As a successful business, you're visible everywhere and utilizing every possible channel. But many businesses are casting too wide a net. It's costing them too much time and money. And worse yet, they are missing opportunities by not hyper-focusing on areas where their customers spend most of their time.
No, before we get there, you need to consider your organization's history, re-examine where and how you have gotten success in the past. And we don't need to just look at it through the lens of marketing. Are you a sales focused business? Do you get most of your business through partners? You must identify what path got you started before you can evolve.
Now that you've figured out where you've gotten customers in the past, you can enhance the way you do that with simple marketing. Let's take for example a Partner-centric business, where your partner provides the product and you give services that help implement the product. Your customers are going to you partner's website. The partner provides the customer with links to different service provider websites.
In this example, your company should put in some serious time and resources to enhance your website. You'll need to beat the other competitor's sites listed with you. And if your partner is providing your social links in their website, you need to make sure your accounts stay up to date with far more visually pleasing and engaging content than your competitors.
Speaking of social media let's follow another example. An organization historically has gotten most of their sales from Facebook. They still pay for ads on the other platforms because they believe that it's all of social media where they can be successful. After a while, they find that the other platforms still aren't making as much as Facebook. They try again on the other social media accounts: reconstruct the ads, retargeting and still nothing.
The problem is this particular organization doesn't understand that they should spend less time on the other channels and instead hyper focus on Facebook. Their customers either don't have these other platforms or just don't spend as much time on them as Facebook. Yet they chose to continue to market to them with the same effort as their most successful channel.
You can't blame this organization for wanting to try the other platforms. Business should utilize all of the available channels. But the right decision would have been to pump up your Facebook ads and just drip a few dollars towards the other platforms until they get going or you discover the results are not worth the spend.
You've boosted your past successes with marketing to get even more results. Great, but you're not done. You're going to want to know where the new opportunities and channels to expand your business even further. Well you'll need to know 2 things before you do that...
We have to say because we've seen the mistake before. Let's take a B2B company we know for example. The business has access to a database like Zoominfo.com or Seamless.AI. They target their customers based on all different filters such as "current technology", "revenue size", "industry", etc. etc. They use a generic persona template to narrow down their target market with those filters. And now they think they are done. Not so.
The list they have is valuable, but those lists only include generic information: email, phone, website, etc. There's another step they could do. They could go into their list and look up several of the target prospects. Oftentimes these databases specify a LinkedIn profile. They should go to that profile.
They need to analyze this kind of information and more like it for several of the people on the list. They should identify the overlaps and commonalities between the profiles then add those details to their personas and use them as new opportunities to engage.
Discovering and taking advantage of what's common amongst your potential customers saves time because you too can now go where all of them are going. In general, we don't have time to engage them based on their uniqueness. At least not in this example. It's not impossible though, we can get close by utilizing automation which is another article entirely in itself.
Don't know your Vine from your TikToks. Pandora from Spotify. Both of these cases include similar technologies or platforms, but one is out of date and the other is extremely popular. However, it's not only important to keep up with the most popular technologies, apps and platforms. Sometimes it's more lucrative to be one of the firsts to utilize them. To illustrate my point, let's talk about TikTok. It came out in 2016. Imagine the benefits your business could have earned had it been an early adopter...
Sure, that specific opportunity is gone now. And there is still reason for certain businesses to get on TikTok even now if they haven't yet. But that doesn't mean you can't take advantage of the next one. To be clear, we're not suggesting you spend so much of your time trying to be an early adopter that it takes away from your focus on the popular channels now. But there is definite value in taking a little bit of time to keep up with new apps, social platforms and other kinds of technologies. There are new ones coming out every day.
How are you supposed to know about what's new? You don't have to spend hours searching on Google, tech sites or app marketplaces. Use your network of people. Bring it up in regular conversation. Talk to younger employees within your organization. Follow some technology influencers on YouTube and watch recent videos that sound like a lead on something new.
Don't know your Vine from your TikToks. Pandora from Spotify. Both of these cases include similar technologies or platforms, but one is out of date and the other is extremely popular. However, it's not only important to keep up with the most popular technologies, apps and platforms. Sometimes it's more lucrative to be one of the firsts to utilize them. To illustrate my point, let's talk about TikTok. It came out in 2016. Imagine the benefits your business could have earned had it been an early adopter...
Sure, that specific opportunity is gone now. And there is still reason for certain businesses to get on TikTok even now if they haven't yet. But that doesn't mean you can't take advantage of the next one. To be clear, we're not suggesting you spend so much of your time trying to be an early adopter that it takes away from your focus on the popular channels now. But there is definite value in taking a little bit of time to keep up with new apps, social platforms and other kinds of technologies. There are new ones coming out every day.
How are you supposed to know about what's new? You don't have to spend hours searching on Google, tech sites or app marketplaces. Use your network of people. Bring it up in regular conversation. Talk to younger employees within your organization. Follow some technology influencers on YouTube and watch recent videos that sound like a lead on something new.
Assuming you've got the right foundation, your top marketing priorities this year are going to come from looking at the past successes, your current customers and future channel opportunities. They are all equally important to the continued success of your business.
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