Successful marketing now is more important than ever before. You need to make sure that your message is clear, concise, and driven to your audience. Here are some of the key elements to be able to have a successful marketing campaign. 

Know your target audience

Your target audience is the most important, and often overlooked aspect of a successful marketing strategy. You have to define your target audience. Who do you want to appeal to? Keep in mind, that you want to define this as far as you can. You are selling to people, not businesses. People are the ones that will benefit from your services, or products.

You will want to be able to narrow down to industry, role, age, gender, interests. For instance, you wouldn’t want to sell a kayak to people that live in a desert climate and nowhere near bodies of water. The more you can define your target audience, the better results you will get. 

Sales Lists

Once you have defined your target audience, you need to define a set of contacts that fit that profile. First, you will want to look at your own network, and the network of your employees, for contact lists. You probably have more people in your network that fit your target demographic than you realize. 

You can also use lists from your email capture on your site, other departments in your company structure, as well as existing customers. Don’t be afraid to utilize your network to expand your customer base. Stay focused on your target audience. That is the first thing to remember when you are first starting off. 

You will want to build a relationship with these contacts. This can be done through promotions, discounts, and email blasts, or text blasts. If you execute your marketing campaign as a one time run, you will be sadly disappointed. Relationships keep people coming back in the door. 

Proposition of value

Getting your message right can be difficult. Think about your audience that you have identified. You should be pretty familiar with them as a person at this point. What problems do they have that you can fix? That is your value proposition. What can you deliver to them to help them in their life, or their business. 

Informing a potential customer clearly, without any jargon, how you can help them adds value to your proposition. Make it real to your prospective customers by providing them with real-world examples of problem-solving. 

Call to action

Don’t leave the conversation without a call to action. A call to action helps you to identify the prospective customers that you need to follow up with. Not everyone on your list will convert to a customer. And that is normal. Don’t be discouraged because the first 2 didn’t convert. Keep going. Keep following up. 

Follow up with a reason for them to want more information. Case studies, whitepapers, videos, webinars, demonstrations, whatever you can use to be educational content are great calls to action. Asking them to call you for more information is not a great call to action. 

Delivery

How are you going to get your message out to your target audience? Since every demographic is different, there are many different answers. Using more than one method to be able to reach out to your target audience is a great way to increase your sales list. This is the heart of multi-touch successful marketing, reaching out to your target audience in multiple ways. 

We all know the old adage different strokes for different folks. This is especially true with your delivery. Different methods of “touch” can include snail mail, email, social media, SEM (Search Engine Marketing), and traditional advertising methods. It really depends on your budget and your target market. 

Follow Up

As a young adult, I was constantly told to follow up on my job applications to see if the position I had applied for was still open and if I was in the candidate pool still. Pretty sage advice right? It is still sage advice even in your marketing strategy. 

You need to continue the discussion with your target market even after they have converted to a customer. Return business helps build loyalty. And that loyalty is what will keep your customers coming back, and keeping you running your business. 

There are a lot of ways that you can have that touch with your customers. Email, mail, texts, and phone calls. Track as much as you can to see which method is giving you the highest ROI. Phone calls and texts are relatively cheap, but your time is worth money. Continue that dialogue with your target customers until they convert, or opt-out. 

Pay attention to your responses that you get from your chosen methods of communication. Ask new customers how they heard about you. Offer different discounts for different forms of communication. If you have a great message, and targeted to the right prospects, and keep the dialogue going with them, you will eventually convert, or they will opt-out. 

Have you created a marketing campaign recently? Let us know how it is working for you. If you need help with your marketing strategy, we would love to hear from you and offer a free consultation for your marketing ventures.