When it comes to marketing these days it can be very confusing to businesses to pick which strategies & tactics to use to ensure they reach their goals and overall objectives for the company. It doesn’t matter whether you have the best product, service or business, if you can’t first get someone to care enough to pay attention.
Every company now is fighting for attention, which means everyone is your competitor right now, and the only way to overcome this & win is to stand up, stand out, and get noticed.
This is why implementing the best marketing strategies is key to helping your business get more attention & in turn grow. So let’s help you achieve this starting from today!
Marketing At Present…
Today’s environment is so noisy and knowing what’s what is hard. You’ve got people over here screaming at you, and you’ve got people over there screaming at them, and you’ve got people way over there and some over there too, hiding inside with the covers over their head, just waiting for this all to be over.
But as confusing and as messed up as things may appear to be, one thing has become more clear and more glaringly obvious than it ever has been before. Attention & getting notice is key!
Specialisation
The first thing that you need to do in order to get attention is to understand one of the most important fundamentals and principles when it comes to marketing strategy, and that is specialisation.
The reality is, in today’s hyper competitive and really saturated world, especially when it comes to business and marketing, well, you can’t be all things to all people; you have to specialise, you have to focus! This means really focusing in and really specialising on either a certain area, a certain product or a certain service, or even a certain market, or segment of the market.
Being a jack of all trades or a generalist is just not the way to succeed because there’s too much noise in the marketplace. Also, there’s no real kind of value or no real reason for somebody to want to go to you or to be able to recommend you or to even have the desire or the understanding that you’re going to be able to help them when you’re claiming to do all of these things for all these different people.
Plus, when you’re a generalist or you’re keeping your offer, your marketing or your message really broad, well, it naturally forces you to kind of broaden that message, which means you have to water it down.
You have to be less specific so that you can include all of these different people. In reality, when you try to appeal to everyone, you end up appealing to no one.
Differentiation
See differentiation is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, but it’s how are you different and different in a way that’s actually better, in a way that actually matters to your market, but how are you different from your competition? Or different from others who are offering a similar or even somewhat kind of different thing than what you’re offering?
Basically, as mentioned at the very beginning, everybody is vying for your customer’s attention right now, which means that you’ve got a number of different competitors you’ve got to try to compete against.
You, of course, have your direct competitors who are selling something similar to you, or exactly the same as you, to the same kind of market that you want to reach. However, you also have indirect competitors, which are people who are selling either something different to the same market or something similar to a different market.
Therefore, these are areas that you’re going to have to find, investigate and do research into to figure out what you can do to stand out and really differentiate yourself from everybody else.
Questions to ask yourself:
- What is your competitive advantage?
- How are you different?
- How are you better and how are you better in a way that actually matters to your customers?
Also, this is an opportunity for you to stand for something, to allow your personality and your authenticity to really come through;
- What are your brand values?
- What are your, sort of, characteristics?
- What does your brand or your business stand for?
- What are some of the attributes that somebody would be able to relate to you on and to your business on a more personal level?
Segmentation
The reason segmentation is such a powerful marketing principle is because by kind of narrowing the focus on who it is that you’re going to concentrate on, who it is that you’re going to focus your marketing and your business on; it allows you to not have to try to reach everybody, but rather just to try to reach a few select people.
It’s a whole lot easier to get the attention of 10, 100, 1000 or even 10,000 people, than it is to try to get the attention of millions, if not billions of people, which would be crazy and prohibitively expensive.
So when it comes to segmentation, what you want to do is you want to take a look at all of the different segments of your target market that you could serve. Then you want to really dial in and really drill down into who it is that would get the most value from your business, from your brand, from your product, from your service and focus there.
This is the reason why using the 80/20 principle or Pareto’s Principle is so helpful. Essentially, the fact that 80% of your revenues are likely to come from just 20% of your customers/clients. When you apply this principle to your business, it starts to become really obvious where you’re going to focus, as it clearly highlights the 20% of people that are going to give you 80% of your business’s revenue & profit.
