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CTH

Scale up your online business

Digital Marketing Strategy

Find out how you can adopt and use effective web strategy tactics.

The list below (aka archives) of blog posts is displayed by date (descending order) and organised by topics. If you prefer, you can browse the articles organised by topics. Enjoy.

Why Customer Journey Mapping?

A customer journey map is the multi-directional tool that helps you understand the individuals’ experience when visiting your pages and see what they’re trying to achieve.

In this post you’ll discover how online users (fictitious characters) will interact with your online business. Which will help you, and/or your team identify unseen opportunities to enhance their experience.

There’s several mapping examples – we will show you how well the user (UX) experience, customer service is working together within your content structure (sales funnel). This can emphasise and/or differentiate the overall business’s online experience.

Let’s get started…

Mapping your user’s journey correctly can help you

This is ultra important as you get to see where you stand. You can add the steps to you CRM and analytics to show you:

  • when a user moves from one device to another (touch-points)
  • show you where the user stopped or left and why
  • show the channel’s interactivity/ usability

It will also support and encourage individuals across the organization to work their magic. Pushing them to see and walk in the user’s shoes.

Client Journey Mapping
Example of How to do a Customer Mapping – Journey map in Saas industry

Example: how they think and feel and what their questions and needs are.

A good customer mapping will depend on the following:

  • The content creators, product designers, SEO, internal stakeholders and who ever is involved in creating content for end-users.
  • Identifying and describing all relationships on the map by answering the questions: What’s the main goal/focus? What do we offer them? How do we present it? Who does what? This map must show you the nearest picture of what you are dealing with.
  • Have a Persona ready – you’ll need a rich customer profile or persona. Describing his/her personal and business situation, likes and dislikes, needs in the present and the future (ambitions).
  • Discussing and elaborating how these characters influence the quality of your content work and how a customer benefits (needs) from it.

Why do you need a customer journey mapping?

Drawing a customer journey is an ideal way to view and describe the path an individual takes before becoming a customer of the business. It all starts with a search, a channel and there is a user decision involved to purchase a product or service and become a loyal customer.

The customer mapping may take several forms and tends to focus on the experiential side of the user experience.

Which leads us to ask: What do they wish to achieve soon as they land on-page, what are they looking to solve and what are their expectations?

Why we need to create a customer journey?

One of the obvious reasons, is the more you find out about the individual’s experience the better. There is a decision path somewhere down the middle of each person’s journey.

So learning more about their positive and/or negative experiences will save time, money and will give you a better perspective to create epic content.

Workout the touchpoints: note down every action they take, why, when and (where), itemise channels along with the touchpoints they will face next. This will (literally) let you walk in the customer’s shoes (gives better perception).

Discover the moments of truth: you can or should be able to easily identify the moments the customer encounters blocks or barriers throughout the content you offer. This is super valuable, when you start by identifying those moments to write or present the obvious content.

How to map a customer journey?

We need to think it as a roadmap with trails and stops or touchpoints.
We may draft or list all the actions (as close as possible) the customer takes to achieve his or her goal.

The best way to go about it is to print one or two of your personas out, so you get a visual picture to help you start. To enhance a customer journey map even further you need to evaluate data from your analytics which is another good starting point. if you can collect data from surveys, emails these are beneficial too.

Helps you getting to know the users who already visited your pages.

This will also helps the discussion further on how to improve the quality of your work and how the customer benefits instead suffering from it.

The Personas

We need a rich customer profile or persona. Describe his/her personal and business situation now (present situation) and in the future (ambitions).

What outcomes to expect: A complete description of his/ her desired outcome – what is he/she trying to achieve or solve?

The more information you include the more you can use to design an ideal user/prospect journey. Doing so, will allow you to draw the best possible user profile – achieving a particular goal as quickly and easily as possible.

We need then to think how this translates into your customer experience roadmap phases to transform your business. I mean by this – “Which steps and touchpoints will they take first” as mentioned above. We may list all the actions (as close as possible) the customer takes to achieve his or her goal.

Build the customer journey

Many call it “Customer Service Design Thinking” (trendy name) – I’d rather call it “mapping customer presence“ which is, a step-by-step user path describing the way he or she interacts (to reach their goal) when browsing a website, app, etc.

To do so, you can either create a flow diagram or document it in a Excel, Word.

Hint: Visual information will help you and your team design/improve the ideal user journey much quicker.

Use A/B test pages to test and see reactions or what path decisions they make about their goal.

The overall experience should combine the users and business goals. As such you need to consider:

  • The individuals who previously bought or use your services.
  • Having your team to identify and trace what people will do online in a particular scenario. (This can be extracted/documented in personas).
  • Map out the obvious steps the user/visitor could complete his intended task.

Example: discovering, reading reviews, deciding which to go for, buying the product, delivery time; cancelling it, etc.

  • Highlight (use post-it) whether the visitor had or could be facing any problems completing a particular task.
  • Anticipate the unknown: write down solutions to his/her problem (What & how to improve it?) in order to make the user/customer journey easier, simple, quicker and successful.
  • Align it with your business goals: these need to be realistic and aligned with the user’s goals.

One realstic/possible scenario:
This millennium, normal individuals often start online research on a smartphone, we may or may not move on to desktop to print/download the map or scan a QR code to complete the purchase.

The next possible step is that they eventually share their own experience in Instagram after purchasing the item.

See the steps used. That is the right way to discover, formulate and visualise individual behavioural patterns.

Tip: Create or add your an extra layer by adding a empathy map. ( include: direct interests, feelings, needs…)

From experience you and your team mates should see the business from the customer’s lens – meaning, start well before the moment he/she decided to use your product or services.

We could also call this a “omnichannel experience”.

