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A winning digital marketing strategy can be one that will make or break a business. It does not matter the way or how awesome your product or service is. If you can not market it, then nobody will benefit from it. We know that right now the competition is really rife in the digital space with the new innovative companies. And also the new products that are being launched every day. And the marketers now need to stay in touch and to stay at the top of their game. To ensure that what they are sharing with their customers and with their audience are still very relevant.

The fast-paced nature of the digital channels have for a certain forced marketers to become agile enough to both staying on top of trends. And also implementing them in their own marketing strategies.

 

Have an Optimized Website

The startups will often cut corners with their website just to save money. Not even realizing their site needs to be fully optimized for the desktop and the mobile devices. Most of the consumer will decide whether they are going to stay or to leave a site within the first 3 seconds. Your product or your service must be very clear with the captivating images and the copy to keep them engaged. Having a general understanding of the SEO and how the SEO works (The Search Engine Watch provides you an easy-to-follow guide for you to understand the SEO). And also hiring a specialist in the Google optimization is very essential.

“When we were trying to review our analytics, we saw that about 60% of our traffic are coming from the mobile. But about 78% of revenue are coming from the desktop. This indicates that our website has not being fully mobile optimized. We had to create more call-to-action buttons. Divided our products into different category-specific collections just for easier and for quicker navigation. And included the customer reviews directly under our products. We also later discovered that our website theme was just slowing down our page. So we are going to change that,” says Broglie Box founder Julia Broglie.

Impacting Tools

If you are just currently selling or you are getting ready to launch a product or a service. The most impactful tool for you to scale your online sales is through the digital marketing. Take a look at the ads and the content that are being posted by your competitors or the companies in your industry. To see what is currently resonating with their audience and also checking what is not. As you are reviewing their content, also try and read the comments. You should note that the most valuable insight is from the consumers. If your ROI is positive when you start to run your ads, you can incrementally increase your ad spend on the best performing ad.

At first, the testing of the ads, the findings of the right agency or finding the right freelancer and discovering what is effective is just by trial and error. When you have discovered that the formula is right for your company, you’ll need to double down on that and you will be able to reap the financial rewards.

As a small business owner, it is very important for you to know who your customers are, where your customers spend their time. What they are really looking for and then how your business can meet their earnest needs. Times have really changed and waiting for customers just to come to you is now no longer a feasible business strategy. In our today’s world evolving business environment. The entrepreneurs need to be approaching their customers and also building a very strong relationships with them so to form a lasting impression. If that your small business cannot grow its customer base very well, then it cannot grow profits.

Marketing agencies bring the outside, the objective expertise that are needed into a business strategy. They have to take a look at the big picture and then they studied the market niche to see what the competitors are doing. And also to see what direction the industry is trending in order to make their informed decisions.

They also make provision for the vital analytical data so that the small businesses can benefit and better understand and also target their audience. The small businesses can now see which kind of marketing campaigns that are resonated. And the strategize future campaigns based on their past performances.

The Right Tools and Resources: Small Business Marketing with CallRail

As the small businesses are moving forward into the recovering post-pandemic marketing landscape. Many of the business owners are also taking a closer look at their marketing strategies. About 94% said that they were highly or somewhat likely to hire a marketing agency or high a professional in the future.

In order for those partnerships to be very successful, it is important for the agencies to understand what their clients really need.

The greatest areas that are available for the improvement of the small business owners that are identified. After having a negative experience with the marketing agency include:

1. Helping to improve customer service: 55%
2. Vetting and recommending new technology to help the business grow: 51%
3. Improving workflows between marketing and sales teams: 43%
4. Helping to refine value proposition: 40%
5. Enabling the business to better track leads: 38%
6. Going above and beyond the scope of work to help a business better understand its customers: 29%
7. Enabling the business to better manage leads: 29%
8. Offering business improvement services, such as sales training or brand coaching, as add-ons: 25%
9. Enabling the business to better communicate with leads: 9%

The Agencies that are able to successfully identify and to successfully repair these pain points. For their customers are the ones that are seen as well-positioned. To become a critical asset that can also be of help to their small business partners with the short-term survival in addition to the long-term growth and the success.

Most of the small business owners (96%) are now willing to pay more for an additional services.

