The secret to attracting interest that turns into sales is identifying what your customers value. You can then use that value to create a business marketing strategy that gives potential customers exactly what they are looking for. This uniquely targeted advertising works because it links what you are uniquely positioned to provide with customers who are looking for exactly that. Even if this is a small audience at first, it gives you a position of strength that you can build on to expand your market reach.

Value Is Why Customers Buy from You

Customers are looking for good value for their money. Whenever they consider making any purchase, they will compare the cost of that purchase against its perceived value. They will only buy something if they think its value exceeds the value of the money they will spend. Not only that, but in a crowded marketplace, people will only buy your products if they perceive that the value you offer is better than the value your competitors offer.

Note that in all these cases, it is the perceived value that matters. In other words, it’s what your customers think is valuable, not what is actually valuable in any objective measure. It might not even have anything to do with what you think is most valuable about your offerings. Though we naturally want to start marketing to our perceived strengths, it’s more important to identify the parts of our offerings that successfully connect with our customers. Leveraging Digital Business Cards can help highlight these connections.

Different Types of Value

Value is a complex concept, and many people perceive different aspects of a product as being more valuable than others. To really target the things that matter to your customers, you have to figure out what types of value matter to them and emphasize them in your business marketing. You want to show how you offer more of this type of value than your competitors do. Here are several different types of value that customers often consider important.

Technical

Technical value relates to the function of your product. For example, the 0-60 time for a car is a technical value. With cars, other types of technical value include the cornering ability, the feel of the suspension, and maybe even the engine’s compression ratio. As you can see, technical value can be very specific, and marketing on this basis can be very effective if your product is technically superior in a way that matters to some customers. However, technical value in business marketing can be challenging because the people who appreciate these technical specifications are a small group and may not even be the final decision-makers.

Economic

Economic value is related to price, but it goes beyond simple pricing. Aspects of pricing like financing, volume discounts, and even customer loyalty discounts can make a big difference for some customers. In B2B marketing, economic aspects can also come in the form of pass-through value if a customer can use your brand name to increase their profitability. A similar value in B2C marketing is resale value, an economic value that is very important to some customers.

Service

Many customers value service as much as they value your product itself. They want convenient delivery, billing that fits their accounting system, and simple returns. Above all, some customers want you to be responsive to concerns and complaints. In fact, customers are often happier if they had a problem that you resolved for them than they would be if they never had a problem in the first place.

Social

Social value relates to how your people interact with their people to make an effective functional relationship. If people feel that they can talk to your salespeople, have a sense that you know and value them personally and they experience positive interpersonal relations, you are delivering good social value. Social media can offer genuine social value by allowing your company to interact with people in noncommercial interactions.

Style

One important value that matters to many customers is the style of your offering. This may be something visible in the product, such as a unique or trendsetting design. However, brands can often build a style reputation that means the brand itself is stylish, independent of the products. The presence of a brand mark can make even a mundane object into a stylish accessory. Style is typically more important in B2C marketing, but in some cases strong styling can offer significant pass-through value for B2B

Philosophical

Philosophical value isn’t necessarily anything related directly to your product or your interaction with your customers. Instead, it’s about a perception that the way your company does business aligns with their values. For example, if you follow eco-friendly practices, customers might be prepared to pay more for your products if that is a philosophical position they share. Social media is a great way to build philosophical value for your company.

How Value Contributes to Your Brand

Your brand is more than just your company’s name and its logo. Your brand is a value promise. You build a brand reputation by promising value and delivering it. Once built, a successful brand carries significant value with it, and people are prepared to pay extra for that value. It’s not unusual for a leading brand to be able to charge 50% more for a comparable item than weak or unknown brands.

In traditional terms, this is what’s often described as your “unique value proposition,” (or “unique selling proposition”). You are attempting to build a brand that differentiates you from your competitors by offering value to your customers that your competitors can’t match. This value is typically a blend of the different types we’ve talked about above: technical, economic, service, social, style, and philosophical.

Although you can start a brand with any type of unique value proposition, you will only successfully build it if you are able to deliver on the promise you made. Your brand builds its reputation one interaction at a time. Every interaction that meets or exceeds your customer’s value expectations helps to build the promise that your brand delivers value.