Read about Omnichannel steps on my Quora post.

Customer journey mapping tools

Cxomni is a fantastic all-in-one SaaS customer journey cloud based mapping tool. It offers you a superb overview and perspective compared to many other out there.

Cxomni allows small-medium to big organizations to discover new data, manage buyer personas, customer journey maps, and above all connect and drive the customer experience touchpoints.

Best Features:

  • Collect and prioritise pain points,
  • Capture insights for innovation
  • Customer voices across all departments
  • CX management platform to analyse CX/UX insights
  • Monitor sentiments, pain points, emotional journeys, performance gaps, and more
  • Connect to real-time market and feedback data

Cost: Best part of all, its forever FREE as long you use up to 100 touchpoints and allows up to five users to login.

Customer-Journey-mapping-tool

 

Canvanizer

Canvanizer is a very effective customer journey mapping tool that enables you and your team to quickly brainstorm many stages in one central place. This tool allows you to run all aspects of the customer journey stages, from early pre-design service to post-service.

Key Features

  • Brainstorming product/service processes and better generate ideas
  • Design design thinking or reajust them as you go along
  • List early pre-services period including: social media, word-of-mouth, past experiences, and expectations
  • Service journey stage and user experience
  • Includes customer relationship management, social media, and satisfaction/dissatisfaction.

Try mapping your journey with their online demo free of charge

Customer-journey canvas demo template by Canvanizer
Try Canavizer Customer Mapping Online

Conclusion

Remember that before setting up your sales page or publishing valuable content on your site, you’re better off drawing or checking out your client’s /customer mapping experience.

Before you start, try to be sensitive to, aware and/or experiencing the feelings and experiences of another individual. Start here, and you’ll see how to improve the three stages of your customer journey planning.

The user or client journey maps are essentially focused on each but unique stages that the visitor will experience on your site, app, etc.

Your customer’s journey must capture all the experiences, he or she has with your brand. It goes through his or her’s point-of-view, while connecting your services with the back stage or supporting customer experience processes.

Thanks for reading this post. Feel free to comment and share it.

Thanks.

How Digital Strategy Can Save Businesses?

Have you created your digital strategy space in this (newly created) digital world yet?

If yes, congratulations! You’re safe.

However robust your digital strategy might be you must go back and revise it (preferably) every quarter. Is this needed for your business to survive in this highly competitive online marketplace? Again, the naswer is yes.

Remember that to transform and maximize your business’ effeorts and become  successful in the digital arena it will take you more than just creating your own online space.

Keep reading to really understand what I am saying.

What’s digital strategy?

For the newbies,  I’d say that “digital strategy is a combination of organised steps mixed with many moving blocks, all depending on processes that are designed to maximize business conversions“.  These all geared and supported by data analysis.

Wikipedia describes “digital strategy” as: a form of strategic management and a business answer or response to a digital question, often best addressed as part of an overall business strategy.

Well, I think of it as a planned structure with optimised steps put together to inform and deliver better business results.

Why digital marketing strategy?

Let’s see it under a different angle. Nowadays, you and I are more likely to book an holiday via a web browser search than you would walk or drive to the local agency  to book one, right? Hope you see what I mean.  And this is why you should invest in digital marketing strategies going forward.

To make your digital strategy glow you’ll need fresh and historical data, that will be guiding your marketing, seo strategy steps. You’ll have to grab some other online tools, processes and tactical approaches. And maybe hire the best digital marketers and/or get the best marketing books if you can find.

The reason is obvious, right. I guess it answers the question, but let me say this – the process and the people count more than the tools used to show you the competitor’s data. You can get those results in a matter of minutes and even seconds – what is working and not, which channel engagement is performing better with your target audiences, etc. But if you can’t decide what to do next you’re in for long ride.

Are you into digital strategy already?

Whilst lots of business owners are still trapped in the old system of business executions, the new digital world does require new approaches to combat the highly-competitive market.

Whether you’re doing in-house or outsourcing it your business will be affected in some way. Trust me it will. And, don’t get me wrong trust no one as mistakes can happen. Some will say buy advertising, invest in building more links or new website for your business for the sake of a digital strategy.

A proper digital strategy should have the capability to transform your business in multiple ways to maximise profits.

For example, the use of:

If you aren’t doing any of the three to four of these steps yet, yes you could as well be described as not having a business in the digital space.

Why is your online strategy struggling?

The digital marketplace has evolved so much that having an attractive/optimised website and great product is not enough.

Let me ask you this:

Are you struggling to keep up with the rapid change in the way consumers want to buy your products or services?

Are you in that situation? Keep reading if your business/company is struggling to find visitors.

Our research informed us that most businesses are having difficulties, or are unable to keep up with the fast and evolving consumer behavior.

There are multiple reasons why this happens.  But our findings tell us that these are essentially due to:

a) poor leadership

b) no customer satisfaction strategy

c) lack of relevant SEO/content marketing.

Industry statistics

Stats showed that it will be almost impossible for a non digital business to survive in the next 3 – 5 years and try to reach out an audience. In other words, you’ll close doors as you would not be competitive enough.

That is a bit scary, I agree. But it will come sooner than later.

Another good survey released by Curata showing that only 30% of businesses have a documented strategy – and with an astonishing 70 percent of marketers saying they do not have a formal content strategy in place.

Read more stats at: Smartinsights digital marketing stats 2020

Many don’t have a documented content distribuition process either to feed their marketing channels or to guide them in their journey. They also lack a proper managed content creation/supply plan.

Despite all the above, we read all these stats telling us that content budgets continue to be allocated and been increased year after year.

So, this begs the question: Who should be (in charge) asking for the return on investment and find out why things aren’t working so well?

