Digital Marketing Basics

How to develop a marketing strategy?




Developing a marketing strategy can feel overwhelming. But when you break it down, I trust that you'll come to recognize just how really straightforward it is. 

Marketing strategy describes how you intend to reach your target audience. And contrary to what many believe, marketing strategies aren't multi-page intensive documents that have a solution for everything. 

Marketing is always in motion. You'll constantly be moving from one idea to the next and iterating along the way, so it's better to have a plan that's flexible. 

Let me give you a high level overview. A great strategy starts with a well-defined and established foundation. 

You start by understanding what it is you're selling?

What makes it unique? 

What's your value proposition?

From there, it's a matter of identifying who you're selling to, and this is known as your target market. You'll need to gain an understanding of who they are, what motivates them, and how your product or service solves their. 

And you might think you already have this covered, but take a minute to think again, really think, "Who is your target market?"

If you misidentify your target, this whole process can come crashing down. You can't market to everyone. You have to figure out how what you sell fits with the market that you're going after. And this means tweaking your value proposition, or your audience, until you've dialed in the right fit. 

And then we'll be ready to keep refining after the marketing cycle is up and running. Now, there's also the matter of looking at your competition, the size of the market you have access to, and how you stack up in the mix. This strategic approach will then have you layering in marketing channel selections alongside the customer journey so you can determine how to best persuade your prospects to buy. 

well; Marketing isn't just about the messaging, it's about the entire journey. It's about how a consumer feels while engaging with your brand, how convincing your solution to their problem is, how pleasant you make the experience, and so on. 

You want a marketing strategy that encompasses every touchpoint. Marketing is by no means quick or easy, and the results aren't going to be instantaneous, but if you apply yourself and work through evolving your strategy and revisiting it often, it'll start to click. Things will fall into place and you'll be moving your marketing efforts forward, piece by piece, until you really pick up momentum.

 

How to define your value proposition

At the center of your marketing is your value proposition. It's a short, distinct statement that outlines exactly why a customer should buy your product or service. It should be something that can live as a headline with a supporting sentence, or a few bullet points. 

It should be front and center in your messaging and be the foundation by which you build all of your marketing around. Now a value proposition is not a jargon filled statement, nor is it your slogan. It must be simple, clear, and easy to understand in five seconds. The less known that your product is, well the better that your value proposition is going to need to be. 

When Uber launched, it's stuck to this value proposition, "The smartest way to get around, one tap and a car comes directly to you, your driver knows exactly where to go, and payment is completely cashless." Now it's tempting to create a value proposition that lists the key differentiators of your product, but this actually isn't the right approach. 

What you want to do is sell the result, or the experience of using the product, not just what features get you to that result. You're telling a story and focusing on the outcomes, and in a competitive market, you're attacking pain points of the existing solutions. 

With Uber, well they're calling out everything people hated about traditional taxis, but their main headline isn't Uber the on-demand taxi service. It's telling you that your current way of getting around is dumb. And the outcome of Uber is that you've picked the smart way. Let's say I'm launching a new smartwatch company. 

Sure, I could sell my watch on features, such as the durability of the glass, or the price, or even the battery life, and that would be important for a consumer to know. But I could instead lead with the idea of never missing moments, an always connected companion with just-in-time alerts, that keep you in touch with your family, your work and your life goals. 

I can position this watch in a manner that lets me market beyond features. I can now develop campaigns for those that are fitness inclined, campaigns for the working professional, or even for the stay-at-home parent. I can now tell stories that connect to the features that matter for that target market. Selling the results and the experience lets you think bigger. 

And it gives your buyer room to imagine the bigger value of that purchase. As you sit down to develop your value proposition, determine not how your product will be better than others in the market, but how your outcome is better. Write this value proposition down and then reflect on it every time that you go to produce any new marketing collateral.

 

How to identify your target market


It's no mystery that the success of a business hinges on having customers and in order to have customers, well, you need to find them, in order to find them, you have to message to them and to message to them, well, you have to know them. 

So if you're marketing without really knowing your customer, stop, the process of finding and knowing your customer is accomplished through customer segmentation. What you're doing is taking your broad target market and breaking it down into smaller groups of people that have a lot in common. 

Let's say I'm an auto mechanic, now my broad target market is probably anyone that owns a car and is within 15 miles of my shop. But this actually isn't a specific enough segment for me to target to. If we put that audience all in the same room, how similar would they really be? 