The Analytics is playing a critical role in the successful partnerships that is between a business and the marketing agency. Not only does the data drive the personalized marketing strategies, but it is also very vital to show a client exactly how much of the ROI they are gaining from the relationship.

For a fitness app like the MyFitnessPal, it can be structured as the following:

Messaging (the segmented value props, the promo, the FUD).

It is vital to make sure that you have a channel specific approach. As each one of them will differ in creative best practices along side with the testing capabilities. What may work on the Facebook may not be working on the Snapchat or on the numerous other paid social channels. Do not be discouraged if you notice that the creative between the channels perform differently. Although we do recommend the parity testing. If you have already gotten the creative asset for one of the channel. It does not hurt for you to start the resizing and the formatting for the remaining channels.

 

Determining wins

Equally this is a very important part to the creative and it is what we know as the proper event selection. And also a statistically significant threshold there for you to abide by throughout all of the testing. When you are choosing an event that you will make use of, for the creative testing. It is not always very possible for you to make use of your north star metric all depending on how high your CACs are. For an example, if you are just selling a high ticket item and then you notice that the CACs are in the hundreds. This would take an enormous amount of spend for it to reach the stat-sig on each creative asset. Instead, you will have to pick an event that is more upper funnel and also a strong indicator of a user’s likelihood of the converting.

 

It is very important for you to select a percentage that will stay consistent. Across all the creative testing when deciding on which of the statistically significant percentage for you to use. As a rule of thumb, I most times like to use a certainty of 80%+. Because it gives me that allowance for enough confirmation along with the ability to make those quicker decisions. A great (and free) online calculator is the Neil Patel’s A/B Testing Significance Calculator.

Make or Break

You are just scrolling through a social feed, and you noticed a sleek gold pendant catches your eye. But all the messaging you see on it has the brand name and the product specifications. It then hooked your attention, but what did it do to reel you in? You can start thinking about it: What are you doing about not only hooking, but the reel people in with the “creative” — the make or the break it factor that is in the paid social growth marketing?

 

Circumventing iOS 14.5 data loss

The Creative testing is just getting tougher day by day for the mobile campaigns even as the iOS 14.5 obfuscates user data. But you should take note that it does not equal the impossible and it simply means that we need to get craftier. There are a variety of of different hacks that you can implement to help in gaining the clear insight on how the creative is performing. Some may not last forever and others possibly may be timeless.

Taking a look at this ever-changing world of the social media, it is quite very easy for you to fall off the wagon with all your social strategy. The steady stream of your new updates, the features, and the websites are just enough to make anyone business owner’s head start spinning. Still, for you staying on top of the social media trends has its own rewards.

The changes in the consumer technology, like that of the relatively recent explosion in the mobile web surfing, is a force that have a direct effect on how the people are making use of the internet.
Ensure that the content you are sharing is something that can just bring conversation naturally. To do so, you need to consider these tips:

1. Give shout-outs to other businesses that you work or you are networking with.
2. Ask open-ended questions. Leave the questions for the audience to reply and get involved.
3. Solicit feedback on your products
4. Understand how you should connect with your customers through the social listening

 

Monitor your conversation

The other advantage of the social media marketing is allowing you to possibly monitor your social conversations on certain topics. This is very essential because you will be able to have an understanding of what the audience wants and the trends that they are following through the social listening.

If you have an understanding of what they are struggling with, it will help you in creating the content that addresses their pain points.

In addition, you will also have a chance to understand the tone of the language that your audience uses. Perhaps when you are targeting a young audience, you can make use of the same slang they use. The social media helps you when you are not sure if you should match such tone and style to your audience.

For the success of your brand, you need to take time listening to what people say or what they are suggesting in your industry. This could be a means of help to improve your brand recognition.

Tell Your Story

Social media is an excellent place where the people can get to know you, get to know about your brand. You can do that by simply sharing your stories and the brand mission. The effective stories will have a vital impact on your business’s image. The stories that you give could be simple or could be extensive, but make sure that it is something effective. An effective story will greatly be an impact to your brand’s image.

If you have checked a post by the Starbucks, the post was about someone getting a job position at a hiring fair. This method helped them with their public image. They represented one image that later turned out to be very impactful and clear.

The other way could be the sharing of stories about those that are using your products or services. When they give those great feedback, you can share it. That could also be a way of help to spread the message that you have a quality product or service because people give it a positive feedback.