Value Case Histories

One way to understand and communicate your value to potential customers is using value case histories. You might call these testimonials or customer stories, but the concept is the same: giving a detailed narrative of how your product delivers value to companies and individuals. Whatever you call these in customer-facing sections of your website, it’s important to remember that the central focus of these stories is “value.” You want to demonstrate that customers are getting value from your products and services that they feel is worth the price.

Building Your Business Marketing Strategy Around Value

As you come to understand your value, it can help you identify what customers you should be targeting. You want to target the customers who truly value (and are willing to pay for) the type of value your brand delivers.

For example, if your company offers a significant technical value, you might build a content marketing strategy around highly technical information. You might start with a detailed analysis of the performance aspects of your offering and provide data showing the ways in which your offering achieves better results than similar products on the market.

Building a strategy around a style value these days would likely involve the use of influencers. Philosophical value might benefit from influencers, but it might not be necessary if your social media campaign is well-run.

Analyze Data to Confirm You Know What Your Customers Value

As with any marketing approach, your success depends on constantly reevaluating and adjusting your strategy based on data. As you collect data from your site visitors and customers, you will understand how your customers really think about your brand.

• Sales Data –This is the basic representation of what customers are really buying from you. If you clearly understand what your customers value about your brand, you will be able to explain why some items are selling much better than others. Pay attention to items that don’t fit your understanding of what your customers value – you might not have the full picture yet.
• Search Data – Search data shows you what searches brought people to your site, which includes considerable data about their values. This data is a lot harder to utilize than it used to be, due to privacy changes on the Internet. Often, paid search advertising gives more complete data, but it’s all still more fragmentary than it used to be. Combining search data with navigational data can help you home in on the thought processes of your customers.
• Navigational Data – Watching how customers navigate their way through your website can give you critical information about what matters to them. Technically minded customers will spend a lot of time looking at spec sheets, whitepapers, and studies. Economically minded customers will follow tags like “bargain” and “sale,” and they will look more at your financing options. Philosophically minded customers will gravitate toward your “About Us” page and browse mission statements or your core values. Reinforce the paths that lead to sales and expand their reach with social media and search campaigns.
• Personalized Experiences – Offering personalized experiences to your customers is another way to check if a particular sale was a fluke or representative of a value pattern. When customers can log in to your site, you can offer them products and services that you think reflect their values. If they take advantage of those opportunities, you know you really understand them.

By constantly reevaluating this data, you will be better able to connect with customers who are drawn to the value your business provides.

Start Marketing to Your Strengths

If your marketing efforts aren’t reaching the customers you hope to win, Webolutions can help. Our transformational Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach to digital marketing has been crafted to help you grow your business smarter, faster and easier.

With this unique approach, we work closely with your company leaders to clarify the elements of your business and your offering that make you truly unique and special. We’ll use this discovery process to craft effective brand messaging that clearly conveys the value you provide to your customers in ways that will connect with them on an emotional level. This process drives more effective communications and more connected user journeys, improving your marketing results.

Contact us today to learn how Webolutions can elevate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and help you grow your business. We serve clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

The post Identifying What Customers Value Is Critical to Your Business Marketing Strategy appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

In 2024, a digital marketing strategy is essential for the success of every business in just about every industry. According to a Pew Research Survey, 81% of Americans conduct their own research before making an important decision. In most instances, this research is primarily done online. Without an effective digital marketing strategy, it will be challenging to connect with these people and convert them into valuable customers.

Your digital marketing strategy provides your business with a comprehensive plan outlining how you’ll leverage the various digital channels at your disposal to reach your target audience, grow your brand, and generate the high-quality leads necessary for your business to thrive. For your digital marketing to be effective, it must go beyond detailing the specific tactics your business will use and also provide a big picture view of how your efforts will complement each other in order to achieve your overarching goals.

Despite digital marketing becoming an increasingly significant driver of success for businesses in recent years, 45% of organizations still don’t have a clearly defined digital marketing strategy. These companies are failing to leverage one of the most important tools at their disposal to help grow their business. In fact, businesses that have a well formulated digital marketing strategy tend to report greater success than those who don’t:

• 75% of marketers improved the trust and credibility of their company when they employed a digital marketing strategy
• Marketing teams that document their digital strategy are 313% more likely to experience success

Still not convinced? Here are 10 reasons why it’s crucial that you adopt a digital marketing strategy in 2024.

