7 Key Steps To Level Up Your Business Marketing Strategy

If you’re reading this post, it is needless to point out how critical marketing is for your business’s overall success. And why not?  If you have built something that your audience loves, you need to get the word out. Without your audience knowing that your product exists, it is almost ludicrous to think of championing the startup game. But here’s the thing.  Often, attracting a more unique pair of eyeballs to your product falls short in making it a bestseller. A S2e consultant can help you to do so. Having more of an audience see your product is just the first step. You need to go all in and make sure you strike an impression with your audience. Only then will you be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  Here’s what you can do to hack your marketing operations. 

7 Elements That Influences The Success Of Your Marketing Strategy

While you are building your marketing strategy, there are two approaches that you can take: a product-centric approach and a customer-centric approach.  Both strategies have their own merits. The product-centric approaches will help you unleash the faults and potentials of your product faster. But, the customer-centric approach will ensure you are in line with your customer’s demands and wants.  No matter which path you take to grow and hack your business, there are a few elements that need special attention. The following is a detailed idea of how you use the same to your leverage. 

1. Hard data don’t lie

Take it from all the successful entrepreneurs of the world—people who have been there, done that. If you have to sustain yourself in business, data is your best friend. There is so much that running analytics can tell you about your business.  But here’s the thing. In the initial days, you do not need a lot of data to be in front of you. Take a lean approach here. Start with the following key elements. 

• Business analytics

 The core agenda of running business analytics is to validate your business idea and the market potential in the long term. Finding answers to questions like is your market is young or saturated, who are your key competitors, the total addressable market (TAM), and the best-suited organization structure will allow you to find your strength in your domain.  You can use a SWOT to make it easy for you to target your goals. 

• Who is your ideal customer?

Behind every successful business lies a pain point that is getting alleviated successfully, consistently. But this problem that you are solving as a business has to come from people. After all, they are the ones who are going to pay for your services.  This means, after you validate your business idea, you need to find who your audience is? If you are wrong in this step, your whole marketing plan will fall apart.  You can use a customer avatar to make this easier. Your audience will give you an estimated idea of how much the problem costs them both in a tangible and intangible way and how you can make it easier for them. All of this data will give you opportunities to create a better product and communicate with your audience in a more comfortable way.  

• Your competitors can tell you more than what you think

There is a reason why competitor analysis is the critical secondary research every business goes through. And no, it’s not what you think.  Competitors sure are striving for the same audience’s attention. But look at the bigger picture. They have been in business for quite some time. The best part? They have been performing. But their performance can deceive you.  A high-performing competitor doesn’t essentially mean that they satisfy your audience’s needs in the best possible way. It just hints that they are the best in the market in real-time. Researching what your audience says about your biggest competitors can help you explore their business’s weaknesses and give you a chance to fill the gaps. You can also know if placing your product differently appeals to your audience better.  Now that you have all the Kickstarter insights, what’s next? 

2. Is your business unique?

Your business cannot withstand competition in the long run if you aren’t known for something amongst your tribe. This makes developing a value proposition even more critical for your business. Answer the why?  It’s going to be one of your unfair advantages over your competitors. Also, your marketing ventures are going to profit immensely from this. It will help you create a brand with a well-knit community that isn’t only your loyal customers but your most prominent brand evangelists. 

3. Develop a hybrid marketing model

In today’s dynamic market, where your customers’ behavior changes faster than you can deliver, relying on just one marketing channel isn’t the smartest move for a sustainable business.  Given, that you already have a robust marketing strategy that engages your target audience well. But what resonates today with your audience tomorrow may not. No matter how agile your business operations are, there will always be something that you can improve over time. But until then, how can you survive? Steering your business towards a low-risk, the agile approach ensures you have more opportunities to generate revenue. Also, it lets you take more audacious steps in your business. So how do you do this?  Spread out. Create an omnichannel experience for your audience. But a word of caution here. No one format fits the landscape of each communication medium. When you brainstorm ideas, it is super critical for you to validate the viability of each of the ideas before launching. Launching without validation can harm your brand reputation in the long run. Perform a soft launch. Test the campaign with a look like a small set of audience before going full in.  As experts say, ‘build something that people love.’ Your marketing campaigns abide by the same principle. Here are a few ways you can do this. 

• You cannot underestimate social media  

Without social media, it is almost over-optimism to think you can gain traction and reputation over your audience. But even if you have social media presence, the key lies inconsistent value delivery.  You cannot expect your audience to be proactive in interacting with you without putting in the hard work. Building a brand takes a lot of time. Years to be realistic about it. But the first step starts today.  Go ahead and interact with them. Create giveaway campaigns for people participating in the contests. It can give you instant spikes in traffic. But don’t forget to retain this hard-earned traffic.  You can use the paid campaigns here. But for your paid advertising to work here, you need clickbait—a lead magnet. Facebook is a great place to do this. 

