According to marketing benchmark surveys, marketing budgets were up 24% in 2021. As budgets climb, however, results are wildly inconsistent – mostly because what worked pre-pandemic will not work post-pandemic.
What many are discovering is that when it comes to marketing, spending without strategy is a lot like trying to drive to a new destination without your GPS navigator. You want a clear path to success and a marketing strategy for business growth will help you achieve this.
Every business should start the planning process by identifying goals, target clients and building a comprehensive marketing plan to achieve them. You should stick to the same formula when marketing your business, while following each target customers journey. This is essential to determine effectiveness.
Identifying Your Goals
Begin by pinpointing goals. These goals should be concrete and defined in measurable metrics like new contacts, clients and assets, or higher prospect conversion rates.
It’s best to begin with a Revenue Strategy or Sales Cookbook. What is the average revenue per client per year? Do you have multiple pricing strategies – that need to be segmented for better outcomes?
For example, if half of your clients bring in revenue of $500 per year; while the other 50% are at $5,000 per year - You’ll want to address the reality of your sources of revenue and plan accordingly. Then, work through the sales cookbook to define how many clients you need (per each pricing model). This will tell you how many prospects and contacts you need to reach on a weekly/ monthly basis to make your projected sales goals.
Projections should be close to accurate as possible. For example, if you want 100 clients, but have traditionally only had 30 – you will need to make a significant investment to your marketing efforts to reach the other 70 clients you’ve never had before.
Next, it’s time to create a strategy to achieve these goals. Although marketing strategies don’t have to be complicated, they should include at least the following three components:
1. Defining the target audience
2. Mapping the prospect and client journey
3. Optimizing digital tactics to engage, nurture and convert prospects into clients
Define The Audience
Almost all businesses focus on a target client type, usually defined by use or need of product or service, level of affluence (net worth) or annual revenue (B2B), and region. Net worth/ annual revenue is a good, practical place to start defining target clientele, but it’s a poor place to stop. Using additional metrics like age, gender, education, industry, title, and needs help to narrow the client target further and will pay dividends in terms of enhanced marketing ROI.
Adopting a more granular segmentation strategy makes every aspect of marketing more effective and less wasteful. Take, for example, a website and social media presence—two critical aspects of the digital persona. Those who target a relatively narrowly defined universe of based on their specific target audience will have an advantage over rivals.
An example could be a legal collections law firm that focuses on Banks, Credit Unions and Commercial Real Estate Property Managers and Landlords can create effective content and attract the ideal audience that will become a better lead and client for the law office. Or a financial advisor who chooses to target small business owners nearing retirement would make far better engagement opportunities than generic content that wouldn’t attract the specific business owner the advisor would prefer.
They can then more effectively utilize search engine optimization to become more visible online to in-bound prospect searches, and thus attract more of the right prospects. Because the content on the website and social media posts will be consistently targeted to the needs of this narrow audience, they stand a much better chance of engaging those prospects than competitors who take a more generic approach.
Map The Client Journey
Mapping the client journey means listing the steps prospects take from the starting point of zero-awareness (never heard of you or your business) to happy clients.
Typical customer value journey includes:
However, there are a few stages that are often not included in a marketing plan that MUST be added for effective business growth:
Our research suggests that the average timespan for this first stage of the conversion journey is between three and four months. Unfortunately, it is rarely a straight path.
As you consider this process, recognize that control has shifted from sellers to buyers—especially in the early stages.
Today, individuals have access to huge amounts of information to not only identify products or service providers, but to compare quality and results based on online ratings and reviews. For that reason, it’s imperative that businesses understand how individuals find, evaluate and hire/buy, and develop a deliberate process to move prospects along the continuum from awareness to consideration and conversion; but recognize how to shift the client along the most important phase of the journey which is becoming an advocate of your work.
Finally, the process must identify the right tactics to move individuals from one phase to the next on the client journey. In almost every case, businesses will have to build a digital presence that starts the process by getting their name in front of individuals thinking about working with your products or services.
Tactics include but are not limited to: social media, content (blogs, articles), email marketing, digital marketing, website, SEO, advertising, video, graphics, infographics, newsletters, print collateral, PR, and more. And they all must work together – in unison – to be effective while reaching your ideal target audience.
Just a few years ago, businesses could create this awareness by posting high-quality organic content on popular social media platforms like Facebook. Today, Facebook minimizes the visibility of organic content to drive demand for paid advertising.
As you work through your marketing strategy, identify the best social media accounts for your business. Although that’s a challenging shift, do not underestimate the power of social media to reach your ideal target customer. If they’re on LinkedIn and Facebook, focus on those 2 social media accounts – and be very active.
Budget for advertising - on Linked In, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google advertising, etc. Facebook and Linked In can deliver a specific paid posts to individuals based on your criteria to target your ideal consumer. For example, financial firms can target not just to individuals looking at information on financial advisors, but to people in that group who are parents in their 40s in the greater Boston area in a specific income bracket with kids approaching college age. That type of precision is a powerful weapon for breaking through the clutter and noise to reach prospects.
Despite that potential, ad dollars can be wasted if you don’t have the right techniques and tools to sustain the relationship. This process of “nurturing” prospects must be automated to at least some extent. The easiest way to do this is through email campaigns that deliver customized content to prospects in a scalable and efficient manner.
Fortunately, there are now many high quality and affordable third-party solutions businesses can use for this purpose. Not only do these solutions help you communicate to clients and prospects, they also allow you to see which prospects open emails, who clicks on attachments, and how long they spend watching or reading. Using algorithms, these applications can pinpoint the best channels, format and even time of day to reach prospects. Does the prospect use LinkedIn more than Facebook? Does the client prefer video to text? Does the prospect prefer certain articles or information over another?
In this day of shortened attention spans, even the best prospect that is ready to buy what your selling - doesn’t necessarily want to read a hard-copy Economist-style treatment of some complex issue. To build relationships, you must be able to deliver the right type of content through the right channel at the right time. The only way to achieve that goal is by starting with a clear marketing strategy that defines the audience, maps the journey and secures the tools needed to move from prospect to converted clients. By approaching marketing with that type of strategic mindset, your business will get the most out of your marketing budget and open the door to new levels of growth.
Next Steps: Create a New Marketing Strategy
Preparing a New Post-Pandemic Marketing Strategy needs to be done. Take the time to assess your goals, identify your target audience, and create an effective customer value journey. This will help you to effectively communicate with your ideal customer.
Use the services of a business consultant, marketing strategist and/or marketing agency to help leverage the overwhelming strategies and tactics available for your business. This way you can work together with a professional to come up with the best strategy for your business and stay in alignment with your sales and marketing goals.
The return on investment is worth it when you can convert your audience into clients more effectively and efficiently than when done by yourself.
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Emilia Andrews is an executive leader, Fractional CMO and marketing consultant who delivers marketing strategies and services that accelerates business growth.
