Effective Marketing Vs Efficient Marketing: What’s your choice?
One thing that I wasn’t in my school days, being popular. I was one of the most introvert boys in the class. The number of my friend was limited. 5-6 persons. These 5-6 friends are still close to me.
I was also not the brightest student in the class. But I was somehow effective. In every exam, I passed with an average of B+ grade.
I had a very bad memory. ( still now, I have trouble with memorizing words) But what I had was some tricks in my bag. I was very good at making strategies before doing anything.
So, why I’m telling this story?
In the world of internet, sometimes number can be overwhelming . Facebook likes, pinterest shares or instagram stories- these all are the quantitative measurement of how succesfully you’re presenting your brand online.
So, we focus on liikes, shares and comments to measure the success rate of our online presence. But , this not how the digital marketing system works. Maybe, this is why your online campaign isn’t contributing to your ROI as much as you thought. Let’s dive deep into it.
How an effective digital Marketing system works
An effective digital marketing system consist of four simple but sophisticated steps. They are:
- Find your audience
- attract your audience and keep their attention
- Turn your audience into customers
- Do more of what works
Find your audience
Different niche exist on different social platforms. You have to find your niche and
Whether you’re a content maker or a business owner, you probably have a audience or niche for your work. But you have to find out where your audience exist in online. For example, if you’re a restaurant owner, then different food review sites, food review blogs, social platforms like instagram or pinterest is the perfect place for reaching out your audience.
proceed into the second step of the digital sales funnel.
Attract your audience :
You have find your audience. But now what? Turns out there are thousands of other people
like you with their businesses. They want the same thing as you do. That is finding a niche and turning them into customers. So, how’ll you survive this in this big sea?
You have to grab your customer’s attention by providing them with valubale content . You have to gain a unique position in your audience’s heart by differentiating your value from other competitors.
The content can be in form of post like how to blogs, step by step guide, free ebooks, different video contents, animation contents or just a free demo of your services that you’re providing.
For example, Hubspot, a inbound marketing company leverage their blog to provide value to their audience. In their blog, they post how to articles, free templates, some simple tools for blogging and of course, free courses to educate their potential customers about their unique CMS system, the service that they provide to their customer.
Turn your audience into customers
If you’re successfully grabing your customer’s attention, then congratulations!! You’re doing it right.
Now, it’s time to find out who you’re potential customers are and make a bond that never breaks. How can you find out who your potential customers are? It’s easy dummy! You have to set a goal based on different metrics like how many email subscriptions there are, how many people are visiting your website, on which page they’re spending their time most etc.
Point is, if you answer to these questions, then chance is you’ll see a pattern and can set a strategy based on that.
But one thing keep in mind, it’s better to have an average of 300 site visitors and 100 sales per month than a thousand vistors and having only 100 sales.
Do more of what works:
Experts say, If you to be good at something, you have to practice at least ten thousand hours of that craft. The key take way is, you have to repeat the same process over and over again in order to grow your business.
Your audience like valuable contents, give them valuable blog post about your services. If you’re most of your sales funnel comes from instagram traffic, then focus on instagram.
The mantra is, find out, adapt and repeat.
Keys to being effective
Advertising across digital media platforms is the same way as past prayer and spray techniques. We now know that different consumers react very to advertising tactics.
Consumers also have different behaviors based on their own objectives. Each social follower is on their own “social consumer decision-making journey.” So, marketing to all your social media followers in the same way is ineffective
Of course, you can’t pick and select your followers. This approach doesn’t mean by any way that you don’t have to continue building up your social media so to expand your base of followers.
Instead let’s go back to the concept of picking your followers and selecting them. In a sense, there’s a way to do this.
After all, you pick and choose who you are targeting what to segment. You’ve already heard about, and already segment your email lists already. You can already have resources based on your interests , previous habits that segment your followers. .
So, how do you segment your followers on social digital platforms ? The solution lies in controlling the media. Media monitoring is not about listening through various media sources for mentions of your brand.
Instead, turn your efforts in tracking media into media intelligence. Learn to listen to and identify your social followers’ behaviors. Then segment your followers by creating tailored paid ads on social media. Also,don’t forget about re targeting those ads.
Because do more of what works. These segments will allow you to interact , as well as better.It will also funnel followers. So that, you can provide them with the latest and most important offers or ads.
Examples from the McKinsey & Company’s Social Consumer Decision Journey
Consumer’s decision journey on digital platforms are divided into 3 stages. creating buzz, learning from customers and targeting customers.
McKinsey & Company’s research highlights examples of the 3 core marketing elements for reaching your followers on their social consumer decision journey.
As you will see, each of these social media actions does not involve the entire follower base. Also, successful results can be enacted from using very small audience samples
Creating Buzz
An example of creating buzz through social channels comes from Ford Motor Company and their Fiesta Movement campaign behind the U.S. launch of their Fiesta model. Ford tapped 100 social media influencers as part of the campaign .
Ford gave them a European model of the car with “missions” to complete . Ford also asked them to document their experience on various social channels.
The videos that were created by those influencers as part of this Fiesta campaign generated 6.5 million views on YouTube. Ford received 50,000 requests for information about the Fiesta. They sold 10,000 cars in the first six days they were available
Learning from Customers:
PepsiCo wanted to find out what consumers thought about their Mountain Dew Brand. They ran ‘DEWmocracy Promotions’ and used social media to gather insights.
Their findings led to creating new flavors of Mountain Dew. Since 2008 over 36 million cases have been sold
Targeting Customers
The Levi Strauss Company has utilized social media to offer location-specific deals. One social media campaign involved direct interactions with 400 consumers . It led to 1,600 people to turn up at local stores due to social media’s word-of-mouth effect
Conclusion
Gaining your digital platforms with the most followers is not always the metric for success.
Media monitoring and media intelligence can help you create specialized campaigns that have a larger ROI to target smaller segments of your social followers.
These smaller campaigns can be more effective than larger ones. You can likely run several smaller campaigns with the same resources and cost.
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