How to improve the effectiveness of advertising: strategic marketing

Entrepreneurs often think of marketing as synonymous with advertising. Digital marketing in their view comes down to creating a landing page and attracting traffic through search engines and social networks.

As a result, such entrepreneurs are either content with little or resent the “myths about selling sites”. The key mistake in 99% of cases is spending money on advertising without understanding what, to whom and how to sell.

In fact, marketing works according to the 4P model: Product, Price, Promotion, Place. Who knows and uses it, he squeezes the maximum out of marketing.

If you reduce marketing to a website and advertising, you might get a story when a resident of a metropolis buys the first fishing rod and other fishing accessories that come across in order to put a bread pellet on a hook and throw it into the nearest body of water, hoping to catch a big pike. The fisherman will object: for pike, you need a spinning rod, and with a simple rod, even for catching minnows, you need a properly adjusted depth and hook size, not to mention a more creative approach to the bait issue.

Marketing is your bait. The market is a reservoir. Clients are fish. So that you catch not only roach for domestic cats, you should understand the basic things.

Goals and objectives of marketing

Complete marketing includes:

• market analysis;
• competitor analysis;
• study of the target audience;
• correct positioning of the product;
• product portfolio development.

It makes sense to create a site with selling content and set up advertising only after working through all the points listed above.

In addition to current tasks, you must know your global goals and move towards them. Strategic marketing is the study of the market prospects and capabilities of your enterprise, aimed at long-term success, leading to the development of strategies and tactics appropriate to target segments.

In the Western market, with its century-old history, marketing has long been a part of strategic management in any company. Few of us have matured to this level yet.

The goal of marketing is to make sales efforts unnecessary. His goal is to know and understand the client so well that the product or service will fit him exactly and sell himself.

These words belong to Peter Drucker, a professor at Harvard University. It was he who developed an effective and familiar enterprise management system today.

How to organize marketing

When building the decomposition of your business, you must clearly understand:

• How will your turnover grow?
• where and how to look for new customers;
• how to increase the average check;
• how to enter new market segments and develop them;
• in which direction to expand the product line.

Market

First of all, conduct a market analysis of the market. What is its volume, how much profit can be squeezed out in general? What segments are there in your niche, where does the product fit better? What are the trends today and what will be relevant tomorrow?

When analyzing the market, you always need to cover a long period in order to understand not only the current indicators, but also the dynamics – the needs of your buyers progress and change every year. You have to predict in order to stay on the horse.

Competitors

After analyzing the market, study the competitors. List them in a table, write down their strengths and weaknesses. Take another look at your product. What advantages does it have that can become a real hook for the buyer? Write them down and form a USP – a unique selling proposition. What a person will receive only from you. If your product solves problems and problems better, emphasize it with the language of numbers and facts.

Price and service are just as important as the properties of the product itself.

When the 2020 pandemic hit, there were three powerful pizza chains in the United States: Papa John`s, Domino`s and Pizza Hut. Their product is more or less equal in potential. Today, only Papa John`s is doing well. Since the first days of quarantine, they have created a mobile application where you can select ingredients and order pizza in a couple of clicks. Hired more couriers for home delivery. Competitors were utterly defeated, and Pizza Hut was on the verge of bankruptcy.

This is the power of good service. Even if your product doesn’t have benefits, you can create them. The key is to know what your customer wants. Here we come close to the analysis of the target audience.

The target audience

Who is your buyer? Gender, age, occupation? How much does he earn? Married or single, a resident of Khrushchev or a country villa? How does his day go, with whom does he communicate, who is the authority for him? Interests, hobbies? When and where is he on the Internet? What is the main thing for him in life, what is his character and temperament?

All these questions are very important. You won’t sell a Porsche to a janitor, just as you won’t sell a Lada to a top manager of a federal corporation. The touch panel on household appliances is not important for a pensioner; young people will ignore dietary supplements to strengthen the heart.

Your spherical customer in a vacuum is the so-called avatar. Draw his portrait, imagine the avatar as a living person. Live in your thoughts his day, understand his pains and needs.

To study the target audience, the best tool is a telephone interview. Call your customers, ask them these questions. Ask friends, relatives, acquaintances. People will tell you what they love and what they fear. And you can derive leads for your marketing from this.

Important: do not sell product features, but customer benefits. No one is interested in how beautiful the drill in your store is and what drills are made of. A man wants to quickly and easily make a hole in the concrete in order to finally hang this picture and calm his grumbling wife. “A unique nano-alloy and a powerful supermotor” loses miserably to a simple offer “Drill any wall in a matter of seconds.”