Enroll to our digital marketing mini course [Updated]

We all know that senior management are always looking to one thing and that is – improving sales revenue and reducing their costs. But often this is done without the approval of experienced managers and effective short-term strategy plans.

Cisco predicts (white-paper) that in 2020 78-80% of mobile traffic will be (just) about video marketing. To sum up, the global mobile data traffic will increase sevenfold by the end of 2021.

As the old saying goes ” You only get what you put in”. One of the many errors is that they keep adding pressure on marketing and sales teams without investing in them (courses, market research, surveys etc.).

The majority of companies may have many skilled people in place, but they often don’t have efficient processes, and supportive technology. It is only obvious, that at some point their teams lack interest or aren’t that motivated. If sales and marketing are mismanaged it will lead to poor execution and profit results.

How to create a digital marketing strategy to save your business?

The term ‘digital strategy’ should not strike fear into you. You simply need to collect your data (old and new), the usual suspects (team) to execute a solid digital plan.

I’d say, depending on the size of your business, your digital strategy should be based on vision, goals, data and short-term aspirations.

But also a successful digital strategy requires a cross-functional team with visions, managerial leadership, solid agile marketing and an information technology (IT) teams.

What is needed to start your digital strategy journey?

To ensure a consistent and howling digital customer experience, a powerful digital strategy is needed to help you break the gaps between all the departments actively involved in your business executions.
You also need:

Content marketing planning

Take note and integrate the following ones:

  • Vision
  • Mission statement
  • Customer plan
  • Data strategy plan
  • Content strategy plan
  • Social media plan
  • CRM email marketing /marketing automation plan
  • etc

It’s evident that you will also need:

  • Real-time data analytics
  • Customer journey
  • Content topic creation
  • SEO content & landing pages
  • Blogging user stories
  • Social media campaigns
  • Video and/or podcast (digital assets)

are the most effective digital content tactics as revealed by clients or prospects reviews. Of course, these are the major aspects of a digital strategy, which by no means will not alone help transform a more scalable business and/or create a large space for you in the digital marketplace with guaranteed results.

However, there’s one major challenge often encountered by digital strategy adopters.

The challenge is – figuring out which part of the strategy should be done in-house, outsourced from a digital strategy provider and/or which should be customised according to prospects and client’s demands in order to be more effective. This is why using a service provider is highly recommended.

Let’s recap.

I do recommend as a priority to update/revise your mission statement, truly understand your customers and revise your customer strategic plan.

Hint: Listen to what your audience needs, wants and try (hard) to create relevant content ( create awareness) for that particular problem/need that will help them solve it.

Which best performing digital channels?

It’s worth emphasizing that in recent years business marketing strategies have evolved around interactive webinars and video content marketing taking the lead including YouTube and Facebook videos. Today you can shedule and make an online demo and sell your product or service at the end of it (…well almost).

There is room for the new technology and savvy channels that are coming fast and furious, such as bots; AI apps; VR etc.

More digital marketing stats with hubspot

To be competitive and influence your market space you’ll need to innovate, collect internal and external data, analyse it to produce and engage with quality content, offer more (but not for less) whilst providing the best possible customer experience.

Your marketing and tactics must be thoroughly agile and revised/evolved every 6-10 months.

Digital innovations have thrown up more opportunities in the marketplace today than in the past five years.

There is good news, however, and the positive side is that there’s equal opportunities for all business owners in the digital realm in order to maximize business profits.

Saying that and I quote “it all depends on how they approach and engage their tactical sequence (digital) and strategic concepts“. This innovation is aimed at responding to customer demands to ensure a stronger customer value proposition.

The major questions here are:

  • What value could your customers gain from your product/service?
  • How does this value differ from the one provided by the competition?
  • Is your business creating compelling content marketing strategies to help your social media/SEO campaigns?
  • What are your best marketing channels/campaigns to include in an overall strategy?

How to listen and monitor your social media?

FollowerWonk – TweetReach –  Likealyzer for FB – IFTTT and Mention.

If this ins’t enough or you aren’t sure what they’re looking for, then ask them directly or run through your industry blog’s comments to pick some ideas (one of my favorite).

Otherwise you can always crowdsource for ideas using your social media channels.

From there, prioritise your target audience to engage them ( promote it @ right times) with the relevant content you created. Remember to optimise your website/blog.

Then pick your content from your content calendar plan so you can create a consistent plan of action for the next coming months.

Explore marketing tools to serve them better, engage daily with video/Podcast marketing and implement/revise your processes and of course.. include good metrics.

Conclusion

Is your company or business ready for this type of change in business model? If you want to stay competitive and open for business, then change/adapt your online strategy now.

We understand that while a traditional technology strategy focuses and relies on 18 months roadmaps and budget forecasts that can take around two years. However, if you adapt a digital strategy focus and rely on short-term, actionable and objective-driven month-to-month roadmaps your business will prosper.

We can help you make that change and focus on where your company’s core and value are more vulnerable to interruptions.

If you or anyone you know is in need of digital marketing expertise in the South East of England or near London get in touch today – get a free assessment to improve the digital/content strategy across all platforms.

In addition to this, we can provide and deliver high quality SEO managed services, consulting advice, and strategies tailored to each clients’ unique goals and needs for maximum benefits.

That is it – you can now share this post, add a comment here if you fancy/thing this post was useful to you and/or if you like to add something else!

Thanks for reading.

Related Posts

Digital Content Marketing Insights To Take Into 2018

Digital-Content-Marketing-InsightsAs we turn this final page of digital content marketing and say goodbye to 2017, I thought we could take some time to reflect upon this past year. Why? Well, we can only benefit from this opportunity to prepare ourselves for the upcoming year by reviewing and analysing the previous one. We’ll start with online content marketing insights, new user/consumer’s needs and behaviors.

