Digital Media Branding Podcast Episode 21 In today’s episode we will go over the Top 10 Digital Marketing Paths To Increase Your Company’s Sales. Welcome to the Digital Media Branding Podcast, I’m your host Carlos Quintero. I own a full service digital media marketing agency based out of Fargo, ND. In my job, I have the opportunity to work with many clients who are often business owners. Being in business today is much more sophisticated because of the web and everything that it implies right? Businesses of all sizes, large and small and even startups have to consider how to best allocate their time and resources to get the most bang out of their efforts. This is why I started the Digital Media Branding Podcast. I wanted to share my 17 plus years of digital marketing experience with marketers and business owners in an effort to help fast track their success or as we call it at MediaOnQ, helping you compete in today’s web economy. So thank you for joining me today. Today we will dive in to the Top 10 Digital Marketing Paths To Grow Your Company’s Sales. What we’re covering here are the variations or types of sales paths that you can take. Your choice as to which path or sales strategy you choose to take can help dramatically increase your sales or keep them flat which really means you lost money right, since you’ve invested time and resources into it. So how do you know what is the best option for your business? Let’s start by taking a look at the top 10 digital marketing path options to find the best fit for your own business Marketing Path #1 – The Shotgun Approach This really is kind of what it sounds like. The strategy basically calls for any and every possible tool, channel and resource to help attract and retain customers. Here at MediaOnQ we’ve experienced our own success and have helped many businesses reach their own success by focusing on the following 9 key areas. 1. Website 2. Social Media Activity 3. Mobile Responsiveness 4. Blogging Activity 5. Email Marketing 6. Lead Nurturing 7. SEO 8. Video 9. Analytics As a matter of fact, every time we land a new client we start by taking a look at each of those 9 areas to come up with a detail picture of digital marketing and establish a strategy roadmap to help our clients improve. This of course can be difficult for some small businesses where one person is attempting to get it all done themselves. MediaOnQ can help carry some or all of that weight, that’s one of the services that we offer. Trying to do it all themselves for most businesses becomes overwhelming and often times the strategy is flat out abandoned or worse, they’ll only work on the things that they enjoy. I’ll tell you why I think this is worse, because only working on what you like or enjoy really means that you are fooling yourself. It gives the impression that you are working hard and working all the time but what you don’t see is how much of your potential audience you are really ignoring and neglecting and that is unfortunate. Throughout my career I’ve yet to see any company or small business be successful when they have a single way of attracting new customers. Here’s something else that you might find interesting. Over the past 3 years or so, I’ve asked every business owner or marketing representative that I’ve talked to if they use Facebook for business. As in do they have a Facebook business page for their business? 9 out of 10 have said yes, and typically the stragglers said they were planning on having one up soon. I then of course followed up with what does that Facebook business page do for your business? I have yet to have anyone answer that question with a real response as in it drives x amount of web traffic to our landing pages or it serves as a way to test out product ideas and incentives … so I’d like to ask you, do you use social media in your own strategy and if you do, what does it do for your business? You can send your response to studio@mediaonq.com I look forward to your answer and hope that you break this cycle for me with your business answer to my elusive question. So here’s an example for you. Wal-Mart uses more than 350 different strategies to attract and retain customers. What I’ve found is that most businesses tend to use 1 or 2 strategies simply because they don’t know about the other options that are available out there for them. Now let’s talk about Marketing Path #2 Education Marketing Education marketing or marketing training is a relatively new form of marketing. The idea behind it is to give your clients, customers and prospects content that allows them to learn about your products, services or information. This approach is most successful when the message is specific toward solving or improving a problem or situation. At MediaOnQ we always try to make money, save money or improve the quality of life for our clients and customers. So try thinking about it from that perspective. Some approaches toward Education Marketing might include product or service how to videos, info-graphics, tutorials, e-books and or a podcast. Does your business service a specific niche? If it does, then a web video series might be the most effective option for you. Education marketing or educating your clients works well for three main reasons. The first is because you are immediately giving your audience some value. This value translates into trust and brand loyalty. The second is because while you are training, it is easier to sell. You have the ability to go over the highlights of your product or service showcasing its strengths and value to your audience. The third is targeting. This allows you to target the specific sector of the market that can benefit from your product or service. For example, if you are a retailer who sells a juicer. You can write an article that talks about natural juice helps you live a healthier life. You will want to let them know how and where they would be able to find and purchase the juicer referenced in the article. Individual who care about or are interested in healthy living will most likely read this article, which will help facilitate a sale. Moving on to Marketing Path #3 – Measure Your Key Performance Indicators Tracking and analytics are not fun for most people simply because it forces us to give up our own perceptions and deal with cold hard facts. Key metrics that you should keep an eye on are: Visits & Visitors Time Spent on Site Bounce Rate Exit Pages Conversion Rate We’ll have to cover these more in depth in a future podcast episode but if you have any questions on these please email me at studio@mediaonq.com and I will do my best to help. Marketing Path #4 – Use The Right Marketing Model Lots of businesses out there are faced with a similar problem. They lack real results. Sustainability is important. Having short-term success is good but it can also be misleading because it can also give us a false sense of security. We’ve all experienced this in one form or another. Sales start to soften up or they hit the brick wall plateau or a competitor moves in and gives our audience another option. Most often than not the main cause is that we’ve done little if anything to change up or freshen up our approach. Let’s look at this from a different perspective. Do you remember what your favorite song was say 5 summers ago? How about last summer? Or better yet, what was your favorite song 3 months ago? AND Is it still your favorite song? Chances are that this favorite song of yesterday has moved down the list of favorite songs of now right? That is because as time passes we have more or new options…and as people we tend to gravitate toward the new. So if and when you find your business experiencing some form of success introduce new marketing models to leverage and extend your period of success. The