly engaging, competitive website that generates a lot of traffic is easier said than done. Fortunately for marketers, there are a range of tactics available to help build a search engine optimised website designed to outperform the competition.
Here’s your SEO checklist to strategically build an optimised website designed to draw traffic.Read more
How to Design a Streamlined Facebook Ads Campaign
The first step to having a streamlined Facebook ads campaign is to use the STP framework. Rather than focusing on a broad audience and actively alienating your customers, STP focuses on specific segments to ensure your message resonates.
10 Reasons Why You Are Failing in Marketing Your Business in 2021
All businesses use marketing to position their brand in the minds of their desired target audience in the best way possible. Effective marketing will ultimately lead to increased sales and brand recognition, however, there are many dangers in current business practices that can result in marketing failure that you may be overlooking.
That is why we have created a list detailing 10 of the most common issues businesses face today when executing their marketing tactics.
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Lack of research
Research, and lots of it, is a must for any business before they can create an effective marketing strategy.
There is plenty to work out before you can even release your brand to the world, such as what channels you will use, who your target audience is, who your competitors are, etc.
These are only a few of the aspects you need to discover to create a successful marketing strategy, meaning conducting thorough research is a necessity, in as many forms as possible, and for as long as it takes until you have all the information you need for your brand.
- You don’t have a strategy
Even if you do undertake the right research, and work out who your target audience is, many businesses then do not use this information effectively and create a detailed marketing strategy.
It is imperative that all businesses manifest a marketing strategy if they are to understand how their daily marketing activities are contributing to the achievement of business goals.
Otherwise, you will have no idea what effect your marketing practices are having on your business and brand, and whether what you are currently doing is resonating with potential clients. This is a major reason for marketing failure.
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You don’t understand your customers or their needs
Communicating with your customers and providing platforms for your audience to discuss issues or queries with your business is the easiest way to understand their needs.
Without regular communication, there is no hope of your business recognizing what is working, or not working for your brand.
Whether you use a chatbot on your website, actively use a discussion forum or even quickly respond to social comments, there are so many ways you can keep in touch with your audience and learn what they want to get out of your business.
There are always alternatives out there for your audience to convert to, so make sure you are meeting their needs and keeping up-to-date with your clients’ needs.
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Marketing and sales departments are not aligned
A major issue faced by many businesses today is the lack of communication between marketing and sales teams.
Sales do not happen without marketing, meaning both departments should have an understanding of where their responsibilities lie, and how they can help each other to improve marketing practices and increase sales.
Both teams should be across all the buying stages and be aligned and have synonymous goals if they are to impact the business in a positive manner.
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Unrealistic goals
As well as working together, both sales and marketing departments need to ensure they are setting realistic goals based on the research they have conducted and the size of their target audience.
Realistic goals are a must, whether they be short or long-term. Unrealistic goals will only lead to demoralized employees and underperforming businesses.
Marketing teams should only focus on setting achievable goals that employees can be rewarded for accomplishing; for if they continue to miss targets, it is likely the business could fail.
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You are using and promoting the wrong channels
Today, there are so many different channels available for businesses to market through, whether it be the many different social media options or website blogs and articles, just to name a few.
It is up to your business to discover, through effective research, which channels resonate the best with your target audience, whether they prefer to get their information online or in person.
Without understanding where your audience receives most of their information on your brand, your business is likely to miss out on many potential leads and future sales.
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You are lacking patience
The majority of marketing strategies do not yield results overnight, or within a week for that matter.
Many take months, or sometimes years, to generate actionable results that can be used to determine the success or failure of your current marketing campaigns.
A large number of businesses tend to give up on their current practices long before they have been able to have a real effect on the market.
Don’t make the same mistake with your campaigns; give them time to reach your audience and leave an imprint of your brand on them rather than scraping “underperforming” strategies before they get started.
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You are targeting the wrong audience
Even if you are being patient and utilizing the right channels, you still could be targeting the wrong audience.
This all comes back to the research you have conducted regarding your target market, what they need and how they want to be informed of it.
Your brand could be amazing for some people, but they might not be hearing about it because you are targeting the wrong clients, therefore you must be sure your research is as accurate as possible and that you’re appealing to the right people.
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Your product or service does not deliver on what was promised
Another factor to marketing failure is that we see with businesses is the gap between what they say their brand can do and what it actually does.
The aim of businesses is to retain customers and generate positive word-of-mouth. But if their brand is not delivering on the promises made in their marketing practices and campaigns, customers will look for an alternative product.
This is why communication with customers is a necessity, listening to their concerns and making adjustments accordingly to retain them in the future.
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Your brand is not easily accessible
Even with a great product and excellent marketing practices, if your product is not readily available to customers then they are unlikely to purchase it.
