Mastering the art of business marketing is a full-time endeavor. The success of any enterprise hinges significantly on the robustness of its marketing strategy—a comprehensive plan that encapsulates all activities aimed at reaching potential consumers and converting them into loyal customers. This is especially crucial if you’re steering an eCommerce or SaaS business, where customer retention becomes paramount. Given that acquiring a new customer often costs more than retaining an existing one, fostering long-term relationships can dramatically enhance your profitability.
In this Marketing 101 guide, we will delve into the essential elements to consider while crafting a marketing strategy that not only attracts but also retains a profitable customer base. Let’s explore these critical factors.
1. Being attuned to the customer’s mindset and values
Consumers’ behaviors change when their own circumstances change. Sometimes, the market forces the change on them. In either case, your business will feel the impact.
When consumers’ purchasing power falls, they tend to look for more economical or higher-value products. When their spending power increases and they aim for a better quality of living, their desire to own more luxurious products grows. When they can shop for products or access a service more conveniently online, they will be tempted to switch loyalties from a physical store to an online shop. In a one of a kind event like the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers will switch heavily to online shopping.
Marketing strategies respond to the new consumer culture. They speak to customers on an individual level. If this doesn’t happen, customers will find other brands that do, regardless of how much you’ve done for them.
How do you adapt marketing to the shifting consumer mindset? Here are some tips:
- Understand customers’ perspectives on your business through surveys, 1-on-1s, social listening, and reviews and ratings.
- Stay updated with news and research related to major customer behavior trends.
- Measure how customers are engaging with your brand on your website and other marketing channels using relevant metrics, for example, subscribers, bounce rates, click-through rates, lead conversions, churn, and revenue growth.
- Track product value metrics like customer satisfaction score, retention rate, conversion rate, and customer lifetime value.
Use the information to improve your marketing and product. Some of the actions you can take are:
- Reinforce what you stand for to build trust and attract the right customers.
- Create better experiences at every stage of the customer journey – awareness, consideration, purchase and retention.
- Communicate with emotional relevance in all your marketing content.
- Develop customer rewards and protections that resonate with them and encourage their loyalty.
- Use the relationships you’ve developed to monitor customers’ behavioral shifts on an ongoing basis.
- Introduce new features or products that satisfy customers’ evolving needs and changing preferences.
2. Choosing the best marketing channels for your business
You deliver your value proposition and brand messages through your marketing channels. Identifying the best marketing channels for your business is crucial to get before a wider target audience and keep marketing costs manageable. Use these tips in deciding the marketing channels to use:
Define your target audience
Knowing who your ideal customer is and how they search for products/services like yours is an essential first step to planning your channel strategy. Market research, buyer personas, and customer feedback are helpful in drawing correct conclusions.
Relate the characteristics of your product to the appropriate channels
If you have a simple or standardized product, conventional mass-market channels may suffice. For a complex or customizable product or service, a direct channel to customers can be necessary.
Examine competitors’ channel strategies
Identify the channels adopted by established competitors. Evaluate how their channel choices compare against those you’re interested in. Also, assess the relevance and performance of those channels to know your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. In addition, identify channels they aren’t using but which offer good opportunities for promotion and outreach.
Compare and contrast channels
Once you have a clear idea of the channels you can potentially use, compare them on reach, cost, and the skills and resources required for marketing on them. Guard against being too conservative by sticking to one or two channels when more can benefit you or spreading yourself too thin on multiple channels.
Monitor and optimize channel performance
The performance of your marketing channels may or may not meet your expectations. It could be due to many reasons, such as the level of engagement of your marketing campaigns and the competition on those channels.
The emergence of new social networks and methods of brand engagement may affect the popularity of existing channels. Continually tracking the performance of your marketing channels will alert you to issues. You will be able to adjust your channel strategy before it impacts sales.
3. Developing marketing strategies
With the internet becoming a big part of consumers’ lives, the importance of digital marketing has become crystal clear. Digital marketing covers a range of marketing strategies, such as search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, and video marketing.
Your business can benefit from all these strategies. But you’ll need a framework to guide and execute them. You’ll also need to measure results from strategies to understand what’s working, what isn’t, and how you can improve results. Depending on the efforts and results, you can then allocate marketing spending and team resources properly.
While there is no standard digital marketing strategy framework, there are three common components of the strategy:
- A vision that establishes the responsibilities of the digital marketing team
- The near-term objectives of the digital marketing strategy
- An assessment of the skills, processes, and tools required to meet digital marketing objectives.
Businesses evaluate digital marketing strategies in the context of their marketing funnel, which describes the customer journey from awareness to consideration to purchase. Top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) activities focus on raising awareness about your products and bringing potential customers to your website. Middle of the funnel (BOFU) involves strengthening the connections you’ve built with potential customers and helping them understand how your product meets their needs or solves their problems. At the bottom of the funnel (BOFU), where customers are at the decision/action stage, the focus is on getting their commitment and driving purchases.
Planning the marketing channels and content at each stage is a common practice to move more prospects down the funnel:
TOFU: SEO for web traffic, landing page or infographic introducing your product, social media posts highlighting your USP, and paid ads on social media and in podcasts.
MOFU: Whitepapers and case studies showcasing your product’s value, surveys, product comparisons, and landing pages for different target segments.
BOFU: Trial or demo for a first-hand experience of your product, social proof, how-to guide, email marketing, and abandoned cart email (for eCommerce).
4. Automating marketing
Automating routine marketing processes and campaign management saves you team time. It is a more efficient way of implementing marketing campaigns across channels. Marketing automation technology can also generate better results than if humans were to handle all processes and activities. Parallelly, it also frees you from repetitive tasks and directs your creativity and intelligence where it’s needed – in strategy planning, story-telling, and analysis and improvements.
Some examples of marketing automation are:
Email marketing automation: The automation tool sends emails after certain events are triggered. In other words, you don’t have to manually hit ‘send’ on every email. For example, subscription reminder emails for upcoming renewals, abandoned cart reminder emails, and action reminders for actions such as completing a survey or leaving feedback. Some popular email automation tools are Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Drip, HubSpot, and Intercom.
Social media posting automation: Your schedule posts in advance, and they’re published at those times. You can also track comments, likes, shares, and other engagement metrics across various social media networks on one platform. HootSuite, Buffer, SproutSocial, and SocialPilot are popular social media automation tools.
Lead management automation: Tracking, nurturing, notifying internal teams about leads, and creating reports are taxing and time-consuming. Using lead management automation software like Zapier and HubSpot, you can set up workflows to organize leads from multiple sources in one place, track conversions, automate communications, and generate reports automatically.
5. Assigning roles and responsibilities
If you’re a solopreneur or have a small team, outsourcing marketing to a digital marketing agency makes practical sense. As marketing is a continuous activity, a retainer that includes specific digital marketing services on a month-by-month, quarterly, or annual basis for a fixed fee is an option to consider. If you’re willing to invest in automation tools and manage most of the work in-house, you may need an external agency for major one-off campaigns.
As your business grows, you may wish to create a marketing team. Roles in this field include digital marketing management, SEO manager, social media manager, content marketing manager, PPC manager, web development manager, and email marketing manager. Digital marketing executives can have cross-functional skills, planning, executing, and managing various strategies on their own. The marketing team structure usually undergoes a change with business growth.
Picking up marketing skills
During the early stages of your business, you may not be able to hire a marketing professional or agency. Learning basic digital marketing skills through courses (there are several free ones online) will allow you to put together your initial marketing strategy and help your business gain traction in those early days.