If you missed our Complimentary Business Coaching Webinar on June 16, 2015 – “Effective Marketing: Choosing Your Fishing Line” below you can watch the recorded webinar anytime, anywhere, at your convenience!
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Effective Marketing: Choose Your Fishing Lines
Think of effective marketing as your fishing lines for brand exposure, lead generation and client engagement. Actions and strategies to get a return on your marketing.
- Best channels for exposure and lead generation
- Determine your marketing goals and how to measure
- Why social media is not a strategy
- Best ways to ensure ROI
Marketing takes persistence because most products aren’t viral, lead nurturing and market analysis is complicated, sales can be a lengthy process.
Are you marketing based on consumer intent?
The key here is to market to consumers’ intent, which will produce better ROI because of the absence of need to create awareness about a product or service in the consumer’s mind before promoting it.
Marketing based on consumer intent may either be predicted based on behavioral data or captured explicitly when the subscriber tries to purchase a product and the transaction has been aborted for some reason. Marketers should not treat all each of their traffic sources in the same way.
For instance, traffic from organic search or webinar channels have different purchase intent than banner ads and social media. The difference in intent depends on how your customers use the channel and if they are directly searching for your product/information or not. This means only one sales funnel is not sufficient, because people from different sources have different purchase intent. Yet, creating only one sales funnel is a common mistake that marketers make.
So how does this affect your sales funnel?
High intent makes for a stronger sales funnel, and less work to close a sale. Medium and low intent channels do not mean that the customers are of lower value, it only means that you have to put in more work to convert them into a sale. The better you get at this and the more systems you have set up to streamline you efforts, the bigger the payoffs.
Test to figure out if these channels will work. The purpose of testing a marketing channel is to see if it will actually lead to a new customer. Successful marketers test their channels and determine lead quality by measuring engagement and obtaining more crucial information from over time.
How does social media fit into this?
Remember that social media is not a strategy. It is a tool, a tactic, a channel for communicating and engaging with your target market – and it must be tied to measurable marketing goals!
Here are some examples of measurable marketing goals:
- sales (customer acquisition)
- product development
- brand awareness
- customer service
With a brand value over $100 billion, social media engagement is not an indicator of success. Social media is like any other marketing activity – IT TAKES TIME AND RESOURCES – which means it comes with a cost (and cost is never a goal).
Social media is not a strategy.
It’s a tactic, a channel – and one that supports your overall marketing strategy. Look at Apple. They are not on twitter and I can’t even find their Facebook page. But they are the most valuable brand in the world. They have no engagement. Social media is not a tactic for them to improve brand awareness, lead generation, product development, customer service, etc.
Do you want more social media advice? Let’s chat – visit http://smithdurant.com/social-media/
So here’s how we suggest you choose your individual marketing channels…
Experiment, grow and optimize.
It’s all about trying and testing new channels. You’ll never grow your marketing if you don’t constantly test new channels, whether they are paid, organic or partnership-based.
You learn more about test and measuring your marketing by visiting the Smith Durant blog at smithdurant.com/blog, or give us a call at 702-583-7301.
Ensure ROI – tweak it and profit. The reason a lot of companies stall in growth is because they aren’t continually finding and testing new marketing channels. The biggest mistake you can make is to leave your marketing campaigns on autopilot. You have to adjust them on an ongoing basis since marketing changes over time.
Thank you to our Experts for hosting our Webinar: Nathan Smith and Michael Durant. For more information and to get in touch with them call 702-583-7301, or visit smithdurant.com