We noticed that people are becoming more curious, astute, knowledgeable, demanding, and less patient than ever before. Before 2018 kicks off, here’s some of the best digital content marketing observations – big data, trends and a few case studies from 2017.
So read on, make your own analysis and gather all the information to start transforming your digital business and avoid mistakes. One thing to keep in mind – beware of the algorithms that will kick you out by penalising your website for its poor or irrelevant content in 2018.

 

Big Data and Value Proposition

This is an era where data is still freely available to us, so why not learn and transform it into valuable strategic assets? We need to identify the patterns, understand the role of our industry and customer data, the various sources of analytics at your disposal and the risks around data security.
This past year, millions of people have been turning to their smart devices with the aim of finding what they need right here and right now – whether it is shopping, health-care, education, holiday deals or online news.

  • According to Google, search interest has tripled in the past two years and will increase further in 2018.
  • 75% of smartphone users are more likely to purchase from companies whose mobile sites or apps customise and deliver information to their location.
  • Three in four smartphone users browse their mobile search beforehand in order to satisfy and/or address their needs.

Sources: Google/ Ipsos connect and Google data

Tip: Data suggests that industries are going to be more digital than ever before, but also more vulnerable.
Whether it is booking travel through digital assistants, car shopping online, or beauty blogger influencers outclassing big brands, this year’s data shows how the game has changed across all kinds of industries.

Factoids:

  • 1 in 3 travellers across many countries around the world are using “virtual/digital assistants” to help them with their travel research/ bookings.
  • Almost 95% of vehicle buyers are now using digital as a source of information. The stats say that twice as many start their research via smart devices instead of going to a local car dealer.
  • Online searches for the “vegan skin care” category have grown by 83% year over year in the U.S alone.
1 in 3 travellers now use virtual assistants to book their travel destination. Click To Tweet

We notice that there is a pattern here – the online shoppers are comparing, studying and collecting main benefits from sites who are providing better and more accurate information, helping them shape their final decisions.

To offer better value proposition to your customers, you need to continuously reshape your business offer by analysing your current offer vs market; threats and opportunities and (innovate) be a step ahead of the competition.

So if you’re looking to reach new customers or retain existing customers, you need all the above plus you need to push them to try your product/services. But all this starts online.

Source: Think with Google

 

Content strategy

You should hire a content strategist (freelance or not) and help them place your goals, efforts and money into a clear content strategy. If you haven’t done it so far you should seriously think about it. These people know how to research, coordinate, nurture and engage with your readers/fans whilst providing a fruitful experience from your website to their inbox and preferred social media channels.

By doing so you will also lead to increase revenue across channels.

Not convinced? I am.

Hire a Content strategist if you're in the process of growing/expanding your business. Click To Tweet

Read the 10 Most read articles this 2017

 

Advertising

Mobile content users are paying attention to ads

Difficult to believe, but people across the globe are paying more attention to ads via their mobile than TV ads.
Primary channel to focus on: The mobile video – Some social media platforms such FB and Instagram were quick to adapt and offer their users the capability of uploading short video content (paid video content too). There will be a new focus towards the use of videos and live streaming.

  • Paid “YouTube mobile” advertising is 84% more likely to receive viewers’ attention than a traditional TV advertising Source: Google/Ipsos
  • YouTube and how to advertise – Case-study: 2017-brand-video-marketing-strategies

YouTube and others: stats, facts and figures for 2017 [Infographic]

 

Website and Mobile site speed optimisation

Did you know that over 50% of visitors abandoned a mobile site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load?
Recent analysis of leading retailers found that 54% suffer from ‘poor’ site’ page speed – currently taking over nine seconds to load. That’s terribly long. Imagine what that could do to your business. (people will leave your site and stop coming back). Dzone offer over a wide range of professional tips on how to start preparing your site now.

Here’s how to optimise your website for speed.

and

if you fancy knowing how your site is doing right now – you can test it with Gtmetrix.

in 2017 over 50% of online visitors abandoned a mobile site that took longer than 3 seconds to load. Click To Tweet

Email marketing

The future of email isn’t dead at all. EMS have worked hard to improve their services – many has changed, they simply added artificial intelligence (A.I) and integrated email marketing automation.

To get it right let your email and/or sales marketing expert plan ahead for:

  • The entire business quarterly goals
  • Communicate the strategy planning
  • Drag and drop segmentation for better targeting
  • Improve copywriting, design and/or Layout
  • More A/B Testing
  • Optimisation

Alert: Note and keep in mind that 2018 onwards many artificial intelligence (A.I) powered tools are increasingly being used in email marketing automation and will definetely continue to adapt and evolve. Keep an eye on your Email Marketing Service provider but also on their competitor’s site (EMS) to learn how you could improve your email campaigns.

Conclusion:

More than ever before the key to success is based on – business strategy, value proposition and digital transformation. In other words be quick to respond to customer demand and disrupt the market. Be willing to self-analyse your own assumptions and quickly release a new mission statement of how and where and when to serve your customers.

Digital transformation isn’t easy, but it can be easy if you know where to go but it can also be complex and costly. It requires direction and commitment from the top to lead troops on the ground.

Businesses must constantly reimagine business models, develop a strategic digital team, processes, platforms and build new strategic alliances. Many ignore business strategy and digital transformation, including all the above. Big mistake!
Assess how you are doing with your digital content marketing efforts and point your team to the most needed moving parts. A clear and documented content marketing strategy will enable you to adapt and transform across your business.

