In today’s small business environment, your competitors may be more focused on the shiny objects in their marketing, things like SEO, responsive web design, pay-per-click advertising, and of course whatever the latest fad in social media happens to be in any particular week, rather than creating a strong marketing strategy to ensure the effectiveness of these things.
Of course all of these things are important and have a role to play in successfully marketing your business, but while all of these constantly changing and evolving areas have been dominating the conversation, one time-tested marketing approach has continued to quietly provide good results for those relatively few small business owners who have truly mastered it:
A strong marketing strategy!
Few things are more confusing or mystifying to business owners more than the idea of marketing strategy.
But, rather than debate the proper way to define what marketing strategy is, I would like to share how to develop it, install it and give it a voice. No matter how perfectly you state your marketing strategy, if it doesn’t live firmly in the tactics you employ to develop and keep customers it’s all for nothing.
This is how you state you’re different from your competitors. It’s your unique positioning in the market and it must be developed after you’ve defined your ideal customer. Scheduling some time to ask your best customers why they do business with you, may offer some insight into how you are different in ways that will attract other potential customers.
Positioning or your USP involves planting “seeds of perception” in the minds of prospects and customers, which by-the-way are already crowded.
Some small business examples are:
I’ve written about this idea frequently and suggest you download my free eBook on the topics of ideal customer and on positioning strategy to get very specific how to instructions on this element.
Strategy-first thinking forces you to push your core marketing strategy above into every marketing activity. I’ve developed a very powerful approach for building this kind of customer journey.
Our approach to the customer journey is a concept that asks you to create processes, offerings, and campaigns aimed at strategically moving prospects and customers through five stages – Awareness, Education, Sample, Purchase and Refer. By viewing each of these stages as a place to reinforce your USP as well as deliver key educational information, you create the kind of journey that leads to your profitable customers .
Awareness – This is the phase where sales, social media, content, networking, public relations will do well and even search, advertising and referrals start here.
Education – This is the stage where once you attracted prospects to your website or location you have give them reasons to come back, reasons to relate and even reasons to like your team and also provide reviews, success stories and client testimonials.
Sample – Now that prospects are wondering how your solution might work for them it’s time to demonstrate to them with reports, ebooks, webinars and very detailed how to information. You might also have an assessment, audit, seminar, evaluation, trial version or low cost offer here.
Need some ideas? 7 Ways Prospects Can Sample Your Service or Product
Purchase – For this stage the focus is still on educating but from the standpoint of a new customer
Refer – The customer journey is ultimately about referrals
Once you develop your USP and outline your Customer Journey it’s time to give your strategy voice. This is done by mapping how you will communicate your USP through educational content that creates awareness, educates, builds trust, engages and converts.
Over the years I’ve identified four types of content that every business must create. Organizations that get this and create and organize content to connect at any point along the journey will win.
Suspect Content – Everyone in your target market
When your entire target market is not aware of your company, product, service or the benefit it offers, then the first objective of content is to simply build trust.
Trust can be built through:
At the heart of every transaction is TRUST and in general, trust is what’s in short supply. If more people trust you, everything else will fall into place.
There’s a really big gap between someone being aware of you (which is really hard) and someone trusting you, enough to invest in you or buy from you.
Prospect Content – Anyone who has taken action to solve a problem that you can assist them with
There’s an huge difference between awareness and action. Putting something in the world for awareness is useless if it doesn’t lead to taking action.
As the market begins to trust you and competition increasing in that market. Prospects will compare you on price unless you give them a differentiation….your unique process, your solution, your message and your approach.
Examples of a unique process or approach:
At this stage you need to educate about that differentiation:
People want to be educated not sold. They will sell themselves if you just commit to educating.
Customer Content – A person or organization that has bought products or services from you
You’ve done all this work attracting and educating now show your customers how to get the most out of what they just bought. This builds loyalty and community.
This is were most organizations stop their content marketing but you should continue it if you want keep customers and create repeat sales.
Advocate Content – A person or organization that tells others and basically sells for you
The last stage of content that creates and keeps a customer is one that’s often overlooked. Ultimately, great content has the ability to help your raving fans spread the word, increase awareness, generate leads and convert prospects .
In other words, in many cases how you sell is more important than what you sell.
You won’t create every tactical initiative involved in executing these five steps, but the planning process involved in fully developing your organization’s marketing strategy must consider these elements as three parts of the strategy puzzle.
Indispensable Marketing takes a process approach to developing and installing your small business marketing.