What if you could read one post that took you 80% of the way to set up a transforming marketing strategy for your business?
We have one.
Why only 80%?
Because that well-known chap called Joseph Juran who named the 80/20 principle after economist Vincent Pareto said so.
Jokes aside, if you want to reach the 90% – 100% levels, you need to be refining your strategy regularly.
Your marketing strategy shouldn’t be perfect.
You just need to get going and have one that gets you most of the way which you can then refine.
So, put the paper down and read between the lines – we have some learning to do.
What we will cover in this article:
- What makes a strategy produce incredible growth
- Make your customer your best friend
- Building loyalty + high retention rate
- How to measure incredible growth
- How to leapfrog your competitors
- Keeping your competitors at bay
- Working out your budget
What Makes a Strategy Produce Incredible Growth
Before you create your marketing strategy, you need to know what makes a strategy produce incredible growth and identify your objectives such as brand awareness, traffic or conversions.
Firstly, you need to find out if there is a market for your product/service.
If there isn’t, then you need to find out how to create a demand for your product.
How do you do this?
You put feelers out.
Run a few testers via Facebook or Google ads, write in the forums, and join a few groups on Facebook.
For example, if you join a Facebook group full of runners and you’re thinking about a product that only runners’ will buy, you can ask them if they would consider using a product such as yours.
But this isn’t enough.
Even if you have hundreds of thousands of people who say yes and that they’ll buy the product tomorrow if you start selling it.
Because talk is cheap.
And money is where the rubber meets the road.
Once people have said “yes” or “that sounds interesting, I’d consider buying”, you then need to ask them to spend money with you or join the waiting list.
THEY MUST TAKE SOME FORM OF ACTION.
If they don’t, you are likely to have a product that isn’t going to be profitable.
Make Your Customer Your Best Friend
Would you find it easy to sell to your customers’ if they were like your best friend?
Of course you would!
You know your best friend like the back of your hand and you know their likes and dislikes.
Which is why you need to make your customer your best friend.
This isn’t like creating a customer persona.
We’re going deeper than age and gender.
You need to find out what your customers are doing 24/7 without using a surveillance team.
How do you do this?
You try:
- Running surveys using tools such as Hotjar
- You join the Facebook groups, the forums and even the local clubs
- You become the customer
You hear of businesses being started all the time by people who needed a solution to their problem.
If you don’t come under this category then you need to be doing all 3 of the above bullet points.
It should always be your aim to know more about the business, industry and product than anyone else whether it’s customers, competitors or any “leading experts”.
We’ve heard stories and we’ve done it ourselves, where we’ve become a customer of a client.
Building Loyalty + High Retention Rate
On a similar note, one of the easiest and cost-effective ways to increase sales + keep sales consistent is to build a loyal following.
When you have built a loyal following, you stand a better chance of increasing your retention rate.
If you’re not improving your retention rate then you’re increasing your churn rate.
And when you have more customers going out the shop door than coming in, you’re setting yourself up for disaster in the short and long term.
The solution?
Customer experience.
When you provide value for your customers, you build trust; customers remember fantastic service, an incredible product that solves some of their problems and companies that care.
Treat your customers like a prospective boyfriend or girlfriend that you see a future with.
Don’t look at the customer as an easy one nightstand.
This is an individual who you want to see more often, start a deep relationship with and be nice to.
Remember: Husband or wife, NOT man or woman I don’t know the name of tomorrow morning!
How To Measure Incredible Growth
“What gets measured, gets improved.” – Peter Drucker
It’s no good aiming for incredible growth if you’re not measuring it.
For example, two arrows are going in the same direction but one is directed a couple of millimetres to the left; you barely notice the difference at the start, but after a while, the arrow on the left is going in a completely different direction to the one on the right.
And it’s those tiny changes that end up costing your business money and valuable time because you didn’t measure where you were going.
There’s a ton of FREE resources that will help you keep track of your data such as:
All easy-to-use and did we mention already…they’re frickin’ FREE!!!