Your priorities are:

a) business strategic key concepts;

b) customer centric;

c) harness midsized influencer networks (this will become core to your marketing) d) agile redesign and/or adapting your marketing funnel.

But above all never forget to:

Fully understand your customers before the competitor does, serve them better again and again. Develop, personalise and deliver consistent and meaningful experiences by tailoring products and services via a modern Supply chain.

††Sales operations and back-office – adapt, transform (or outsource) and manage via new cloud-enabled specialist platforms that use Artificial intelligence (A.I). This service is available to use at medium low cost and offer real-time data. Bonus: this will allow swift and efficient delivery to the end-users, but it will also gather huge amounts of data to analyse for better informed decisions to be taken in the future.
You need to transform your business this 2018 or set yourself-up for serious problems.

Tough, maybe but it’s the reality.

Enjoy your New Year! All the best.

How to fix your digital strategy while avoiding pitfalls?

How to fix digital strategyReading time: 6 minutes 55′.

Did you say how to fix digital marketing strategy to adapt to customers, competition and market technology? But these changes haven’t really worked.. yet.

Perhaps your online business is struggling to adjust to the new technologies and market demands? You’re naturally concerned, and your doubts are genuine.

But do not fear as your digital marketing strategy can easely be fixed.

Here is how you go about to improve it.

How to restore your digital marketing strategy?

Have I wasted opportunities and time? Is that what your are asking yourself?

If you’re changing things around, testing it and logging what is and what is not working. The answer is, more than likely not, because its an ongoing process.

Here is what you need to concentrate on:

  • Identify digital marketing goals
  • Create your personas
  • Revise customer strategy plan
  • Audit your content
  • Revise/Create content marketing plan
  • Identify best online channels/tools
  • Follow the promotional plan
  • Check key metrics for each performed action

However, if you’re curious or/and need rapid assistance I can work with you and show how to perform an audit to identify those issues. Very important.

I will also give you a (free) checklist to keep you on track along with tools and processes that will help fix the non-working components/parts within your strategy.

Before we go on bear these two in mind:

Firstly, mend a digital strategy only works if you align marketing and sales with your business goals and objectives, while managing the lead funnel effectively.

Secondly, prioritise phases and steer away from dangerous pitfalls when implementing your strategic plan. Also read the following 7 reasons why online strategy plans fail.

Seven reasons why online marketing strategy fails:

  • Aimless business strategy: the mission, vision and business values are setup for a 2-3 year period but not updated or revised. Often the global vision for a campaign has changed direction, and resources aren’t aligned with business strategic plan in order to fulfill customers, prospect’s needs/problems.
  • Worthless or poor tactical implementation: we often say that the devil is in the detail. This is even more true when the strategic planning is released with little or no actions – surely, this cannot guide your teams, hence leading to poor implementation.
  • Weak or lack of strategic management: poor continuous planning, data monitoring, analysis, marketing and sales assessment will danger the business in short or medium-term. All the above are required for an organisation to meet and carry out its vision, goals and objectives.
  • Poor or lack of communication: communications and strategic management do tend to overlap with each other, meaning if the plan doesn’t get aligned and communicated properly to staff members/employees, they will not understand why, where and when to improve and/or give useful feedback.
  • An unrealistic plan: has actions to be implemented but are unfeasible and/or there are too many to be executed in time because the team manager failed to hire qualified resources or outsource to help reduce team workloads.
  • Out of scope: often added-on tasks not covered in the statement of work, also called S.O.W (Scope of work), that will increase the daily basis workload leading to a direct change in the project cost or time.
  • No visibility and accountability: if there is no high-level visibility and accountability then it stands to reason you will not be able to see or detect opportunities in order to drive change. It is important that each process, task, data implementation and initiative must have an accountable owner.

Note: I am confident to say that business people don’t ignore the problems at hand, but their staff often do, simply because the problem has not been fully understood or identified.

To build a successful digital marketing strategy you must:

  • Identify and align the steps/changes that will be made according to your plan of action.
  • Make the strategy clear and easier to understand for everyone.
  • Include ground-level people in the creation of strategy and its implementation.
  • Walk them through the logic behind the strategy and tactical choices before going live.
  • Listen (online) and record what has been said (any resistance can pinpoint issues).
  • Provide the processes, tools and communicate it to everyone.
  • Implement a strategic thinking process board (continuous learning) and challenge your and teams views.

Your strategy’s success will depend on everybody’s desire for change. Positive strategy change will not happen overnight. It’s like a champion training process – it builds up over time surrounded by people with a positive mind and shared leadership.

A powerful but yet simple digital strategy checklist

  • What benefits will my strategy bring us?
  • What has to change in order for that to happen?
  • What do we need to do to make this strategy work?
  • Who is doing what?
  • Who will be implicated/affected?
  • What tools do we need to help team visualise the future changes.

Related methods to help improve your digital marketing strategy

We can find dozens of excellent business analysis tools/models to guide you and/or think more strategically.

Here’s a few:

You can tap into another great methodology to ensure that when planning your objectives these are as SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timelined) as possible.

Now, if your business is up and running and you’re stuck or need to quickly identify where to make the much needed improvements – I’d recommend to start with a fairly simple but efficient method to pinpoint and fix a failing part within your marketing strategy.

The Digital  Marketing SWOT Analysis

It stands for: Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats analysis.

Download-SWOT-to-Fix-Your-Strategy

SWOT analysis is the most popular strategic analysis models among the better-known methods to help you visualise which parts of your business you’ll need to focus on.

When you need to find where the strengths and weaknesses of your business are, and pinpoint any opportunities and threats then this tool can help you.

Once you have identified all of the above, you can continue analysing and assess how to capitalise on your strengths, while minimising the effects of your weaknesses, make the most of any open opportunities and reduce any possible threats.