main key here is to give your customers what they are looking for in a way that fits their lifestyle. For example, if you sell UGG shoes at the mall. Use Instagram to show off the new styles with video and photos and if you’re using video then make a shorter version to publish on vine. This would apply to basically any product or service. The brands themselves do a great job at telling people what they should buy, through national advertising. Think about that for a moment. National advertising on TV, RADIO and PRINT basically shows us their products and services telling us what to buy. In our own efforts as business owners, it then becomes our job to tell people Where to buy. So if I revisit the UGG shoe sales example and change it out to an Agriculture client, say a Tractor Dealership or a Seed Dealer, can they too use Instagram and Vine? Of course they can. What if your business does not sell a national brand of product or service? Well then that means your marketing path and approach needs to pull double duty. How successful is your own marketing model? I’d like to hear about it, so if you’d like to share please email me at studio@mediaonq.com. Marketing Path #5 - 2-step Selling The 2-step selling method makes it easier and is a much more cost effective way of selling. In a 2-step selling process you actually turn things around. Where normally you would go after a customer, with this method you give customers a reason why they should buy from you. Let’s go over an example of how this type of selling might work. We’ll start with two business that sell computers, smartphones and tablets. They both not only offer similar products but also carry the same brands and are at the same price point. As consumers, we all know and are often attracted by the lowest price right? So if we are one of the storeowners or marketing managers, what can we do to mix it up and drive sales? We could write an e-book titled “101 Ways to Help Your Child Get Into The University Of Their Dreams”. This e-book would offer real advice that would often be accompanied by a laptop, smartphone or tablet that could be found at our store. We are now not only marketing to the end user but also those that influence the buying decisions. If we take that a step further, would could also invite the parents and students to meet us at the store on a Saturday or a group of Saturdays to hear first hand how some of this technology is being used in today’s schools… You could then offer special incentives on your demo products the days of these events. So in this campaign we’ve established a pipeline of people who would want the free e-book, brought them into the store and hopefully also sold off some of our used or demo equipment. This is a much better option than simply competing on that race to the bottom as in going after the lowest price. Marketing Path #6 – Have a Unique Selling Proposition Having a unique selling proposition seems obvious right? But in today’s World Wide Web, which basically opens up opportunity for a Global Market, how do you get this done? This really all comes down to branding and consistent marketing. The messages should always address the single most important question and that is why should a consumer choose to buy from you? Nailing this will significantly impact your sales and profitability. Marketing Path #7 – Free Reports Free reports are a great marketing tool or path to take simply because 99% of your competition will not take this path. A free report is as simple as a 10-50-page booklet or digital download PDF document, which gives answers to frequently, asked questions about your business, products and information. In fact at MediaOnQ we strongly encourage all of our web design and web redesign clients to take advantage of the FREE marketing and SEO that a Frequently Asked Question section of their website can provide. Because you’re the author, you can absolutely point out all of your strengths and unique value proposition as well as link directly to product or service landing pages to get readers additional details. Now of course if you take the time to do this for your website, you can turn around and repurpose the content into a download or PDF. You can market that FREE report and drive traffic to your site and business because let’s face it, people like FREE stuff. Marketing Path #8 – Keep In Touch What do most successful companies have in common? E-mail marketing. They tend to send off two to three emails per month to stay in touch with their customer base and remind them that they are the WHERE to purchase the products or services. If you don’t already have a mailing list for your business, I would strongly encourage you to get one set up right away. Marketing Path #9 – Create A Price Range Creating a price range really makes it easier to nail down your target audience as well as segment your marketing to reach different groups of consumers within the different price ranges. Just about every major brand out there uses this marketing strategy. This is why we see brands like Toyota offer 10+ models for their vehicles. Having the various price ranges allows them to market the less expensive vehicles to students and their more expensive vehicles to more mature audiences. Other companies use their price ranges as a way of creating the illusion of exclusivity. Take credit card companies as an example. Just about all of them offer their standard card, a platinum card and a black card. Ego too can play a role in a consumer’s purchase. The key here for business owners and marketers is to give consumers options based on price points. This can apply to any type of business from a small shop that only sells jeans to a shop that sells tires. Say I needed to replace the tires on my car and my service shop gives me the option to upgrade tires to either prolong the life of the tire or improve my safety, chances are I am going to dig deep into my pocket to go for the upgrade. This now leads me to Marketing Path #10 – Use Cross Selling Cross Selling allows you to increase sales without making any kind of additional investment. This is the quickest way to increase sales because you are making by making purchasing recommendations to your existing customers, people who want to do business with you and who already trust you. More and more companies are trying to mimic Amazon who based on my experience is the original cross-selling pioneer. Most of us have used Amazon and you will quickly notice how once you run a search or select a product, other related products are brought to your attention for consideration. We’ve just covered the Top 10 Marketing Paths to Increase Your Company’s Sales. We talked about: Using the Shot Gun Approach by incorporating as many techniques and strategies that we can afford to drive sales. Using education marketing to teach our clients and prospects about our own products and services. We also discussed tracking our key performance indicators, using the right marketing model, having a 2-step selling process with a unique selling proposition. We went over giving away free reports, keeping in touch with our customers, creating a price range and cross selling. How do these 10 marketing paths or approaches fit in or compare to your own marketing strategy? If you’d like to share please send your feedback to studio@mediaonq.com I’d like to hear from you. I hope that you found this information useful. And if you did, please subscribe on iTunes, Leave us a Review and Share this with a business owner or marketing professional. Join me next week where we’ll continue to discuss digital media branding and marketing techniques to help you compete in today’s web economy. Until next time, I’m Carlos Quintero from MediaOnQ.
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