In a business world where Small and Medium Enterprises are taking up a greater market share with every financial quarter, competition seems now to be more fierce than ever, cross-sector. On the other hand, as an SME, marketing budgets are often very limited, and carrying an open “fight” for your customers’ attention with the bigger corporations can many times seem like a battle nearly impossible to win.
Stick around — below are our latest tactics to seize the opportunities technology is opening for dramatically increasing your marketing results while optimising cost, so you only pay for quality traffic and engagement, that can lead to the conversions your business needs!
1. Knowing your core target market
This might sound basic for most Marketers, but trying to please more people than relevant is actually one of the pitfalls many of us can be drawn into! Decide on the first, most profitable and specific segment you want to target — and you can always expand from there, once you build authority and get the cash flow up.
2. Find the most profitable services from your offering, to sell to this specific target segment.
If you are like most businesses, you have an array of services on your offering, however some of them having higher fixed costs (production/shipping/man hours) than others, which can potentially impact profitability. Ultimately, what you want is to sell the products which have the best profit margin after withdrawing fixed and flexible costs (yes, this includes Marketing). In this situation, the products or services you push through your initial communications system have to be: easy to sell (so the cost per conversion is kept as low as possible), in demand by the target market at this point in time (so you supply an already existing demand, rather than having to generate a demand), and with a high profit margin for you.
3. Choose the best channels to create and deploy your Marketing Strategy -
Digital vs. Offline
This might be seen as a bit of a biased opinion, but our advice would be: put most of your money in Digital — mainly if you don’t have much budget to “play around” or risk on offline channels as well. Below are a few reasons why we are so sure about Digital Marketing being the best choice in most cases, in today’s age:
1. Allows for highly targeted actions
2. Is very cost effective — many times you pay only for the people who interacted with your advertising one way or the other. In the other scenarios, the cost will be much lower than offline advertising, generating much higher returns on dollar spent (e.g. TV or Billboard)
3. Is accountable and easy to adjust on a broad scale (at once, if needed), making informed decisions to optimise performanceYou can automate the channel-specific campaigns to create “Marketing Engines” — not only campaigns, and….You can create communications systems around the behaviour of each of your new leads or customers, to drive conversion, all personalised and automated, based on their specific interactions with your messages. We will talk a lot about this concept in this as well as the next article, but in short: the most effective way of doing this is by following the AIDA model for your ad sequence — build awareness, engagement, resonance and only when these are established, push for conversions.
Now that we established “going Digital” will be the way to earn best results from your advertising, the next natural question would be:
“Ok, but there are so many Digital Marketing channels… how do I know which ones should I choose for my business?”
The best strategy to choose is:
1. Look into your ideal customer persona, and see where they consume most media and advertising online, on which devices and at which times. Take notes of these so you can have them at hand at all times
2. Map all the these marketing channels through the AIDA model, and attach a stage of engagement to each of the channels — for example, you can use “x” channel to build: Attention / Interest / Desire / Action towards buying your brand. if there are more ways in which one channel can be used, write them down in the form of a scheme — Email or Facebook/Instagram can be used for more purposes — Attention/Desire, and Social Media is often used for Awareness too. Got the point?
If you are targeting a Millennial demographic, it’s worth checking out this article as well.
Now that you have this view, and you know where your messages would potentially reach customers — and when — the concept that will bring them together is the “The Integrated Marketing Communications” Framework. Through this, you will be sending the message to the same customer through multiple channels using platform-specific language based on their objective of engagement with the platform (psychologically), as well as stage in their customer lifecycle.
Very important to keep in mind: your customer navigates different platforms with different intents and being in completely different states of mind. You can’t communicate on Email as you do on Facebook, which is completely different from how you would push content through Youtube. To get to the bottom of this, try to create a roadmap of communications, and see how an average potential customer would engage with your brand.
To make you communications effective, choose at least one Digital Marketing channel to engage with your audience on each of the AIDA stages — Attention, Interest, Desire and Action, and automate the campaigns on each channel to be enabled one after another, as the customer progresses through the journey with your brand. This way, you will invest even a small budget in an intelligent way, having no money wasted on un-effective advertising
Wrapping it up…
Marketing is getting more “Intelligent” every day, and no matter the size of your business, you will need it to get in front of your customers. Even if your monthly budget is below £1000 or £5000 at the moment, use the insight above to map out the best ways in which you can reach your customers, and not only push messages at them, but rather try to carry them through a “Journey”. The most effective way to do so will be tracking their interaction with your brand through cookies, smart databases or cloud services — but even if you don’t, split your budgets at least on two channels minimum (if not more), and try to reach your target market in as many points during their customer journey as possible.
Have fun!
Wishing you all the success, and if you ever feel the need to discuss this in more depth, and find the specific ways in which you can use these tactics to significantly increase your customer loyalty and profits, write us anytime at hello@marketiu.com.
About us:
At Marketiu, we help you get to the edge and maximise your Digital Marketing returns as well as exponentially grow your business by combining latest Strategic Industry Know-how with intelligent Marketing Execution, Automation & Personalisation tools & Tactics on all required channels.
We have obtained continuous success through Marketing channels integration and optimisation, great scheduling and on-spot control. We offer top-class tailored Marketing Consultancy, Social Media & Cross-channel Digital Advertising Services as well as All-round Digital Production, and have worked with brands ranging from Luxury International Cosmetics, Financial Services and Entertainment supporting their growth. We’d be happy to answer any questions you might have too — just write us @ hello@marketiu.com
Think we can help further? Get in touch @ hello@marketiu.com for a free Marketing Audit and Consultancy session, and let’s prepare the ground for setting your business on a rising Profit Curve!
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