When you have focused customer segments, you are creating audiences that have a lot more in common with one another. So that it's a lot easier to speak to them. Perhaps I specialize in electric vehicles, so I'd likely want a customer segment that contains electric vehicle owners. And I may also segment customers by the type of vehicle they drive or the type of problem, I specialize in solving say, it's transmission issues. 

Now you can refine your customer segments using a variety of attributes. And these attributes can combine demographics, things like age, education, work type, and income. Geographics, where people are located, psychographics, which includes personality traits, likes, dislikes and even purchase behaviors, and technographics, thinking about the types of devices that they're using. 

You can also use relevant behavioral attributes to describe your target customer. So you might identify consumers who say buy a cup of coffee every day or those who watch at least three YouTube videos per week. 

Now there's also needs based. This is an additional approach, which essentially solves for consumers pain point. Take the Nest thermostat, for example, for some it's valuable as a way to reduce their energy usage, for others, it's useful to turn on the heater at a vacation property. 

And for others, it might be a way to monitor the temperature in a child's room, same product, but with consumers that will receive different messaging based on their need. And you see this play out often with landing pages on a marketing website, a different page for a different segment. This way you can tailor the journey to the shared attributes within one audience. 

So as you develop your marketing strategy, take your broad target audience and break it down into at least three segments. You can add more segments as you advance in your strategy but if you really want to succeed, you must identify some specific consumer segments.

 

How to create your customer persona



Marketing is all about getting the right message in front of the right people. 

And your customer segments are who you'd like to get your message to, but to figure out how to message, you need to truly understand your customer segments. 

And that's where personas come in. A target persona is a fictitious person that you describe that'll represent your target group really well. So instead of figuring out how to message to electric vehicle owners, you're building a campaign for new graduate and new car owner, Jenny. Every customer segment that you create needs to have a persona attached to it. And a persona will fit on a single page and provide a snapshot of the customer that's really quick to digest. 

Let's build one together. You'll start with these four questions about your ideal customers. 

Who are they? 

What needs do they have? 

What barriers do they need to overcome? 

And what motivates them? 

Imagine for a minute that you're marketing for a company that sells eco-friendly organic diapers. Here's how you might answer these questions. One of my ideal customers might be a woman between 28 and 35 years old who lives in an urban area, works full-time, and has an interest in healthy living, yoga, and connecting with other moms. Her needs are to be environmentally responsible, increase her free time, and to continue to advance in her career. She also wants to get outdoors more. 

Now she faces some obstacles, a lack of time, which often makes it harder to find eco-friendly products, a general distrust of big-box retailers to source responsibly, and anxiety around what products are safe for her child. She's motivated by advice from moms in her peer group, validation from certification organizations, easy and quick shopping experiences, and companies that align with her values. 

Now once you complete this exercise, you want to make this fictitious person feel real. So add a picture and a name. Creating a target persona makes it easier to imagine the person that you're marketing to. You'll find creating marketing campaigns and crafting messaging is much more enjoyable and easier when you have a persona. It's a powerful exercise that you can do even with limited time and resources.

 

How to establish goals for digital marketing


You likely have a vision of what you need your marketing to accomplish. It might be to increase traffic to your website, drive more phone calls or get more customers to come through your doors. Now, these might sound like great marketing goals but these are all actually examples of marketing objectives. 

They're actually quite useless as is, to be effective they need to be measurable. Now a common approach is to create goals using the SMART acronym. This means that for a goal to be effective it must be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound. 

Now the approach that I use to map out goals, which is also in use at companies like Google and LinkedIn is to use a format called objectives and key results.

 And you'll hear these referred to as OKRs.



 It looks like this, first, you set the objective and objectives answer the question, where do we want to go? 

And then you'll define two or three measurable key results.

 And those answer the question, how do we know that we've got there?

 This is important because otherwise you can't decide if you've achieved your objective. 

Okay, let's say that we want to increase online sales for a coffee shop. Here's how we'd set SMART goals inside the OKR framework. 

First I set my objective,  it's specific,  increase online sales for coffee, beans and coffee mugs. 

Next, we set our key results, these are measurable relevant to the goal and attainable within our timeframe. 

For this example, let's say sell 100 packages of coffee beans, sell 250 coffee mugs. 

Now all goals should be time bound and traditionally OKRs are time bound by a quarter. So we might say that this objective is due by end of Q1 next year, but you can set goals by the week, month and so on. As you can see, the key results are how I'm qualifying that we increase sales.