There is also another rule called the 120 over 20 rule, which basically states that, the top 20% of your customers will give you 120% of your revenue because the bottom 20% of your customers are going to end up losing you money. Again, the point being that you really want to focus on that top 20% of your customers, and of those ideal people who love you, love what you do, are happy to pay you for the true value you provide and also want to tell everyone they know about just how great you really are.
Concentration
Essentially what concentration says is that once you’ve applied your segmentation, you’ve divided & really categorised your different segments of customers, you’ve done your 80/20 analysis and you’ve determined your top 20% of customers; you now want to concentrate & focus on those people and ignore everything else.
However, obviously you don’t just never communicate with anybody else, but you do want to start focusing & tailoring your message, your service to deliver towards that top tier or 20%. Really focus all your time, effort, money, energy & resources on serving them to the best of your ability. In turn, you can get more of them, keep them for longer, and consequently help increase your revenue and your profits.
Tips & Treats
Now that you know the principles to successful marketing strategies, what are some tactics that you can use right now to take all of those principles and start getting even faster results?
First off you need to look into the who, the what, the where, the when, the why and the how of putting this all together.
The Who?
This is all about your ideal target market or ideal customer avatar or buyer persona; which is who is the person, who is the market, who is the segment that you’re trying to serve?
Your goal here is to try to understand them better than they even know themselves. Get into their heads, get into their thoughts, get into their feelings and try to figure out what is motivating them? What is incentivising them? Why are they doing the things they do? Why are they buying the things they buy?
This is why it’s incredibly important to talk to your customers. However, if you don’t have customers yet, it’s important to talk to your prospective customers, so you can start to understand what is driving them.
Who are they? What makes up their gender, their age, their income, their occupation, where they live, what are their values, their attitudes, their lifestyles, everything.
This is such an incredibly important thing to do because when you do this, you’re going to be able to be a little more polarising with your content, because you’re going to be able to speak directly to the wants, the needs, the dreams and the desires of a specific market, at the exclusion of everyone else.
This is going to mean that those that love you are going to love you more.
The What?
This is the offer, message, content and the context behind what it is that you sell & how you speak to them. This is where the example of miracles and miseries comes in.
Their miracles are their wants, their dreams, their desires and everything that they’re trying to get. Whereas, their miseries are their fears, their frustrations, their pains, their problems and everything they’re trying to move away from.
Your business serves as the bridge that helps them cross the gap from misery towards miracle from their current pain to their desired end state.
This is why the better you understand what their pains are and what they actually want to get, the better you’re going to be able to create messaging, content and marketing that really resonates & really strikes a chord with them.
The Where?
This is all about where are you going to market your business? How are you going to stand out? How are you going to find your people, stand up and get their attention?
When it comes to marketing choices available, there is no shortage of different options to choose from e.g. email marketing, social media, paid advertising etc.
However, if you’re totally lost and you don’t know where to go, you really can’t go wrong with Facebook, Instagram or YouTube. Facebook has over 2 billion monthly active users. Instagram has over a billion, and YouTube has over 2 billion.
However, with this all being said there is one strategy/content choice that really stands out then all the rest in the current environment, and this is video content. This is obvious for something like YouTube, but even for Facebook & Instagram, video is still the preferred media choice, both by the algorithms themselves, but also by your customers.
Final Thoughts
Marketing is ever changing, however, by implementing the above principles your marketing strategy is off on the right track.
You may ask but when is the best time to start? As the ancient Chinese proverb says, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. However, the second best time is today. So if you’re not already investing in a marketing strategy on these platforms to grow your business, to try to get attention; today’s the day!
And if you’re wondering why you’re doing this is? Then like we talked about at the beginning, to get attention, to grow your business, to generate more leads, to generate more sales, to increase your revenue, essentially, to set yourself up for success.
However, if you’re still unsure on where to begin or want help along the way then we at Ryan Marketing Solutions are here to help. Contact us today and we can schedule a FREE consultation call to answer any questions you may have.