You can now download SWOT-Analysis-Template 2017 and start your internal and external analysis. Good luck.

You can then start a Fishbone diagram

A fantastic tool to visualise the root cause of a specific problem, whilst exploring potential upcoming issues. The cause and effect diagram (AKA Fishbone, Ishikawa or Fishikawa in Japanese) and is often used by the Japanese automobile industry.

Fishbone-diagram-template-AKA-Ishikawa-or-Fishikawa

You should create a cause and effect diagram:

a) To quickly discover project problems/issues
b) To guide any team to uncover possible root problems
c) To make sure major issues are not overlooked during brainstorming sessions.

This technique is actually considered one of the best seven basic tools of product/service quality control.

So, let’s start a fishbone diagram.

TIP: You can get a free account with Lucidchart for an unlimited amount of time—no credit card required. Go here.

Let’s take the restaurant as an example.

Start by stating the problem in the form of a question, such as:

“Why do we have so many complaints”

Framing it as a “why” question will help in brainstorming, as each root cause idea should answer the question.

Effective questions to help you start:

  1. What is the primary problem you’re trying to fix?
  2. Where to start?
  3. What are the root causes of initial problem?
  4. Why do you need to fix it?
  5. Who will do the job?
  6. What other backup solutions are there to avoid further issues?

Can I use cause-and-effect diagram in marketing planning?

Yes, a fishbone diagram is often used by many marketing agencies for their customers strategic planning.

How to fix your digital marketing strategy using cause-and-effect flowchart ?

Step 1. Select two small teams: Create two balanced teams of around 2-3 people in each group. Why?

Because having two teams will help you quickly identify the problem by focusing on the issue at hand. You should mix front-line/customer service people who have experienced or knowledge of the problem.

For bigger businesses/projects do not be afraid to build 2-3 teams of 4-6 people to identify the initial root problems- each taking over a department or business unit. This will help you be much quicker at building a new action plan.

Step 2. Give the problem a relevant name:
At the head of your fishbone write down the problem’s name. This is very important, allow 5-10 minutes to discuss this, depending on size of the business.
Each team will have to agree on the issue to tackle. Be as specific as possible as this will redirect you at later stage to sub-categories.

Step 3. Decide the major categories: Create a root cause diagram on flip chart to include: People, software or servers, methods used, material and/or environment.

Step 4. Brainstorm session: Now its time to brainstorm the issue – start a session by listing potential causes – here you just ask three to five “Whys”. Make sure you repeat the process for each category previously listed.

Tip/Suggestions: Write onto self-stick-notes and place them under the relevant category.

Step 5. Review the diagram: Agree, validate and eliminate causes that do not apply.

Step 6. Start a second brainstorming: with categories with less items to find quick relevant ideas without stopping anyone’s creativity.

Step 7. Time to validate and finalise the diagram: Here you must identify the causes that are most critical, and urgent follow-ups.

Step 8. Control stage

Conclusion:

In 2017 and going forward, you’ll need to quickly spot and solve any digital digital marketing situation. Get deep inside on your analysis, draw and understand the priorities. From there, replan, realign business goals and focus on your audience lead funnel while refreshing and/or optimising existent content. Secondly, concentrate on mobile optimisation and third, I would strongly recommend you improving your website loading speed as part of your overall strategy.

Also, forget all the trendy gadgets, plugins and other fancy stuff as these aren’t essential to help your business provide valuable and relevant content to your readers or end-users.

Every business is different, what is working for your competitor may not work for you. Like I said above, if you want to save your digital marketing strategy you’ll need to first assess or audit to see what is not really working for you. Start with your goal priorities, revise them and work the plan, educate your team, republish your content, make it valuable, unique and persevere, so you can finish the year with a smile on your face.

I also think that marketing strategy is much more than tapping into that egotistical concept  or product idea, if you see what I mean.

If well designed, mixed, followed and aligned your content strategy can deliver and empower your overall strategy on its own, and that from the moment you deliver the value people are expecting, whether it is through emotional facts or educational meanings.

But one of the ways to do this quickly – is to implement and/or customise your marketing automation process to get you activity reports across departments (know when and what your leads are reading) and get sales lead intelligence (lead tracking and scoring setup asap so you will know where to go.

Do not attempt to persuade people (old school tacticts) who read your blog post when you absolutely don’t know what they’re looking for, what their pain points are, etc. Your business can actually have a much more pivotal role in your industry if you do your home-work properly.

Thanks for reading this post.

Do share it around you and please leave a comment if you enjoyed or find the topic useful. 🙂

Strategies to Market Your Small Business – Guide Part 1

Marketing-strategies-for-small-business Are you confused when it comes to find effective marketing strategies for your small business? You keep marketing your small business day in and day out, but you are struggling to find clients. We know it is a tough one to crack. Let me tell you that you are not alone.

For some strange reason many entrepreneurs think that starting and running a business is easy – a bit like running a 200m sprint sport event. No offense sprinters, I know there is a huge preparation before the sprint competition happens.

When it comes to implement an effective marketing strategy you need planning, resources based upon your goals. Let’s put this into perpective.

If you are familiar with Heptathlon (which consists of seven track and field events over two days) and the Pentathlon (consists of five events in one day.) you soon realise that is a long competition. In business terms its the same thing, but here you’re taking financial risks in the hope of making a profit – so… you’re running a marathon or Decathlon ( consists of ten track and field events ) but with two big differences. First: you do whatever it takes and hope to get the gold medal and secondly, you’ll push on and on for months and months or maybe years.

So, what are the typical questions we ask ourselves when we start a business?

Would that be: How do I market my small business? Where do I start? How do I plan? What to plan first and stay focussed? Which strategic channel should I use?, etc.