 

I have never understood why the marketing budgets are not unlimited. To most of the business executives, certainly those that are on the financial side. That statement is probably sounding like heresy. But really, how is it that the ROI for marketing any different than the ROI for purchasing the capital equipment. That shows a break-even point in two to three years? In fact, the marketing usually outperforms that by far.

Now consider this: A marketing vice president recently had to share a story with me. About when he asked his CEO for a larger trade show budget (obviously it was a pre-pandemic request). The VP was a savvy marketer who have the idea of what was important to driving the business. He did not approach the request as just a discussion about an expense or about a cost to the business, but rather he approached it as a proven revenue generator. He showed the CEO that trade shows accounted for about 40% of that company’s new account sales.

And the CEO then properly replied, “Not only is your request for a larger trade show budget approved, but what else, how much more can I give you?”

In this case, both the marketer and also the CEO have an understanding of the financial payback they were getting. And they would just be foolish not to put as much money as they possibly could find into a tested and proven formula for getting more sales.

Making The Marketing-To-ROI Connection

Recently, we were reviewing the ROI results for several of our client’s digital marketing programs for the prior year. We were then looking at the usual stats on the lead generation, the cost per lead, the program efficiency and even the size of the sales pipeline that we are driving.

 

Transition From Manager To Leader

However, it is possible we increasingly can take marketing analytics further than that, all the way straight to the final step. Not just marketing ROI for leads and quotes, but also through to final sales ROI. In other words, for every dollar that is spent on marketing, how many dollars in sales has it generated? Not clicks, not the impressions, not even the pipeline deal flow, but actual the revenue? Today’s software tools the marketing automation software linked to a customer relationship management tool. Make this ROI calculation not just only automatic but also very transparent and visible to everyone.

The approach should be to use the analytics to draw a straight line right from the marketing to sales to the ROI. For our clients, with all the different industries and different programs, the ROI ranges from about 10:1 to 25:1. Some years it has been as high as 40:1. But in most of the cases, for every dollar spent on the marketing, the software analytics point to definitive returns of about $10 to $25 in revenue. This is not a payback over the two to three years, as in a capital equipment investment, but also an ROI-to-sales result for that same year. A pretty enviable financial return for any chief financial officer.

That is of course just a one year of payback. It does not account for the total lifetime value of any customer acquired.

 

Many of us dream of becoming an author someday, but when our fantasies now turn into reality, it is possible we may get stuck. How are we going to find and reach our audiences so that people can discover and buy our books? Even if you have only just started daydreaming about your book, now is the right time for you to start thinking about marketing.

We are trying to work on and still working with the first-time authors and best-selling authors for some time now, and we have found that there are so many great ways for you to reach readers. To know which of these strategies and tools are best for you, I invite you to give answers to these two questions.

Why Do You Want To Market Your Book?

For you to determine the best way to market your book, the thing is to first figure out the “why” of your book. You would have probably heard this before, and you might even possibly have a knee-jerk answer, but I can not stress enough how important this question is. I have noticed that authors tend to spend so much time thinking about the reason why they want to write a book, but not a lot of time on the reason why they want to market it — and these are two very different things. For you discovering why you are marketing your book can be a good support for you in creating a marketing strategy that will get you where you ultimately want to go.

Are you just marketing your book because you are aiming to be a recognized author with more books in your future? Or do you want to simply establish yourself as an expert? By asking yourself all these questions, you will have a better idea of the best way for you to market your book.

Now you might be wondering, “What if what i want is to just focus on my expertise, why does a book launch matter?” Well, anytime that you are approaching the media, there are just two main questions for you to answer: Why should the media care? And why should they start caring now? Your expertise answers the first question, and then the book launch answers the second question.

What Do You Like To Do?

Now that you are clear about where you are heading to, let us work on the specifics. Whether you are boosting your profile as an expert or you are promoting one book, you need to start with social media. We always tell our clients, choose the one social networking platform that you are enjoying most, and then work on that. Do you like to take that great photos? Fantastic. Zoom in on the Instagram. Do you enjoy it when you talk to strangers? Clubhouse is your place. Do you have passion or you love to pen a pithy headline? You will be great on the Twitter.
You need discover where are really good at, then make it your focal point and develop more in that area. Discover where you are good at and hold on to that social media platform.