Whether it be due to complicated online purchasing procedures, limited delivery options or the lack of physical stores and support services, there are many reasons why your audience may choose to go to a competitor with simpler purchasing processes.
There are many reasons as to why a business could be failing, but we are trying to make sure that it is not because of your marketing activities.
Take note of the issues discussed here today and ensure that your business is employing the best marketing practices possible.
The Top Marketing Strategies Deployed By B2B Content Marketers
There are a lot of different forms of marketing these days, you could be forgiven for losing track of which is which.
This article focuses on how your business can effectively execute B2B or business-to-business content marketing; what it is, and why it is an important area for your business to have efficient marketing strategies in place.
What is B2B marketing
B2B marketing can be a challenging area to excel in, with so many businesses competing for the same goals, partnerships and customers.
Business-to-business marketing refers to the marketing of products or services to other businesses and organizations, as opposed to B2C marketing that focuses on marketing to consumers.
Ultimately, B2B marketing content is generally more informational and straightforward than B2C, as corporate decision-makers are more concerned with how these business decisions will affect their ROI, finances and future growth.
The aim is to expand your business’ audience whilst developing brand affinity and driving sales by appealing to other businesses who have a need for your product or service.
There are many different types of B2B marketing that your business can use, the majority of which are similar to B2C marketing tactics, only the way you create your content is very different.
The main types and channels are:
- Blogs
- Updating blogs regularly can create more traffic for your website and keep your audience interested, as long as the topics and forms of blogs you create stay relevant and shareable.
- Social Media
- There are so many social media channels out there for you to reach your audience. B2B marketing generally has a LinkedIn focus, but there is no reason you cannot utilize other platforms to research and engage with your customers as much as possible.
- Email
- Many businesses utilize email marketing for lead generation and relationship management. This tactic keeps your brand top-of-mind while also enhancing the lead nurturing process; bringing efficiency, meaning to content and actionable results.
- Videos
- You can upload and share videos using all of the above formats. This medium is a great way to engage your audience and present the features of your business in an in-depth fashion.
- SEO
- By ensuring your site contains the right keywords for your audience, you will be able to rise up in the search engine ranks and create higher website traffic.
As long as your content produced in these formats is aimed at enticing businesses rather than appealing to your usual customers, these channels and techniques can be a great way of promoting your brand to other businesses.
The best approaches for creating a B2B marketing strategy
With so many approaches to B2B marketing available today, it can be difficult to decipher which is the best of the lot.
But there is no one size fits all way of tackling this problem, there are many different ways your business can utilize B2B marketing to attract other organizations to your services.
So, we are going to outline a few different approaches adopted by the best that you can tailor to the needs and functions of your business.
Approach 1
Develop an encompassing vision for your strategy and define your market:
- Outline specific and achievable business goals.
- Create a B2B marketing strategy around these goals, so that your primary focus is on ticking them off.
- Constantly check that your audience is engaged and that sales and marketing are on the same track.
- Can you actually measure the results of each of your goals?
- Your audience should be much narrower than that of B2C businesses; conduct research to identify your ideal customers.
Identify possible channel types to run your campaigns:
- Decide how you will reach your target audience and ensure you know features about your ideal customers.
- Understand how your audience is spending time online, which social media channels they use the most and how you can offer them products and services that your competitors cannot.
- Ensure your campaigns advertise the right message; include calls to action and sophisticated language, as the businesses you are appealing to will have a prior understanding of your product or service when it comes to B2B marketing.
Measure results, make adjustments, and go again:
- Understand why some content works better than others so that you can make future investments in your strategy wisely.
- The audience is key; use analytics tools to determine where consumers are engaging the most, what channels they are using and focus on these areas in the future.
Approach 2
Identify your ideal audience
- Develop market segments and try to create smaller groups of potential consumers so you can better identify what each business will be able to get out of your organization.
- Utilize tools such as Google Analytics to find out more about your target customers in terms of demographic information and their interests that may help you further narrow down your potential customer base.
Develop new content ideas continuously
- Once you have identified your audience, you need to provide them with topics and content as consistently as possible, by observing what your audience is talking about on social media.
- There are a number of tools available developed specifically for B2B marketers that you can use to analyze and track keyword searches for you.
- Use what you already know about your audience to anticipate what they want to read and learn about, your content, especially for B2B marketing, needs to provide an obvious benefit to your audience, otherwise, they will have no need to be engaged with you.
Test and promote your B2B content
- LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook can be a great way to test with your audience what they want to read and learn about by creating polls and asking questions and generating conversations.
- By this time, you should have a much clearer idea of what your audience and other businesses are looking for from your organization, and you can begin to promote your brand through as many channels as possible, such as social media, EDM’s, blogs, podcasts, etc.
