Are you looking for a way to accelerate your marketing strategy and secure more sales? If you’re like most of us, the answer is yes!
Business leaders and marketing teams around the world compete to reach their target audiences and promote their products. The thing is, there are many strategies to choose from, so it is often difficult to find specific options that will work well for your brand.
Today we want to remove some of the confusion and show you several universal ways you can improve your marketing regardless of your industry and budget. These tips can help you increase sales and engagement while building a relationship with your customers if done correctly.
Let’s dive in.
Use data to create targeted customer personas
If you want to speed up your marketing strategy, the first thing to do is to create several targeted customer personas. Customer personas are avatar sheets of companies that define their target group. Like this:
So, an ecommerce store selling sporting goods would likely have multiple people based on the products on offer. A potential customer interested in soccer probably doesn’t want to see content and offers related to basketball and vice versa.
The goal of customer persona sheets is to learn more about your audience’s goals and vulnerabilities. Knowing your website visitors can help you create blog posts, sales pages, and promotions that suit their needs.
There are several ways you can collect data for your Persona Sheets. Here are some of our favorite strategies:
- Check Your Google Analytics Account – Check Demographics, Device Settings, and Popular Pages.
- Conduct surveys – Gather information from as many subscribers as possible and identify patterns.
- Social Media Research – Listen to what your audience wants and needs from your brand. Also, explore discussions with third-party vendors to discover vulnerabilities that you didn’t know existed.
Build a relationship with personalization
Now that you know what visitors want from your brand, you can build a relationship through personalized marketing. Believe it or not, 4 in 5 people say they want more personalized offers from their favorite companies. This feeling clearly conveys that harnessing individual and group interests in your marketing can produce significant results.
There are a few ways to use personalization across your various marketing platforms. For example, a pop-up campaign on your blog targeting users by name and interest could result in a dramatic increase in conversions. This is what it looks like:
The exciting thing about it is what we just described is the tip of the iceberg. We encourage new subscribers to answer optional questions when they sign up for your email list or when purchasing a product. You could ask about their pain points, goals, and expectations.
Use this information to segment your leads and create unique email campaigns for each customer group. Let’s go back to the eCommerce sporting goods storefront that we referred to earlier. This company’s marketing team may ask users what sports they like. When someone says they’re interested in basketball, you know they’ll likely be interested in blog posts and offers that focus on basketball.
The great thing about personalized offers is that they can be as comprehensive or specific as you want them to be. It is possible to reach a significant portion of your audience based on their interests. On the other hand, you can also create special email campaigns for your subscribers on their birthday that include a special discount or a free gift.
We recommend experimenting with different types of personalized content until you find a format that engages leads and paying customers alike.
Keep prospects active on social media
Next, let’s talk about different ways you can improve your social media marketing strategy. If you aren’t already using platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to connect with your audience, you are missing out on an important marketing opportunity. Research shows that users spend an average of 2 hours and 29 minutes a day on social media.
Combine that statistic with the fact that 3.96 billion people use social media, and its appeal is easy to see. There are a whopping 2.45 billion active users on Facebook alone, potentially waiting to hear from your brand.
When it comes to social media marketing, you have many inexpensive and powerful options. One of the best ways to grow your brand dramatically is by running an online contest. Everyone enjoys the opportunity to win a prize, especially if they really want or need it.
Add competition rules that encourage visitors to take actions that aid your marketing efforts. For example, if you want to generate more leads, you can give visitors an extra chance to participate by subscribing to your company’s email list.
We also recommend spending plenty of time with prospects on your social media posts and in industry-specific groups. These people are more likely to see value in your product or service, which can help you achieve your sales goals.
Publish lots of high quality content
Posting quality content on your company blog is another great way to boost your marketing efforts. Almost 80% of internet users read blog posts, so it’s easy to see why this strategy is effective.
Remember when you last visited a company website. You’ve probably checked out their blog to learn more about the products and the brand. Would you feel comfortable shopping at a company without a blog? If you’re like most of us, the answer is no.
Similar to our previous tips, your customer personalities play a crucial role in the type of content you post on your website. You want to publish posts that resonate with your audience and convince them that your product or service is worth their time.
You can get more people to interact with your business by posting videos on your blog. Research shows that 47% of consumers want more video content. This is in part due to the increase in mobile marketing and users who prefer to watch videos to learn more about brands.
If you regularly share high quality content on your blog, you will see a significant increase in traffic. In fact, after posting 51 blog posts, companies report 77% more traffic compared to companies with 0-4 published posts.
Back to you
As you can see, there are many ways to speed up your marketing strategy and grow your brand. The tips offered here today can help you take your business to the next level. We recommend experimenting with the advice outlined today and refining your strategy over time. In a short time, you will likely see more website traffic resulting in more sales and engagement.