Marketing is all about communication and stories. It aims to show potential customers how their brand can solve the customer’s problems and fulfil their needs. Marketing is a fundamental tool for establishing brand awareness, attracting new customers, and building strong and reliable relationships.
When executed efficiently, marketing communications will not only increase sales but also boost and establish your brand as a strong competitor.
To optimise your marketing communications and reaching your target audience, it is crucial to consider the below factors.
Business Goals and Objectives in Marketing
As the world continues to spin, your company continues to evolve. Are you optimising your marketing collateral to keep up with the ever-changing business world?
It is important to check business goals and objectives regularly to ensure they are still relevant, if they arent, do they need updating? Have you created SMART Goals?
Do your business goals match the goals and objectives of your marketing strategies?
Ensuring your communications are in line with the company’s goals, is the first step in creating a strong foundation for all your marketing strategies.
For example; you work for a research organisation who sells merchandise to increase donations. Their business goal is to create awareness of their research. Would your marketing message be:
- We can’t fight this disease alone; we need your help to find a cure. You can assist in helping us by purchasing merchandise or directly donating.
OR
- Please buy merchandise to fund our research!
The slight difference in the communication message can have a massive impact on the overall effect of the outcome. The critical difference is that one message is telling a story; the other one is not.
In a way, nowadays, marketing is story-telling. People like stories, stories engage them on a deeper level; they help the reader sympathise and understand your goal.
It’s also important to have consistency across all messages and marketing collateral because it pushes your business in the same direction.
Determine your Target Market; who are you talking to?
You think you might have the content right, but will it resonate with your specific target market?
All good marketing communication strategies talk to the specific target audience.
If this is ignored, your campaigns may fail to engage with your potential customers, therefore, create no conversions.
Developing buyer personas, learning about them, and applying this information to your strategies is vital for success. This insight will help ensure all your marketing efforts will be tailored to your specific audience.
In turn, the content will resonate better with the customer and will tell the right story that connects with them.
If you’re looking for further information regarding personas or the inbound marketing methodology, click on the following links.
Tip to help you benefit from inbound marketing
A detailed insight into the Buyer’s Journey and how it will help your business thrive
Marketing content and specific targeting through the right channels
In this day and age, content is king. Repurposing and optimising your existing material can be efficient and have a positive impact. However, if the repurposed content is out-of-date or not relevant, you can instantly lose interaction and engagement.
Make it easy for customers to support your business by staying connected and relevant. In Inbound Methodology, it is invaluable to make your interactions personal by providing an authentic connection in real-time. Let your audience be involved and up to date with what is going on at any given time.
Your marketing content is what drives traffic, lead generation, and conversions. Your message has to resonate with the right audience at the right time. With this in mind, you can further improve your outcome by considering the most suitable design, layout, and messaging for the campaign.
Segmenting your audience based on the stage in their buyer’s journey is a major first step to narrowing down your messaging. The three main stages of the buyers’ journey; Awareness, Consideration and Decision all need a different approach.
For example, someone in the awareness stage is still only becoming aware of their problem and may click on your advertisement for more information.
Whereas someone in the consideration stage has most likely already subscribed on your website. This segment should get information in an EDM, as this allows for a more in-depth and personal approach.
Segmenting your audience will increase the effectiveness of your marketing strategies dramatically.
Analysing Current Data is Vital for Effective Marketing
Data and analytics are essential insights to determine the most effective strategies for your business. Furthermore, they are also very easily accessible.
When properly applied, assessing data analytics can provide significant growth to your business and its revenue (Forbes Insights). From paid ads to organic likes and follows, it is imperative to be tracking your data. Monitoring your performance enables you to understand what is working and creating engagement and what isn’t. From this insight, you should optimise your marketing communication to reflect what efforts are performing and what aren’t.
To access data that reflects website traffic, you will need to set up your Google Analytics account and connect it to your website.
In short, you will need to get your Google Analytics code from your Analytics account and drop it into your website header code. The complexity of this task varies depending on the back end of your site. You may need to ask your developer to help with this.
Social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram have their insights and analytics reports within their platform. These platforms provide detailed reports that are incredibly beneficial to your business and its online profile. To measure the success of your Facebook ads, you can incorporate Facebook Pixel into your website code.
In conclusion, have a look at your business goals and objectives. Determine who you are talking to and define your target audience. Ensure you are giving them relevant content at the right time and through the proper channels.
And finally, don’t forget to track all of this. This way, in a few months, you can look at the analytics and refine your approach.