There are many examples out there of businesses who are have adopted excellent B2B marketing practices. Ultimately, there are many different approaches to B2B marketing that could suit your business, and we have just provided you with a few options today, but it is up to you to decide which of these practices you adopt so that your business can effectively develop a B2B content marketing strategy.
How to curate the most effective content
Sharing a compelling and resonating story to your audience is a goal for any brand. Andrew Davis, a keynote speaker states, “Content builds relationships. Relationships are built on trust. Trust drives revenue.” From a business perspective, content creation is an integral part of presenting a brand.
Nowadays, content creation is a must-have thing to effectively communicate important information. This can be through various social media channels, blogs, digital presentations, and websites, etc.
What makes the content effective?
Content strategy should be a foundation in curating effective content. Content strategy helps in documenting your marketing plan as it gives you a structure and keeps things organized. There are different ways of how we can develop a content strategy.
Firstly, understanding the ‘why’ or the purpose behind your venture. Simon Sinek, an unshakable optimist describes a golden circle as Why, How, and What? He states, “Very few people or companies can verify why they do what they do.”
Now you’d be wondering how does this relates to creating effective content?
Imagine if you don’t clearly understand your business and the value proposition, you can’t expect your customers to understand your product/services. Delivering content is about clearly understanding the value it brings to the user. If you clearly articulate why it’s worth their time then it’s like hitting a jackpot.
Secondly, customers are enticed by the art of storytelling. If you’re able to sell a story to your customer, you build brand loyalty. Let’s take the example of Apple, Steve Jobs was the one who told those stories. We’re all emotional people and Apple has always targeted emotional intelligence to sell their story. How do they do it?
- Entice the audience first and then introduce the product
- Build suspense
- Resonate or focus your story on customers successfully using your product
We understood the why behind the content but what’s the guide behind curating effective content?
How many times have you read a blog halfway and realized that it doesn’t answer your questions? Often, right? This is how you can solve this issue:
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What problem are you solving for your customer and how you’re unique
The product or the service you’re trying sell solves the customer’s problem. Your content acts as an educator for the customer. This can be for the new customers who are trying to understand your product/services or the existing user who is looking for solutions to the existing challenges.
Your content is a reinforcement of your solution and this is where is you can showcase your uniqueness as a brand. Competition is always a potential threat to the business so your customers need to know how you’re different or what makes your product/services better than others. This is where content can change the decision-making process. Your content needs to sell a story and prove why you’re worth their money and why you’re worth their time.
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Find your target market and brainstorm their journey
Content is about understanding who your customers are and how they interact with your brand. Who will be reading your content and how many people would be reading it?
Your content should be more than one type of customer. In terms of selling sneakers, try to publish content that is relevant to different stages of the buyer’s journey. Effective content allows the customers in decision making and move ahead with the sales process. Make sure to use different calls to action as this engages the customer.
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Provide your opinions on different things
As humans, we seek validation and encouragement every day. Try to provide your opinions, quotes, or attribute other sources so that the user can relate their problems with your solutions.
Try to curate content that is customized and humanizes their problems. Link your content with third parties which align with your core values, opinions, and create that sense of community.
Make sure it’s not self-centered content because the user would be more interested in validating their problems with your brand. Further answering users’ common questions in your content allows them to connect with your brand. These can be FAQs or blogs with your current existing challenges that users may face. While curating your content, be very selective as you’re trying to sell your unique value to them. Anything which is off-track will misguide the user.
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Being elegant in the way you present
The interactivity of your blog, EDMs, social media channels depends on the style of typography.
Texts are a major source of information. Your text is the medium of communication and the fonts attract the readers. Interactivity through your text is an influential intellectual as it showcases the mood or feeling.
If we take the example of storytelling again, it carries a rhythm that creates value for the readers. On average, a person goes through 5000 ads each day so how can you make that one interaction count? Users remember the fonts that you present in your visuals. It specializes and acts as an identification for the brand. Once you have a good visual, selecting a good title will attract the readers.
Outsourcing has been the optimum solution for curating effective content.
The data from B2B and B2C Content Marketing 2020 suggests that 84% of companies outsource their content creation. Why?
There are several benefits of outsourcing your content creation:
- Businesses will have more time to work on other activities like sales and operations. Many SMEs don’t have the time and expertise to create content. Trying to save money they don’t realize that content creation takes a lot of research, analyzing, and writing which can be a full-time job.
- Outsourcing allows you to publish more content and create high-quality engagement. It’s important to utilize the time efficiently so that the content writer can provide the best content and businesses can work on creating an experience.
- Outsourcing will allow you to have a different point of view. Content experts work with different industries and are experienced with what works in the market.
