Marketing is meant to have an impact. It’s meant to be seen wide and be felt deeply. To that end, you need to do more than propose a deal you think is superb. You need to make sure that people are actually coming across it and that it’s having some effect on them. Without taking a proper look at how much impact your marketing has, you could be preaching to an audience of no-one.
Know your target
One big mistake that a lot of small businesses make is trying to go too broad with their marketing. They spend a lot of effort sending their message to people who just wouldn’t be interested in it. Make sure the bulk of your effort is focused on people you can readily identify as your audience. Who would gain the most value from your product? Who are your competitors marketing to? Where are they found? These are the questions you need to answer.
Can anyone see it?
Visibility is crucial for the online component of any business. There are thousands upon thousands of businesses and websites competing for attention online. The best that you can hope for is that you will appear to those who are seeking you out. Processes like search engine optimisation help you do that. By using keywords relevant to your business and what you provide, you can make sure you’re one of the first names to appear when someone is looking in your market online. Otherwise, you’ll find it hard to maintain the visibility you need for people to be able to find you on their own. If you’re not visible, it’s much like the tree falling in the woods with no-one there to hear it.
Get the evidence
Your marketing efforts don’t just end when you send out new content or apply new optimisations to your site. To really know what kind of impact you’re having, you need to look at the numbers. Data’s becoming a big thing in business, particularly in marketing. There are a lot of tools to help you gather it, too. With Google Analytics, you can track the performance of your site to individual pages. You can see how they accessed it, where they went and where they stopped browsing. Similarly, lots of social media management tools allow you to assess the success of every post you make. Finding what works for your audience is how you start to make effective changes to the rest of your campaign.
Remember to make it emotional
The three tips above are all about using the tools and facts at your disposal. But marketing isn’t all about logic. It’s about emotion. For instance, using video and audio media to make the same point as written content is proven to be significantly more effective. As is using positive proof instead of negative marketing. Don’t hit them with the stick of ‘this will happen if you don’t use our service’. Give them the carrot of ‘this will happen if you use our service’. Show the people who are already part of your community and how they are benefitting from it. We all have an innate ‘me-too’-ism when it comes to identifying positive changes. Capitalise on it.
Play to your crowd
Keeping your audience’s attention is easier than getting the attention of someone new. Yet many businesses still neglect to put any effort in retention at all. If you’re not working to keep people you’ve already attracted, you’ll lose them. To retain people, content marketing has become one of the most effective tools. People who are enthusiasts, who are already fans, are a lot more willing to read about news that’s relevant to them. For instance, if you sell makeup, then you could benefit from a fashion blog tapping into the lifestyle of your audience. It gives you a different space to peddle your wares, too.
Be quicker on the draw
Brevity is the soul of wit. It’s also the soul of good marketing. You have a limited window to make a first impression. You can’t waste it. You might have some sterling information that’s definitely going to make someone see the value of your product. If you can’t convince them to stay long enough to read it, however, what’s the point? Infographics have become so successful on the internet precisely because they make that information easier to read and much quicker to deliver. Make sure you’re using strong visual media as your front line of marketing.
Make a clear path
That said, the follow-up to your marketing is as important as the haymaker. You might have a great infographic on how one of your products or services is particularly effective. Someone sees this on one of your social media accounts and clicks the provided link. But what if that link takes them to somewhere on your site that’s irrelevant to what they were previously reading? Why would they want to be taken to your home page which has all kinds of different options? Make sure your online marketing has a specific path. Create landing pages if you’re talking about specific things that you offer.
Spread the love
One of the best ways to make a larger impact is to make sure you’re not the only one working on it. Network with other businesses and share their content in return for them sharing yours. Get your audience involved, whether it’s asking their feedback or running competitions and giveaways. You might even want to use influencer marketing. This involves targeting bloggers, podcasters and all sorts to signal boost what you offer. Influencers can be a great way to reach markets who would be interested in your business that you haven’t reached yet. Using the power of a network is a lot more effective than trying to be loud all on your own. Capitalise on the networks you build.
For real impact, you have to combine the science of marketing with the emotion of it. You need to master the tools you’re using as well as the narrative you’re creating. Visibility without connection makes you just another big of spam people will get rid of. Connection without visibility means you’re way out of reach of your campaign’s real potential.
Nice article Andy. I agree with you. I can never remember anyone complaining that they did too much marketing.
Gary