How To Leapfrog Your Competitors
Just because your competitor has been in business for a while, doesn’t mean you can’t catch up in a short period of time.
You always hear of companies that went from being unknown one week to Industry-Leading brand the next. This is down to good tactics, PR and high spending on marketing.
There are only two ways of looking at your competitors when researching them:
- Find out what they’re doing exceptionally well
- Find out what they’re NOT doing exceptionally well at
For example, you could use Ahrefs or SEMrush to find out which pages are getting the most traffic to a competitors site.
Is it a piece of blog content, a landing page or a tool they’re offering for free?
(For information on how to use competitor research using Ahrefs, try this link here.)
In his book, Delivery Happiness, Tony Hsieh talks about focusing on one side of the business that you wanted to be known for.
At Zappos, he talked about focusing on delivery unmatched customer service so that customer retention rates were high, word of mouth got out and spending on marketing was less relied on.
After this, he focused on company culture as his last venture became stale for him when he noticed employees were out for themselves.
What do you want your business to be known for?
Once you’ve found what your competitors are doing well, you can look at what they’re not doing well at.
Maybe they’re missing the mark in their content marketing and not answering the important questions that their website visitors are looking for.
Are customers leaving any treasure in the reviews such as delivery being slow or customer service being rude?
If so, you can decide to focus on this aspect for your business so that you become the company that delivers ahead of schedule and has their customer service agents answering the phone in a positive, constructive manner.
Keeping Your Competitors At Bay
So, you’ve found a chink in your competitor’s armoury and they’ve cottoned on that you’re exposing their weakness(s).
They’re on your coattails.
And they’re angry.
This is the competitive side of the business that resembles a Super-Bowl between two teams that are going back and forth.
You can fight back and focus on the competitor but then who do you forget about when you do this?
The customer.
Don’t compete.
Compete on providing the customer with the best possible experience, the most affordable prices and a fantastic product.
Try not to get into a bidding war unless you have the resources to withstand the onslaught.
Amazon did this with most of their competitors where they knew they could keep the prices lower, for longer.
Working Out Your Budget
Whether you have a big budget or not, you need to focus on one channel first.
Don’t go in head-first trying to master all the channels because you’ll spread your workload to thin.
Pick one.
Maybe one of your competitors aren’t using but your customers are beginning to use.
Get your footing right before you start venturing out into greener pastures.
Look at the demographics of your audience, what they like to do and where they like to go to find out what channel to funnel your budget into.
You can use tools such as Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush to find out how much you can expect to pay for a click.
When you work out how much cost per clicks are, you can then find out the volume per keyword and the amount of traffic you are likely to get from bidding on that keyword.
Reminder: higher-intent keywords such as “buy Nike football boots size 10” are going to be pricier than “Nike football boots”.
This is something you can’t do in Facebook advertising but you can use industry averages to get an idea of what you can expect to pay for a click when advertising on Facebook.
Tip – the average CPC across all industries on Facebook is $1.86.
If you’re going to use content marketing to attract traffic + customers, you can use SEMrush to find out how much traffic competitors are getting to their blog content.
(Delve into your competitors’ traffic using this link here.)
Gone are the days where one company could dominate an entire industry for years’ on end.
You can compete with companies with budgets that swamp your own.
You just need to think outside the box and be RESOURCEFUL.
Terms like “growth hacking” have become more known because of individuals and companies who had to bootstrap their business.
They decided that their budget wasn’t going to be able to compete with the big boys and they were forced into being resourceful.
To summarise this section about setting a budget:
- Choose one marketing channel
- Know how to maximise it better than your competitors
- Pour all the money you can afford into it
- When you’ve mastered one channel, you can try others
Conclusion
If you’ve read the points above then you should have enough information to create a marketing strategy that will provide incredible growth.
Not having a big budget is not a reason – it’s an excuse.
You have been given free tools and resources by companies who have audiences in the billions.
What are you waiting for?
Bio – The Good Marketer is a Marketing Agency in London which drives more traffic, generating conversions and increases sales for Small-To-Medium Sized Businesses.
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