Like it or not, marketing continues to play a pivotal role in the success of a business. With all of the uncertainty in the world at the moment, you may be contemplating pausing your marketing campaigns to save money. You may have also convinced yourself that there is no market for your product or service. However, we recommend taking this chaotic time and turning it into an opportunity for change and growth.
We don’t mean bombarding your email marketing subscribers with daily offers, but we do think it is necessary for consumers to be able to find you and purchase a product or service. There are so many tools available to help you to reach your intended audience, but you must implement a strategy before taking an approach.
Additionally, think it through.
Ask the right questions, and create content that will be engaging both short-term and long-term.
If you are still struggling, no worries. We have several tips to help you out and get you through these challenging times.
Create a Strategy
Your goals will help determine what strategy is best for your business. Consider these questions, answer them honestly to yourself, and your goals will lead to a well-advised content strategy.
- What do you want to achieve from your digital marketing activity?
- What is your budget for this activity?
- What your success metrics?
- What is your unique market offering?
- Why would your customers choose you?
Based on your answers, your business objectives will guide you to determine:
- Who you want to connect with
- What content you should share
- How you will interact with your audience
- How often do you need to interact with your audience
- How do you want to influence people to act
Your content strategy should also be motivated by your intended audience, and once you have clearly defined your target audience the rest will fall into place.
Measure Your Current Situation
Before you implement a new marketing strategy, you should measure the status and state of your current marketing strategy. This will allow you to compare your new strategy to your old strategy, and make adjustments when necessary.
Certain measurements to include:
- Channel Growth
- Audience Demographics
- Who you are engaging with
- Engagement per post
- Social traffic to website
- Conversions
Identify Your Target Audience
If you already know your audience, then great. If not, you can create engaging content that will help you better understand who your audience is and what they are interested in. The better you know your audience, the better. It is more cost-effective as they are more likely to convert.
Consider who you want to connect with:
- Who is your audience? Parents? Children? Professionals? College students?
- Consider demographics such as age, gender, city, etc.
- What content do they like to see and what platforms do they spend the majority of their time on?
- What are their interests? What are their challenges?
There are many things to take into consideration regarding your target audience, but there are also many tools that can help make your job easy. For example, SEMRush and Google Analytics are two tools we use regularly.
Create Content That Matters
Do not just create content, create content that matters. Create GREAT content. Your content should vary depending on the channel you are publishing it to, and your content should drive your viewers to your website. In order to determine what content people are looking for, you will need to do your research. Keyword research is easy and affordable with the use of Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Google Trends.
During your keyword research, you should define your keyword strategy and search range:
- Search volume
- Ranking
- Competition
- Human intent
- Customer journey
- Mid vs long-tail keywords
Another very helpful and useful free tool is Answer the Public. It displays the questions people are searching for around a certain word and then provides you with a lot of great ideas for blog content.
Listen To Your Customers
Consider the way that your customers talk to you or ask you certain questions. Do they use certain words or phrases? When you are talking to them, be sure to ask open-ended questions to get to know them. When creating content, you can use these open-ended questions to spark a discussion.
Organize and Maximize Your Content
Not only do you want to create content that your audience wants to see and digest, but you also want to make it digestible in different ways. For example, having an active blog is excellent, but also have the opportunity for people to listen to a podcast, or watch a video.
To organize your content, our crew at Eternity highly recommends using a content calendar that can be established either monthly or quarterly. This keeps everyone in their lane and ensures that deadlines are met.
Measure Your Success
The last step in rethinking your marketing strategy is measuring your performance and hopefully finding success. By doing this, you will notice areas where improvement is needed, but you will also be able to give yourself and your team a pat on the back.
Things To Consider:
- Profit margin
- Cost per inquiry
- Cost per sale
- Conversion Rate
These figures alone will dictate how much you need to spend on your marketing strategy moving forward.