 

For the modern marketer, the generating of awareness and driving the demand generation efforts should never be seen as simply mutually exclusive. Just like a game of the heads or tails.

Why? Because the modern marketing can actually accomplish much more with both of these goals. Building the brands by means of advertising, while they are still driving clear sales-focused lead generation efforts. But in order for you to make sure their entire marketing team is aligned. The CMOs today must ensure that the team members know the value of both of these marketing efforts.

Success should not just be analyzed by the numbers. Companies need to have an understanding of the effectiveness and the relevance of messaging. Does it reflect the current cultural events? Is it enhancing the brand? Does it really provide value to the customer or the prospect?

 

Creative Expertise

The risk for the marketers is that in an increasing technology- and the measurement-driven discipline. The essence of creativity of you recognizing how to speak to the customer with the right sentiment will be all lost. Indeed, so many growing numbers of young marketers are now arriving in a business with a great understanding of the mechanics of the successful campaign delivery. And the technology expertise but little, if not to say zero, insight into how they can craft the correct message, one that piques the customer’s interest.

Technology should not drive marketing – and the marketing teams need to be very creative first, ‘mar-technicians’ second. What technology should do is provide the entire team with a complete view. Complete view of how, where and the when customers interact with marketing activity to ensure that the strategy is infused into every message.

It should also empower the individuals to experiment with messaging, the delivering rapid insight. Through the A/B testing for example – into how the customers respond to small changes in the emphasis. It should help a company to understand how best they can approach a new market, to measure an existing brand awareness for example. But the creative skills of the marketing team are then very vital to identify how they can entice that new audience. To create the best messaging to also tap into their mindset.

Conclusion

Marketing is not a linear activity. The customer expectations, the experiences and the desires change constantly; the way that they can interact with a brand evolves continuously. Good marketing will be a judicious mix of innovation and also consistency. And the best of CMOs will balance the brand with the demand. They will maximize the value of the proven channels while always looking towards – and also experimenting with – the new.

The marketing teams require a holistic skillset that blends with the creativity with technical confidence. And the business leaders need to recognize that while the MarTech provides a great insight into the marketing value. It is not the “be all and the end all” of marketing success. Pitching the brand against the demand makes no sense. It is just simply the way in which a company reaches out to customers that is mainly the key. It is just the message, not the channel, that resonates.

The Marketing a guessing Game?

A question to be asked: Is the marketing ever a guessing game, and did the companies get successful out of just sheer luck?

A deceptively simple part of every business. The marketing is in its simplest form all of the activities. That is targeted at converting individuals and/or the businesses into customers and the driving of profit. Marketing involves the research, the product development, the promotion and the pricing strategies. That is required to position the products and services in the marketplace. And to motivate target audiences to make a purchase.

Distinguishing Market

Marketing is simply what distinguishes the product A from B and it is the secret sauce of successful businesses. Whether your business has for a long time existed, either for years or it has just recently started. For you finding the most effective marketing strategies is really critical – small and large. Taking it from the market stalls in Idumota, in Onitsha or in Kano to the sleekest boardrooms, all of the businesses depend on marketing. While the market person might be ringing a physical bell in an attempt trying to sway those passing customers. Those large corporations also are ringing bells using their marketing materials. Marketing requires very careful planning and strategy to ensure appeal to the intended target audience. The most successful marketing campaigns do not just happen like that – they are been planned down an inch.

Marketing is not just one size, one community fits all:

Once only a one-way conversation, marketing just continues to evolve and to be redefined so to possibly fit the current generation. The average consumer is currently defined by the personal characteristics. And also defined by their ‘digital tribes’ in this our increasingly hyperconnected world. The local context matters a lot. The nuance of who and where, is very essential in crafting a successful marketing campaign. When Nike had to release an advert, it will deploy quality visual imagery and inspirational messaging to the audience. Just to capture audience attention in most of the western countries. Yet that same unchanged method sparked outrage in Japan.

What is marketing? The definition of marketing that many marketers learn as they start out in the marketing industry is: simply putting the right product in the right place, at the right price, and at the right time.

The 4Ps of marketing is known to be a model for enhancing the components of your “marketing mix” just the way in which you will take a new product or a new service to the market. It helps you to define your marketing options in terms of the price, the product, the promotion, and the place so that your offering meets a specific customer need or demand.