- Outsourcing allows you to reach a wider audience and have customized content. One of the key benefits of reaching a wider audience is being able to experiment with your content with different users.
If you’re unsure how your company can benefit from content strategy. Get in touch with us! At Robotic Marketer, it is our mission is to be the best; empowering talented marketers to produce outstanding results for small and medium-sized businesses. By constantly improving how we work, our technology, systems, and processes, we deliver the best possible marketing solutions to our clients.
Components of a Good Marketing Strategy
A good marketing strategy consists of a comprehensive collection of marketing techniques that enables a business to direct its resources towards the best opportunities in terms of increasing sales and achieving a sustainable advantage over the competition.
A marketing strategy consists of short term and long term activities that contribute towards achieving business objectives.
Remember developing a marketing plan for your business shouldn’t be complicated.
To help you generate an effective marketing strategy, here are eight basic components of any marketing strategy.
1. Market Research
An integral component of any good market strategy is market research. To lay the foundation for your strategy you must collect, organize and write down data about the market that is currently buying the products or services you intend to sell.
You should consider looking at marketing dynamics, customer demographics, market segments, target markets, needs and buying decisions.
In terms of products and services, you need to analyze the market to gauge what’s out there now and what the competition is currently offering. Identifying current sales and benchmarks in the industry in addition to suppliers that you will need to rely on will help you build a more substantial base in which you can effectively build a good marketing strategy.
2. Target and Positioning
Any good marketing strategy begins with the identification of a target audience. This is the most important component. There is no point in wasting your time and resources trying to market your products and services to an audience that isn’t interested in what you’re selling.
You should aim to sell to the market segments that will be most profitable for your business. Direct your marketing efforts towards people that are genuinely interested in your products or services. By narrowing your marketing efforts towards your ideal target audience you will greater optimize your time and resources.
Furthermore, defining your ideal target customer will allow you to adjust the overall style of your marketing strategy in a way that suits your target audience. Your content will be more targeted, using language that connects with your customers on a more personal level.
3. Awareness
The ultimate business goal should be to gain the trust of your clients and create brand awareness among your target audience. A combination of traditional techniques like magazines, TV and word of mouth should be paired with online techniques to boost the awareness of your brand.
In today’s digital environment it’s imperative strategies prioritize online marketing. A business must have a website and a blog where you post high-quality content that connects with your audience and generates traffic. Additional visual and audio content like videos, podcasts, and infographics work to further generate brand awareness and leave a lasting impression in your target audience’s mind.
4. Unique Advantages
To win over your competitors you need to offer your target audience a set of unique advantages that your competitors aren’t offering. You need to distinguish your brand by offering your target audience valuable content that they can’t find elsewhere. Creating unique brand offerings will help distinguish your business from your competition.
Aim to identify one or two things that make your product or service different and promote them as much as possible. In doing so you can create more effective marketing strategies that greater reach your target audience.
5. Communicate With Your Clients
It’s imperative to know how and when to communicate with your target audience. You need to strategize the types of content you are making and how you are sharing them. Think about where your target audience hangs out most and utilize the platforms that will best reach them.
The connection you develop with your customers is a key aspect for the success of your marketing strategy. It’s important to promote your products and services as the best choice on the market, but it’s even more important to focus your attention on the needs and wants of your followers. Identify the problems they have and show them how your business offers the best solution to satisfy their needs.
6. Promotional Tactics
Once you have created your marketing strategy, you must decide which marketing activities will ensure your target audience knows about the products or services you offer, and why they meet their needs.
Aim to execute a combination of tactics such as various forms of advertising, public relations, maintaining an online presence, promotions and an effective point of sale strategy. Remember every action you take must align with your marketing strategy in order to be effective and convert customers. Aim to limit your activities to those methods you think will work best with your target market.
7. Monitoring and Evaluation
This is a key component of any type of strategy and something a lot of businesses overlook. Take the time to analyze how your strategy is performing in practice. Surveying customers, tracking sales, leads, visitors to your website and percentage of sale to impressions are all worthwhile tactics to consider.
Any successful marketer will continually review the status of their marketing strategies against their set objectives. Doing so will ensure ongoing improvements to marketing initiatives and benefit future market planning.
8. Marketing Plan
Once you have finalized your marketing strategy, draw up a marketing plan that outlines how you intend to execute the strategy and evaluate its success. Your marketing plan should be excessively reviewed and if necessary updated to respond to changes in customers’ attitudes and broader economic forces.
Fundamentally, all good things take time and a successful marketing strategy takes not only time but commitment as well. When developing your marketing strategy you must be ready to invest in order to reach your business goals. Focusing on the finer details of a good marketing strategy will allow you to develop a logical, effective plan that will lead your business to success.
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.