These questions also work for freelancers as they’re faced with very similar business challenges. Both share the same big struggle – which is:

How to plan a strategy and stick with your daily actions!

 

Marketing strategies to market your small business [sample]

In this post I’ll share simple ways to plan your marketing.

This will include:

  • structure your mission,
  • define and discover your audience,
  • set SMART goals,
  • how, where to find your first client and get them to try your skills,
  • followed by how to turn completed work into referrals.
  • tips and proven recommendations

Bonus tips: I’ll also share some extra great marketing ideas from others! So if you’re ready stay tuned, continue reading and let’s build your client base!

Let’s imagine you’re just getting started and you need to work out fine marketing strategies to get some quick results.

Define your mission

 Step one: Write down your mission for the next six – twelve months. The draft should include:

What you’re aiming to achieve, What is the voice of the business (V.O.B), the resources needed, what your success looks like and how you’ll get there etc.
For many this step seems unnecessary, but trust me, later you’ll see  why it is so crucial.

So, your first step is the most important of all. Now you can either – grab a computer and open a word document or stick to good old fashioned note paper.

Define your target market

Step two: Who is your audience? What needs do they have? Know their pain points and associate them with your start-up/freelance goals. Create and tailor your initial campaigns based on your audience’s problems and offer a solution.

You should dig deeper into your target market and by that I mean segment your clients:

Tip example:
You visit a manufacturer webiste selling middle range shoes – they’ve got basic images and it’s not mobile user friendly.
So if you’re an App designer what do you do? You create a simple demo and show it to them to spark their interest.
You can also sell market innovation and how to improve their brand awareness. You want to be the guy who can turn dreams into reality, so go find who is in charge and what immediate needs they have. If they agree it’s a foot on the door. Then invite relevant people and show them how you’d like to work with them.

Another example:

Let’s assume you don’t know which target market to go to first. No problem, this  is what I’d recommend you do. Offer your main skill set. Even if you’re just good at just one thing, focus and do it well.

Pratical Tips:
Google offer many search operators to help you save time and go much quicker – Just Google your area of expertise to figure out how others are presenting themselves. How many are in your area? What skills set are they selling? It is useful to figure out which keywords they’re using, whose commenting etc.

You can try these: related: example: related:http://www.yourcompetitor.com  –  very useful indeed  and/or – try date range, The daterange: operator can restrict the search results to pages recently added or updated within the specified date range. Unfortunately, it only accepts Julian dates, but you can convert them to Gregorian dates online. here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/calendar.

See the idea?

Setting SMART goals

Step three:
You have some big ideas, and want to go live as quickly as possible. First, lets figure out what your SMART goals are.

What are SMART goals?  SMART stands for: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely.

Get into the habit of using S.M.A.R.T when planning your main goals.

Test SMART yourself:

Instead of writing “I need to find more web projects” try the following:

  • Identify 5-10 local business websites that aren’t mobile friendly. Include heading topics: I will email to inform or educate them about my skills and services.
  • Search for Web agencies in my region with 5-10 employees specialised in App development. Then I introduce myself, what I do and ask if they have any occasional work or run-off I can help with.

These actionable tasks (above) will improve productivity, help you stay focussed and feel positive on the long run.
Often we think more is better, it is, but only if it’s well planned. That is why SMART will leave you with this great energy to tackle the goals ahead.

How to find your first clients?

Wouldn’t it be great if clients were calling or emailing to give you work?
Believe it or not, this is possible, but you’ll need to show them great content, work examples, and one or two case studies etc.. You need to show the prospect what they’ll get from your business.

But until then, you have to do some brain work. Bear in mind that your prospects aren’t going to know you unless you start getting your services out there in front of them.

How to promote your business without getting stuck?

In the first few months don’t even bother promoting yourself, if you haven’t written at least 10-15 pieces of content.

Use free social media to listen and curate other people’s content.

Social_media_planning

 

Here I listed some social media listening tools that I think would help SMB’s – but it also gives you extra great insight in other departments.

Buzzsumo
Pros: BuzzSumo is a must have social web platform for SMBs looking to track daily to monthly shares, but with an edge, as it will work more effectively than any other platform. I love it. It trows content alerts if you need it or simply schedule real-time brand monitoring. Plus side: Finding industry influencers, what they said; sharing great metrics and its real-time social monitoring
Cons: Can’t find one.

Sproutsocial
Pros: I heard good things such as listening capacity.
Cons: Can’t comment as not tested yet.

klear-advanced
Pros: Perfect tool for marketers who are new to the social media. Uncomplicated.
Cons: Not trully tested yet.

There is a plethora of free social media analytics on the web, such as: Social mention, Followerwonk, Buffer, SumAll, etc. I would suggest to try them yourselves and see which ones suits your business better. You can also find them through recommended sources. Social media examiner post showing 4 free tools to spy on your competitors.

Take time to listen, analyse what others are doing, test and take notes. Then, get your brand/name in front of your audience. Pic a steady pace, introduce and ask them to read your blog posts, share fun or relevant content.

From here you get to know your influencers better, take part in their blog posts, leave a nice comment and repeat. Go where they talk, share and comment. At later stage you get to ask them to RT your stuff. Don’t be a stalker. But what if I don’t have any proper work examples to show?

We will get there.
Your prospect’s have got needs, you just have to figure out what’s in it for you. Just keep adjusting your plan and stick with it.

Do not cold call – Email them instead

Guy Kawasaki once said that before you write an email you should provide just enough information to answer the following five questions:

  • Who are you?
  • What do you want?
  • Why are you asking me?
  • Why should I do what you’re asking?
  • What is the next step?

