Welcome to the year 2018 (or maybe should we say – almost 2019?), where winning the marketing game is practically impossible or so complicated that a lot of players are, rather, spectators. With such a marketing clutter, getting your audience attention and reaching your business goals seems to be harder than ever. Having the right software development company on board can also help.
We decided to ask 30+ professionals from all over the world about their ultimate recipe for winning the marketing game. Insights come from many industries, companies and brands: so we are sure we deliver a brilliant article full of knowledge. Enjoy and share!
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Neil Napier | CEO @Kyvio | www.kyvio.com
Marketing is a pretty long term process. If you want to win your marketing game you should think of it that way. Marketing is about building up an image and brand that people recognize and trust. And that never happens overnight. Work hard for it but don’t expect it to make immediate revenue. Also focus on offering value through your marketing. Audience today recognize a cheap marketing attempt. So invest in nurturing your audience, don’t take them for granted. If you accomplish it all, promoting as niche businesses as services referring to termites in Michigan won’t be troublesome.
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Ruchi Hupta | CEO @Shane Communications | shanecomm.com
Most business owners pay so much focus and attention to marketing and lead generation that their sales almost takes a hit. If your sales efforts is not up to the mark, our marketing efforts are futile. Also, after sales service is even more crucial in order to get referrals and repeat business.
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Bruce Harpham | Content Marketing Specialist | http://bruceharpham.com/
Start with reading the classic books: I’ve read all the classics like “Scientific Advertising” and the modern classics like Dan Kennedy’s books. For Internet marketing specifically, I strongly recommend both of Russell Brunson’s books: Expert Secrets and Dot Com Secrets.
Adopt an experimental mindset for marketing: You will need to try a wide variety of experiments to land a win.
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Klaudia Zylka | Marketing Specialist @Sotrender | www.sotrender.com
Always keep in mind your audience. You might produce an excellent content but if it doesn’t relate to needs and interests your audience have, you may forget about achieving your goals and success. Create your buyer persona in the first place, it should be your starting point for every marketing activity.
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Isaac Bullen | New Zealand Director @3WhiteHats | https://www.3whitehats.co.nz/
Keep your customers front of mind when carrying out any marketing activity.
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Agnieszka Zawadka | CMO @Livespace | www.livespace.io
There is no magic pill or a one-size-fits-all solution to building a highly successful marketing. Each company has its challenges and the key is to find its personal fulfilling formula. If you want to view your job as empowering the success of the sales department, you need to start with market research. Target markets are those that your company can reach, and whose members are likely to buy your products or services. Invest the time and effort to align every communication with customer pain points and the sales team’s goals. Seek the balance between short-term performance and long-term branding activities. This will help you to identify and generate high-quality leads. If you want to win your marketing game, you must be fast, smart, agile, specialized, and data-driven at all times.
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Noman Rehman | Digital Marketing @Associate Concept Schools | http://nomanrehman.com/
Marketing includes but is not limited to advertising, SEO, public relations, press releases, blogging, promotions and sales. Using the right marketing techniques via the right marketing platform at the right time is the formula to win the marketing game.
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Martin Olsson | CEO @Brandox | https://brandox.com
Firstly “never go hiking without a map” – make sure you have a plan and decide what you want to achieve. Adjust the plan accordingly as you go on. Listen to your audience and know what works today as the game changes rapidly. Keep what you promise and don’t over-sell. Use humour and be bold – don’t be afraid to experiment with your marketing and mix. Try to stay outside the box and make the cost of mistakes low so that you can make a lot of them …! 🙂
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Brooke Herron | Wine Industry Marketing and Communications Consultant
Remember, that marketing and sales can’t work without each other, and you won’t have as many sales without any focus on marketing. You can exponentially increase your sales, with good marketing. Marketing is what brings the eyeballs to your brand. And then after a certain amount of time, those people who have been seeing your brand more and more (not just once) come to your website. Your are on their mind now. You were not before.
Then they look at your website and your offers. Or your event. Maybe they send you a message or ask you a question about something you sell or an event you are having. They they buy something or come to one of your events. Some will buy more quickly than others. But if you are in a conversation with them and keep communicating with them, they will eventually become customers.