• How big are you on blogging, vlogging, and a podcast?

  If you thought that your audience’s limited attention span deters you from creating blogs, think again. Medium has successfully proved that assumption wrong. Good, relevant content can never go wrong. Long or short, your audience will always be hungry for engaging information.  But doing blogs has evolved a lot since last time. If you need to be heard, you need to do so much more than just typing text. Think of your blog’s design, throw in some colors, and embed pictures and videos. Keep it fun and entertaining, along with informative. And of course, don’t forget the SEO while doing so.  To get more out of your content, be heavy on repurposing. It’s super easy to convert a popular podcast into a blog post or a blog post into an infographic. You can quickly transcribe audio to text for all your channel videos and podcasts with software. 

• Emails are the best way to keep the conversations going

Did you ever come across a potential lead who converted on the first interaction? Maybe yes. But I bet this has been a one in a million instances. But wouldn’t it have been nice if you had a way to convert all those inquiring leads into customers? Email marketing is that way.  By creating personalized and custom messages, you can now not only create the best experience for your audience but automate the process. This means now you have more room for more creative work. Create a better copy, conversations, marketing, and the core product.  But to get the most out of this, never forget to split test your email sequences. This will give you a better idea of what works and what doesn’t. Also, you must take permission from your audience before sending them emails. Mention them how you are collecting their data and your plans to use them in what context. Your audience is sensitive about their data. No wonder, so many new data privacy laws have been introduced. Always stay updated on the recent additions to ensure your marketing campaigns abide by them. Osanos ccpa guide has a detailed explanation of the primary data privacy laws and how you can tackle them. 

4. Build your dream team 

Optimizing your resources is incomplete without optimizing your production team. This means you cannot be the star of your domain unless you build your dream team.  Be cognizant of the people whom you hire. They are the front face of your company. It is critical to take some time to understand their natural mindset to align it with yours. Your reputation has a great deal to do with this dream team. Think of your sales team. Are they warm to your customers? Do they have a natural inclination to socialize? How good of a listener are they? Asking these questions will help you make the high-performance team that scales your business and markets it right requires.  

5. Collaboration leads to higher success

If your marketing strategy doesn’t include a collaboration strategy already, now is the time. No matter which industry vertical you are operating in, B2C or B2B, opening your business to collaborations is just going to open your floodgates of revenue opportunities and quality traffic. Here are a few ways you can approach collaboration. 

• Establish an affiliate partnership

Opening your doors of partnerships to the right set of collaborators can give you massive growth in both traffic and sales. But finding the ideal profile to collaborate with is really what is going to make a difference. 

• Leverage influencers

Influencers are modern marketers’ most significant assets. If you partner with the right influencer, your brand will get tonnes of unique eyeballs and all of it in a very short period.  But here’s the glitch. How to find influencers who perfectly pair your brand? Find the sweet spot. Your audience is the only thing that should be common between you and your influencer. They shouldn’t be another small-scale business selling the same products as you but under a personal brand. Got the idea?  Ideally, you would want to go for mid to macro-influencers with at least 500k followers. But, if budget is a challenge for you, going for micro-influencers with 5k to 10k followers also does the trick. No matter what you choose, the goal is to test your theory. Distribute your influencer marketing budget between macro and micro-influencer partnerships. 

6. Create a continuous feedback loop

If you have to have any shot at sustaining your business, you have to be okay with critical feedback.  Staying inside the feedback loop keeps you closer to your customers. Each one of the reviews will only help you improve your marketing and product in the long term. But what is important here is to get honest feedback. This is the only way you can constructively develop your product. 

7. Improve your customer experience

If collaborations and partnerships are your power, customer experience is your superpower. Today, your customers need more. To retain their interest in your brand, you need to find ways to delight them. Based on this collected data from customer reviews and audience behavior with your brand, create a personalized brand experience that will last in your customers’ memories. You can update the placement of your brand based on this too.  Creating awareness campaigns based on feedback data has been some of the best-performing marketing ventures irrespective of industries. 

Parting Advice

Marketing is a very dynamic industry. What works today may not yield optimum results tomorrow. This means there is no one answer to resolve all your marketing problems. It reiterates time and requirements.  The only way to keep up with the trend is to make sure you never fail to satisfy the underlying principles of marketing. Marketing is nothing but stimulating a deep connection within people.  Your focus should be on finding ways that support this core principle. Only then can you truly grow and hack your marketing venture? Chances are you will curb your failures too.