Business Strategy %%sep%% CTH

Feb 27 2017

How to fix your digital strategy while avoiding pitfalls?

Reading 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:

Kotter’s eight steps process for change
Boston Matrix: How to use BCG Matrix?
Scenario planning: is also a powerful technique that will help you build credible (future) views for your business.

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.

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.

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:

What is the primary problem you’re trying to fix?
Where to start?
What are the root causes of initial problem?
Why do you need to fix it?
Who will do the job?
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. 🙂

Aug 31 2016

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.

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:

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

May 23 2016

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

Steps_for_multi_channel_strategy We’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:

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