BUT, If marketing does great work and increases your sales potential by 200% but the customers they send to your business don’t get helped in the right way (bad salesperson or no effort to capture any sales). Or don’t get helped at all (email not responded to, phone call not answered) you will lose all of those sales you had the potential to make. It is important to remember that you must not forget to set up the sales side to match up with your marketing efforts. This is a mistake many small businesses, particularly in the wine industry forget.
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Pollyanna Ward | Digital Strategist & Digital Brand Manager @Vifit Sport
Who is your target audience? Segment them by demographic, or interests, or behaviours (the list goes on), choose the channels they use, develop a strategy that covers the channels that gets you to your end goal. Choose tactics that help you win that strategy.
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David Trott | Lead Digital Marketer @Impact Business Advisors
Without exception, the single most important thing our clients can do to improve their marketing is to talk to their existing customers. Forget spending £5k on a market research agency – get five or six of your best clients together in a bar, pay for all their drinks, and ask them about their businesses. Learn about their customers – who they want to speak to, and what they want to say to them. This is marketing gold-dust – and all-too-often overlooked. Use your existing customers as a source of intelligence for finding new clients – it might be the best thing you do this year for your marketing.
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Bohumil Pokstefl | CEO @Kontentino | www.kontentino.com
Experiment with marketing channels and combine the most effective ones. For some brands the most effective channel is TV combined with Facebook. For others it might be LinkedIn, Content marketing and Google ads. Experiment, measure, learn, apply.
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Gloria Ziencina-Kawula | Global Community and Marketing Manager @BRAND24 | brand24.com
Be a step ahead of the competition. How? Learn from your customers: start with tracking their behavior on your website, analyze their feedback, and monitor their online conversations about your brand and products. Improve your product, encourage customers to give feedback, learn from it to know what is the most important. By monitoring online conversations you will learn how to talk to your target group, where to find them, how to engage them and encourage to spread a word about your offer. Be with your audience, let your brand be their friend and companion, be grateful and thankful, say sorry if needed, encourage them and appreciate. Don’t take anything for granted, be always a little bit too kind in relations.
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Oksana Chyketa | Marketer @Albacross | https://albacross.com/
- In addition to publishing high-quality content, it is also essential to optimize the content according to the requirements of the search engines. Optimizing of on-page SEO will lead to a significant increase in organic traffic.
- Make sure your website is responsive. Don’t neglect your mobile users; thus, always ensure that your site is compatible enough to support accessibility via a range of devices such as tablets and smartphones.
- Be patient about the outcomes of your digital marketing campaigns and be consistent when it comes to your marketing strategy.
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Vlad Calus | Co-founder @Planable | www.planable.io
Find your best channel, find exaaaactly what works for you. Our team understood that content and Linkedin is all we need, and we focused all our marketing resources for them, that’s why we’re creating at least 3 pieces / week for our blog, and videos, posts, comments on LinkedIn, by doing more than 500+ people outreach / week. If you have no ideas, where to start, here’s a great way to brainstorm with your team mates.
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Justin Hartzman | Co-Founder & CEO @needls | http://www.needls.com/
When it comes down to it, marketing is about three things: strategy, testing, and optimization. Without a well-thought out strategy, you’re just shooting blanks into a barrel of fish. Without proper split testing, you’re not collecting enough information about what’s actually working or not. And then, if you’re seeing that targeting to one part of your demographic isn’t working, or one of your ads is doing better than the rest, optimize on that knowledge.
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Martin Hennig | Senior Marketing Transformation Consultant | http://www.peregrine.se/
It used to be enough to have superior products to run successful businesses. The challenge today is to get your products in front of the right people. That requires discipline, patience, and a bunch of other skills. Your advertising, marketing, customer service and sales experience need to be a consistent and enjoyable experience for your customers in times where the competition is just a click away. Loyalty is hard to get and even harder to maintain. Make your customers feel special all the way and exceed their expectations whenever you get a chance.
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Eden Spodek | Founder & CEO @Spodek & Co. | http://spodekandco.com
“Be strategic. Develop a strategic plan that maps out goals, objectives, strategy, tactics, and measurement. This sounds so simple and yet you’d be surprised how many businesses I speak with almost every day that use tactics without a strategy, or any idea what they are trying to achieve. Remember to test, test, test, then continue what works well and discard what doesn’t. And don’t be afraid try new things!”