It is very good if the avatar believes you from the first phrase. The market is saturated with advertising. It is worth mentioning in the messenger that you are planning to go on a camping trip, and immediately backpacks, tents and mosquito sprays from dozens of different companies begin to jump out of every crack.

Advertising has become familiar to people, they have learned not to notice it. Any potential buyer today is like a handsome prince, around whom a series of contenders for the bride. Every smart girl is beautiful, and everyone announces this in unison. The natural reaction is to cover your ears and not hear anything.

Knowing your avatar, you can predict his actions. Knowing your product, you can build a strategy so that the avatar goes down the road you need. Here’s how it works in the age of digital noise and sensory overload.

Customer journey

Sales in the forehead give an effect only with an exact hit in a powerful need. But such luck is rare. A year and a half ago, to sell antique masks, it was enough to write “masks” and indicate the price. Today it won’t work like that anymore.

To sell in a normal and competitive environment, you need to move step by step.

1. Grab the customer’s attention.

The first thing a person needs to notice is you. Know that you exist. And most importantly, remember. You need to awaken and kindle interest. It can be useful content when you help a client through your video blogs, social networks or publications. Subscribers to a blog about construction will be interested in a note where it is correctly painted how to arrange cabinets so that later you do not cling to every corner with your little toes. People read this and will remember your company as an expert in the market. You can be interested in different ways, we have described one option out of many.

2. Sign the client.

Now it is necessary that the client does not disappear from sight. Befriend him. You understand that contests and sweepstakes in social networks are held for one purpose – to get people to subscribe and read the necessary pages. A more efficient mechanism is to collect contact details. Present a lead magnet – a useful checklist or guide that will solve the client’s information need better than what is in the open search. Instead, ask for an email or phone number.

3. Convert a customer into a buyer.

In marketing, there is the concept of “tripwire” (English tripwire, stretching) or OTO (one time offer, one-time offer) – an inexpensive product, the purpose of which is to catch, encourage you to make the first purchase from you. Tripwire solves one of the client’s problems, while it costs ridiculous money. People rarely refuse this. The result of the purchase satisfies them, and you will no longer be forgotten. Even more – they are thinking about buying your main product.

4. Warm up the client.

Give people new useful information. It can be posts, publications or mailing lists. At the same time, tell us more about your product, describe the benefits in more detail. Show a picture of the future – how the pains were resolved as a result of buying your main product. Now you can already sell.

5. Satisfy the customer.

Your core product should fit the avatar’s needs and solve their pain. If you were honest with the client from the very beginning and correctly showed the benefits, he will be pleased and grateful. This is important if you are looking forward to it in the future.

6. Secure the friendship.

Don’t forget about the person after the purchase. Organize a service. Perhaps additional minor services. Online school? Chat for consultations. Do you sell TVs? Free installation and configuration. Vacuum cleaners? Free set of dust bags.

7. Show the return path.

Offer new products or services to existing ones. Or bonus points that the client can convert into rubles at the next purchase.

8. Turn a customer into an enthusiast

These can be live events, personal consultations, competitions. The higher the customer loyalty, the more willingly he recommends your products to friends and acquaintances.

9. Turn an enthusiast into a promoter

Offer commercial benefits from cooperation with you – gifts for reposts, referral programs, discounts for attracting new customers.

If you get the client right through this path, he will start advertising you. Agree, it is much more effective than a one-time purchase.

Mission and values

In addition to interacting with the client, marketing requires more in-depth work.

The product does not start with a USP. The product is the fruit of your company, so the client must understand you as a company. You must have a philosophy, mission and values. For example, IKEA: improving everyone’s daily life.

The mission and values of the company reflect its essence. If the essence of the company is correctly reflected in the identity (logo, corporate font, color, tone of voice), interaction with the client occurs on a subconscious level. The brain reads nonverbal cues and attaches a friend or foe tag to them. This is where the inner feeling comes from, that I want to buy from these guys, I like them.

If the client is not connected with your heart, he will go to a competitor as soon as he finds out that there is a more profitable product. If a client feels a connection through values, he will continue to buy from you, because they don’t betray their own, and values are always higher than benefits.

Summary

We hope we were able to show how important proper marketing is and how it differs from the reduced tools that most entrepreneurs use. Develop yourself a marketing plan for the next 12 months, put our advice into practice.

Approach the process calmly, thoughtfully, and creatively. Marketing is a fascinating detective story, a puzzle with prizes and profit growth. For this we love him.

If you need help – get in touch! We are Escalator marketing studio. We are engaged in the development, analysis and implementation of marketing strategies for various business niches. You can discuss any marketing question with us on Zoom, it’s free.

Good luck and sales growth!