 I've decided that if I achieved each of those key results, well, then we hit our goal. There are many ways though to set goals. What matters is that you commit to setting goals and measure your progress. You can't simply point yourself in a direction to march forward. 

You      need      a     plan.

 

How to develop your digital marketing KPIs

                                ( Key Performing Indicators )

As you move your marketing forward, you may have broad established objectives and key results for your quarterly performance, but you'll still need to establish granular success metrics for each marketing objective. 

A nimble and common approach for this is through the creation of key performance indicators, or KPIs. KPIs lets you measure the performance of a particular activity, such as an outbound email campaign or a fall sales event. 

Now, you may have many activities contributing to a large objective, but each of these activities will require its own measure of success. By monitoring your KPIs, you'll see what's working and what's not. 

Say, for example, I'm on a quest to sell 250 coffee mugs for my café this quarter. Now, I'm running online ads as one activity and email campaigns as another. For my online ads, I might be trying to get the dollar amount I'm spending per sale within an acceptable level. So, I might want a KPI that says achieve an $8 CPA, or cost per acquisition. 

For my email campaigns, well, I might want a KPI targeting an open rate goal or a goal for how many clicks that campaign generates. In marketing, we often have to fine tune each activity that nudges our customer along the journey. 

We can't get folks to click on a link if they aren't opening the email. So you'll often set your KPIs to map to the biggest pain point that you're trying to solve at any given moment on your quest to achieve the target objective. KPIs will always be unique to you and your campaigns, but I'd like to give you a few common starting places for setting KPIs. With online sales, you're likely going to be looking at your conversion rate and the cost per acquisition or action. 

For broader marketing objectives, set a KPI for total revenue and even the ratio of new to returning visitors. If you're using a landing page, then set a bounce rate KPI. That's to say how many folks dart from that page without taking any action. This way you can identify if your inbound traffic isn't targeted enough or if the content isn't relevant enough. 

As you consider your KPIs, do yourself a favor and avoid worrying about things that aren't impacting your bottom line. Page views, for example might be impressive, but only if they're actually driving revenue. Now, I track business and marketing objectives and KPIs in a shareable document. 

And this could be a Google spreadsheet, a confluence page, or even a pinned note on Slack. Take your time and pick the metrics that are relevant to you. And then organize them in a way that makes sense for your business.

 

How to draft a one page marketing plan



As your marketing strategy shapes up, you'll need a place to park all the information you're capturing. It needs to be agile, easy to update, and very simple to distribute. Now, I use a very simple, one-page template to help with this exercise. This is meant to put your problems front and center, so you can generate effective ideas. It'll live alongside your buyer journey map and your persona documents. 

Here's what it looks like. 



You have a series of boxes that you'll fill out, and it's divided up so that the left side of the page is all about your product or service, and the right side is all about the market. 

Let's walk through these fields together. 

In the problem box, list one to three high priority problems that your customers have, and below them, list any existing solutions that try to solve those problems.

 In the customer segments box, list the personas that you're targeting. From here, the solutions box is where you'll list one to three ways that your product or service solves the consumer's problems. 

Now, from here, you'll fill out your unique value proposition, and this is right in the middle, as it lives both between your product or service and your market. 

Next, list all of your channels. This is your path to the customer, and it's how you'll communicate the existence of what you're selling, and pick the channels that your customer segments are spending the most time with. 

Now, moving on, you'll need to outline your revenue streams. 

How are you going to make money? 

What's the lifetime value of your customer? 

What's the gross margin on whatever it is you're selling? 

And now, just to the left is your cost structure, and this is where you'll list the operational costs for making the business get all the way to market. 

How much will it cost to acquire your customer? 

How much does it cost to run the business? 

How much are you going to be spending on marketing? 

Next up, key metrics. Every business must have key metrics that are used to monitor performance. List what activities you'll be measuring that are going to demonstrate that you're successful in your marketing efforts. 

And finally, the unfair advantage. What do you do so insanely well that nobody can copy you, or that puts you way ahead of the competition? I want you to take 20 minutes and put together a one-page marketing plan. Now, there's a ton of resources online with editable templates if you need one. Just run a Google search for lean canvas templates, but I want you to build one at least once. It is a fantastic exercise that can help bring some clarity to the chaos that is marketing. Continue......

"Hey Guys, first of all, thank you so much for reading till this line, i will really appreciate if you could like and subscribe to my blog for upcoming Episodes on Digital marketing"

until Next Time. 

Chapter 3 Link here 

Chao