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Hemant Jani | Co Founder & CMO of Abhisi | www.abhisi.com
The most essential potion for the success of your marketing campaign is to get your audience right. Know your customers better, their behaviors, buying patterns, Demographics, locations and on which platform they are present.
Sell the pain points, not your product and services. Market the pain points and you will get the better response on your marketing campaign. Engage publicly with your audience, the best marketing strategy. Creating and optimizing sales funnels.
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Ben Culpin | Content Marketing Specialist | WakeUpData.com
Be original! While it’s ok to take inspiration from others, we always try to think creatively in our marketing efforts and produce messages and material which is unique and hasn’t been produced by others.
Have a sense of humor and be human as well! As long as you are still getting your message across, many customers would prefer to hear a light-hearted narrative where they can connect with you on a human level, rather than something which is overly-formal and distant.
All in all, taking the time to understand, nurture and build relationships with your audience is the best way to improve your marketing efforts in the future. If you have a growing base who understand your product and know that you listen to them, you are on the right path to successful marketing!
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Georgios Chasiotis | Marketing Hustler & Co-Founder @Slide In | https://www.slidein.gr/
In order to stand out, you have to add value to other peoples’ lives. If you don’t add value, sooner or later people will forget about you.
When trying to do marketing right, you always have to keep one thing in mind: Marketing should add value, not ask for it.
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Enes Karakash | Account Manager @PikselLTD / http://piksel.mk/
– As I said above – uniqueness is the key. Create a story around the brand and product that you promote. Try to see and tell the whole story from different aspects, something that will not always be focused on sales but on engaging content which will connect the user with the brand on more than one or two levels. Adjust the content for the different marketing channels.
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Nina Kozlowska | Content Designer @BrainyBees | BrainyBees.eu
Stop guessing. If something works for one of your brands, it doesn’t mean it would work wonders for others. What’s more – it could do more harm than good. Test and analyse whatever you can – it takes time, it takes efforts, but it pays off in the end. You have a lot of data to interpret. Make the most of it. No excuse.
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Matteo Volani | Founding Partner of isac/volani | www.isacvolani.com/home/consulting/
We always like to repeat to ourselves that there’s never a one-fits-all solution in marketing.
Every company, industry, stage of development, presents different challenges and the most solid base to build a marketing strategy on it’s an in-depth understanding of what you’re working on and what you’re marketing.
The dialogue with your clients it’s always the most relevant discussion as you’re blessed with a fresh and new perspective than who built the business, and more often than not the solutions are already under your nose. Once you understand the problems you’re tackling, it’s just about testing, experimenting and iterating making sure every iteration brings you valuable insights on the way to the perfect marketing mix.
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Norbert Strappler | Founder @DragDropr.com @SyncSpider.com @nnpro.at
- Determine your audience precisely and define your USP!
Do a thorough research to know who you are targeting, how to reach them and understand the reason why they want your product.
- Talk to your audience.
Social media channels are perfect for creating relations with your audience. Talk about your industry, your users, yourself and your business and always give a helping hand. Provide value.
- Create a powerful online presence.
Beside obvious blogging, tutorials and tips, list your product on various listing portals, review sites and do more press releases.
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Nick Stephens | Freelance Digital Marketing Expert | www.njstephens.com
Be consistent, if you say you are going to do a “Friday feeling” post every friday do it. Be visible, it doesn’t have to be the most elaborate post ever, but make sure people know you are there by saying something. Make use of as many opportunites as possible, even if that means doing work for free at the start. Review your progress, you are wasting your time and money and if you aren’t looking at what works and what doesn’t.
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Dynamitri J. Nawrot | Digital Consultant
You need to post good content consistently. Make sure that you create a two-way conversation, an ongoing dialogue with your audience through your brand’s messaging, and that the content is relatable and strikes a chord with the audience. If people feel that there is a conversation and they have someone equal to them, someone who is on the same level that they are, someone who’s their peer, they’ll respond and put your brand on the forefront making sure that you win the marketing game.
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In the first “episode” of this series, we presented some tips & tricks for content marketing.
Stay tuned for next two parts: e-commerce & social media hacks!