I use this framework and it works just fine.

There are three basic approaches to cold email

  • Email someone high up in the business to introduce you to the right person
  • Email the decision maker if you can – ask for 20-30 minute call/meeting/etc
  • You can email someone who wrote a blog post and tell him you like it and that you can help/add alternative.

How to achieve that in four simple steps:

  1. Find the right person.. search his/her profile. Research well your prospects.
  2. Find accurate email information. You can use emailhunter.co or use http://rocketreach.co
  3. Compile and segment lists
  4. Create/use epic email template.

My winning tips for email outreach:

  • Keep it simple (Start with Hi, Hello instead of Dear Mrs/Mr)
  • First sentence is your prime-time ( Do not waste it – go for powerful stats, or a question about their assets)
  • Write as if you were talking to them face-to-face
  • Focus on one benefit/pain point /offer (per outreach email)
  • Use plain English and kick the adjective superlatives out for example: “We offer you the best security app on the market” Instead try this: “You will be protecting your business assets but also your peer’s confidentiality”
  • Use your best active voice for example: “Our software is used by Hundreds of thousands” instead of “Our software was used by many”
  • Add a sprinkle of emotional/value or even fear (these elements are crucial for email strategy )
  • Build trust – Add compelling stories/testimonials etc
  • Keep it friendly and professional (but not to friendly either).

 

Next time we’ll go through email examples.

Feel free to comment or add any questions/ideas. It will be very much appreciated.

How to win customers with multi-channel strategy ? Part 1

Steps_for_multi_channel_strategyWe’ll talk through how to structure and align your multi-channel strategy using a step-by-step sequence.

Are you, like many other small or medium size business owners feeling it’s the time to pause,  regroup ideas and start a strategic review?
Perhaps you get frustrated with the same questions – but with so many components and options to consider, there’s alot to know before moving ahead.

So, where should you start?

First lets check why 4 out of 5 consumers declare brands do not know or understand them – According to IBM and Econsultancy Study. These figures were based on 2015 US market study.

Factoids:

Their most used channels: 90% of consumers go online and then call the call center to finalise their purchase.

 

The UK figures aren’t brilliant either – the multi-channel customer service is considered ok but not consistent across multiple industries.

Factoids:
  • Over 63% of consumers are saying that they’ve stopped doing business with a brand due to a poor customer service.
  • 50% of UK consumers used their desktop computers with retail, banking and travel companies in the past six months.
  • Across the five surveyed industries, consumers are most likely to have browsed retail websites using a tablet (e.g. an iPad).
  • Just under a third of consumers (29%) have used a retail brochure or catalogue, while 17% have used a travel brochure.


Source for UK: https://econsultancy.com/reports

Why are they failing to execute a multi-channel strategy?

To avoid falling into the same traps or making unnecessary mistakes – Lets see where the majority of business owners struggle or fail:

  • Plan or set specific SMART goals
  • Define marketing campaign activities in time
  • Add (real) value proposition for customers
  • Set and maintain channel promotional alignment
  • Control service/product offer
  • Review USP differentiators
  • Analyse competitors and/or underestimate them
  • Budget marketing activities
  • Poor and/or unconsistent service
  • Measure online marketing campaigns – resulting in poor ROI.

 

Well, these are the main reasons. If you have failed to execute any of the above, then I can reassure you’re not alone.

So, where should we start?

“There isn’t a one type of bullet proof strategy” as Joe Pulizzi said – but a good starting point would be to begin with your business vision, mission and priorities. I’d make a list of goals you’re hoping to achieve and then jot down what, why, whom and when you’re hoping to achieve it. Set a 3-6 months time frame – no point going beyond that.A good strategy should be #agile - start with vision, priorities and best services you can provide to your customers. Click To Tweet

 

Did you know..  “that business vision without proper execution is just a simple hallucination”

 

The aim: how to hit the ground running, promoting the business across several platforms whilst making substantial costs savings.

 

Is multi-channel strategy the platform to go in order to win more customers and business?

A digital strategy plan would be incomplete without the multi-channel strategy.

To avoid this – you must consider the following approaches:

  1. Set and determine business goals – Based on your vision and current presence.
  2. Define and segment buyer personas group – maximum three-five.
  3. Identify new market opportunities – do a market research – listen to your audience.
  4. List solutions for those opportunities – identify challenges prioritise them.
  5. How to create content – educate, influence with emotional, fun messages.
  6. Integrate major social media platforms to reach more people, buyers.
  7. Create interesting (value) content and promote it.
  8. How to check and control results.

The recent IBM survey, suggests that the majority of marketers (still) are failing to adopt an integrated cross-channel approach.

The Multi-Channel-Framework

 

Many of those are in: retail, telecoms services, financial services and the travel industry, – meaning that over 40% are failing to coordinate their marketing campaigns across these important channels.

So this begs the  question: why are these businesses struggling to move towards a multi-channel strategy effectively? Are they lacking time, research, planning, internal skills, resources or all at same time?

First analysis showed that SMEs tend to focus or concentrate more on two-three channels – the web, email and/or phone. Is two-channel coming soon? Don’t think so.

The point of this exercise is to demonstrate how to overcome these obstacles whilst making substantial time and cost savings. It isn’t an easy task. Do not look to make many changes at once but enough that your customers will notice its benefits.

Question: Wouldn’t you rather benefit from short/medium-term strategic changes and keep your customers happy whilst getting more competitive?

Hope you enjoyed part one. Please share your comments, thoughts.

Thanks

Part 2 is on the way – I draft it but needs 8-10hrs to organise, and proof read it. But will be out in 2 weeks time.

 

First Image courtesy of Sira Anamwong at FreeDigitalPhotos.net