It is seen recently that the marketing automation has stolen the show and is currently the new whale oil.

A marketing automation solution is known to be the most critical enabler of the crucial customer insights. That fuel delightful customer experiences and then define a brand.

Data Grants Power

Marketers must remember that the data in itself is not powerful but data grants power to those people who can understand it. And help to deploy their learning effectively.

Eons ago, the whale oil was the most valued commodity in the whole world. From the street lighting to the sea-faring vessels, it was a source that powered the world in the 18th century. Soon after, the crude took over. Oil was nicknamed it is referred to as the black gold as the world runs on it, quite literally. But now, the it is visible that the status quo has changed. Data is now indeed the new oil, it is the new most valuable commodity of the world.

Data has now taken over everything as the world has now gone online. Armed with the smartphones and the cheap mobile data. The modern-day consumer are equipped and has a solid willingness to experience digital solutions for their various needs. Take the E-Commerce, for example. By the year 2025, India will have about 99 billion$ e-commerce market, that will be growing at 27% YoY.

But, of course, the pandemic has really sped up the digital transformation timelines and tremendously. And now the consumers are increasingly demanding more of an online solutions that deliver value safely. With minimal human interaction. As a result, the India’s E-Commerce order volumes has increased by 36% in Q4 of 2020. In addition to that, the personal care category alone increasingly grew by 95%!

India poses a very unique challenge for the consumer brands. As the market continues to mature, the customers also become more discerning. Actively seeking the one-to-one experiences from brands that they have come to love based on the values the brands offers and past experiences.

 

A New Era Has Began

The solution of all this lies in the creating of a robust digital experience. That can extracts insights from the personal & behavioral data to power a hyper-personalized engagement strategy. Just imagine a system that is working across multiple digital touchpoints. Noting every of the digital and the offline interaction, updating the customer profile in the backend, and also building a very unique, more powerful perspective. For the marketing teams for them to take the correct next step.

Brands are now looking at their customers all from a renewed perspective. Which involves them analyzing their entire lifecycle and tailoring their communication according to their current stage. And there is one central element that is powering this strategy — the customer data.

The Partner marketing programs are also expanding to give support to relationships with new categories of partners. “I think that our worlds are now coming together,” says Liz Fuller from Citrix. “Customers are really demanding it. I cannot begin to imagine being a customer and then saying, ‘I understand everything that I need to possibly address every single pain point.’ It is our job to do that, and that is where partners really come in.”

Virtual events must evolve

The shutdowns that occurred in the year 2020 have shifted a lot of marketing activity to digital channels. In events perhaps even more than any other tactic. But ramping up the virtual events capabilities carried its own set of challenges for the partner marketing community. Fortunately, there were some of the silver linings. Early on, customers were all flooded with a range of virtual events to select from. And much of the exhibitor messaging all sounded the same. Recognizing this as a problem, the savvy partner marketing teams then saw an opportunity for them to start a collaboration with their alliance partners. Just to develop truly differentiated and an unified value propositions to help better serve the needs of their constituencies.

Although we are currently beginning to see a revival of in-person events for this 2021. Panelists anticipate a hybrid model that will develop with a mix of digital and in-person activities. Thus offering the audiences more flexibility to learn and also to engage as they prefer.

“Going forward, even if we are having an in-person event. We will still want to reach out to all of those customers and those partners that are all around the world. So, this hybrid engagement will be a very critical piece of our own strategy,” notes NVIDIA’s Robin Wolf.

The fundamentals of successful partnerships still remain a constant
Despite the plenty adjustments that was made across partner marketing practices in the past year, the key elements of a strong, successful partnerships that still remains essential to success, including:

1. You and your partners must know what your goals are individually, but you must also explicitly identify where you can complement each other. Be very clear with your partners about what you want to achieve together, also how you will want to do it and how you will resolve any differences.
2. Trust. Your partner must know and be pretty sure that they can rely on you. Build a comprehensive strategy and a plan, set your expectations and then meet or exceed those goals that has been set down.
3. You and your partners have to work well together. This begins by jointly identifying and developing the strategies that will help you to reach your goals together. Share data and also use it collectively to inform the partnership and to also make educated decisions as a team.