Five words to boost your marketing in the New Year

Can you believe the end of the year is right around the corner? To help you gear up for a bigger, better year with your business, here are five words to put into action to help boost your marketing in the year ahead.

1. Strategise 

Now is the time to review. What worked, what didn’t and what can be made better? Will you be aiming for a different market this coming year? What do they need and want? What problems, worries and frustrations do they have? If you aren’t changing target markets, are your messages working or do you need to change your approach?

2. Personalise

We are doing business in an increasingly global, faceless environment, don’t underestimate the need to personalise your marketing. People want and need to feel as though you are talking just to them, but to do this you need to be more aware of your audience and more targeted in your marketing approach. 

It might be a case of doing three specific marketing or advertising campaigns to key target markets as opposed to one general one. While it can sound like more effort, you will get far better results being specific.  

3. Theme

Make your marketing easier in the New Year by theming your content and campaigns. Grab a large wall planner and write down all key dates, events and tradeshows within your business and industry. Then write in all related causes, awareness days, weeks or months, and public holidays. 

If you are planning public relations and advertising campaigns in the New Year, request the media kits of the publications you want to target and write down the editorial themes they will be covering.
 
Very soon you will start to see possible themes emerge within your calendar. Then once you’ve decided you can theme your social media, marketing material and promotions around these making it easier to find content and identify the best marketing activities.

4. Care

There is no marketing strategy more powerful than genuinely caring for your customers. Go the extra mile, help where you can and take the time to answer questions. Build relationships with your customers don’t just bank transactions.

5. Authenticity

Customers don’t just want to purchase a product or service from a business anymore they want a genuine, transparent experience from a business that knows who they are and what they stand for. 

For this reason, you need to be authentic and transparent in your marketing and in the way you do business. If you make a claim, back it up. If you make a mistake, own it and fix it. Be real, at the end of the day most people are buying the people behind the business, not a product or service.

How will you be shaking up your marketing in the New Year?

Amanda


The biggest point of difference you are underselling

If you are like most business owners your biggest point of difference comes not from what you do or even how you do it, it comes from what you know.

The knowledge you have around your industry, products and services, your customers needs, problems and challenges, the lessons you’ve learnt and the formulas, templates, processes and systems you’ve created based on your knowledge and experience is all extremely valuable. 

What’s more it could be what influences a potential customer in doing business with you over your competitors. Yet most of us undersell it. 

So if by chance you are underselling your knowledge, here are four reasons why you should stop doubting and start sharing.

1. Your industry knowledge isn’t “common sense”

When something comes easy to you, it can be easy to think that it comes easy to everyone else too – but it doesn’t. The truth is you have distinct skills and knowledge that most people will never have. Even the most researched customers won’t come close to what you know.

2. You may share the same expertise, but not the same experience

While you may feel that the industry knowledge you have isn’t unique, that it is shared by anyone working in your industry, your experience is. The experience you have gained from working in your industry day in and day out can’t be replicated.

No one has been exactly where you are today. They haven’t had the same life experiences, the same customers, learned the same business lessons, or had the same setbacks and wins. You are far more knowledgeable than you realise.

3. Your explanation and application could be just what someone needs

Each of us respond better to particular communication and learning styles and build rapport quicker with specific personalities. 

While you may not be the most knowledgeable person in your industry – or even close at this stage, how you explain, implement or package your knowledge could be what spurs a customer or potential customer to finally take action on something they have “heard a hundred times” before.

4. Every great expert started as an amateur

Remember that every great expert and every successful entrepreneur and business leader started out as an amateur. The only difference is they kept learning, growing and sharing what they knew with their staff, customers and the world.

Are you underselling yourself?

Amanda


Five ways to make your marketing more strategic

Too often businesses take an unplanned approach to their marketing, either following the crowd or acting on a hunch they decide to “try it and see”. But it’s the fastest way to blow your marketing budget. 

True marketing magic happens when the right product or service, with the right message meets the right people, at the right time, on the right marketing platform. Though, to do that you need a strategy, and you need to test and measure your results. 

So stop doing what you think you should be doing, what the company down the road is doing or what you heard would be good to try and start strategising the best way to create the marketing magic for your business. Here are five tips to get you started. 

1. Qualify your marketing efforts

In order to make the most of your marketing campaign and investment you need to:

  • Check there is a need for your products or services
  • Craft messages that are relevant and emotionally engaging with the audience that have the need
  • Ensure the platform or strategy you use will reach a large amount of the audience you are targeting 

When you start to evaluate your marketing efforts, strategies and opportunities even on this simple criteria, by asking is it relevant and targeted to your audience and reaching a high percentage of those you are targeting, you can quickly protect your budget from marketing strategies that “everyone is doing” and start to see what to say yes to and try, and what to say no to or stop. 

2. Know the purpose 

Whatever marketing or advertising you do, there needs to be a clear purpose for it. You need to know what you want someone to do after reading or hearing the specific message you have created, as this will impact the call to action you use. 

Is it to call you? Go to your website? Sign up to the mailing list? Buy immediately? Once you know what you need them to do, you can then make sure your copy, call to action and incentive all work together to make it happen.

3. Ensure there are real benefits or an opportunity to get a return

It sounds obvious, but many marketing campaigns have been done under the guise of “increasing brand awareness” (sponsorship can be an ideal example of this) which is fine if you have brand awareness to start with, have a large marketing budget to play with or if it’s a highly relevant and targeted opportunity, but it’s impact is very hard to measure. 

Whatever you look to invest your marketing dollars in, there needs to be real benefits and return. So, to use the sponsorship example, find a way to proactively reach your audience in a measurable way like sponsoring a prize and getting the business cards of those who enter. 

4. Test your message on a smaller campaign 

Before you embark on a larger marketing or advertising campaign test your headline and message on a smaller one. 

It could be through a focus group, survey, Facebook advertising campaign, a Google Adwords advertisement or a smaller mail out to test and measure the results. Better to find out a message doesn’t work on a small scale with a small investment rather than a large one. 

5. Don’t confuse persistence with foolishness

While you need to allocate a set amount of time to tell if a product, message, platform or strategy is working, you don’t want to keep wasting time, money and effort on something that isn’t. 

To prevent this from happening, set a cap or measurement on your efforts. It could be a time limit, or a set amount of mail outs you do to in order to test the product or service, message or platform to see if it is getting a response. 

As entrepreneurs we need to be mindful that sometimes business ideas, products or services and marketing campaigns don’t work the way we think, want or hoped they would. 

When this is the case, it is important for your business and your bottom line to stop instead of persisting, put it down to education and move on to the next project, idea or strategy.

How do you ensure your marketing is strategic?

Amanda 


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