You’ll Have More Focused Efforts Aimed at Achieving Specific Goals

Your digital marketing strategy gives your marketing team direction. It provides a roadmap that keeps your business focused on the goals they want to achieve and the initiatives necessary to reach these goals. When you set clear goals as part of your digital marketing strategy, it also makes it easier to:

• Prioritize the initiatives that will be most effective in achieving your desired outcome
• Arrive at the proper budget necessary to achieve your goals
• Determine that best way to allocate your budget in order to maximize the ROI on your efforts
• Identify the right success metrics to evaluate the performance of your marketing tactics

You Can Ensure the Latest Trends Guide Your Efforts

Many businesses simply keep the same digital marketing strategy in place year after year. While this is better than not having a strategy at all, you risk using an outdated plan that either no longer aligns with your current goals or fails to leverage the latest trends that are impacting the digital marketing landscape today.

Keeping up with the latest digital marketing trends has never been more important than it is in 2024. The last 12 months have ushered in a new AI era that is changing the way businesses operate. Many of the most successful companies have been early adopters of AI technology and are actively pursuing ways to use AI to improve every aspect of their operations, including marketing.

AI technology allows you to automate many aspects of your marketing efforts, improving your efficiency and results. A few ways businesses are leveraging AI in their marketing efforts include:

• Using AI tools to improve keyword research efforts
• Implementing AI-powered chatbots to improve customer experience
• Leveraging AI plugins to more effectively use existing platforms, such as Canva, with their social media efforts
• Leveraging AI and machine learning algorithms to analyze massive quantities of customer behavior data to determine the most effective targeting strategies
• Implementing AI-powered predictive analytics to more effectively examine patterns and trends that will optimize your marketing efforts

When you update your digital marketing strategy every year, it provides an opportunity to evaluate the latest trends, digital marketing channels and tools which can provide your business with a competitive advantage. This process of annual reflection and planning ensures you remain on the forefront of the digital marketing landscape rather than scrambling to catch up with the businesses that innovated before you.

You Gain a Deeper Understanding of Your Audience

In order to ensure you’re targeting the right audience and delivering a message that will resonate with them, you first need to understand your audience on a deep level. What are their pain points? What information are they seeking out? What motivates them to take action?

With many traditional marketing methods, you lack the data necessary to gain these insights about your audience. Digital marketing, on the other hand, delivers a treasure trove of data to help you refine your efforts to connect with your target audience more effectively. You’ll be able to capture a wide range of data, including:

• Which pages on your website are visited most often
• How long people spend on each page (a measure of their level of engagement)
• What questions are most commonly being asked (which you should then address in your marketing content)
• Which CTAs on your website are clicked most often
• How far down the page visitors go when they are on your website
• Which interactive features on your website generate the most engagement
• Which pieces of content are shared the most (an indication that your audience finds this content valuable)

In addition, you can leverage social media marketing to directly engage with your audience on a more personal level. You can learn a great deal about what your audience values by reading and responding to their comments on your social media posts. When you respond to these comments, you’re also creating a direct connection with the individuals who made them. This demonstrates that you truly value them, which will help forge a relationship which may lead to these individuals becoming customers down the road.

Read our article: Current Marketing Trends – Eliminating Negative Reviews

It Becomes Easier to Develop an Effective Value Proposition

Most businesses face a very competitive landscape. In order to succeed, it’s critical to differentiate your business from your competitors so that your audience clearly understands why your offering is superior and provides a better experience. Developing a comprehensive digital marketing strategy with the help of experts from merged.ca can help you refine your value proposition so that it resonates better with your audience.

The data you compile about your target audience makes it easier to build out detailed buyer personas which help you understand their preferences, needs and motivations. This information can be used to develop messaging that will differentiate your brand from your competitors and allow you to convey the value your business provides.

Your digital marketing strategy can then outline the ways in which you’ll deliver this messaging to your audience. A cohesive strategy will also ensure that this messaging remains consistent across all your digital marketing efforts. Whether someone visits your website, engages with you on social media, reads your email newsletters or clicks on your paid ads, they will receive the same messaging about the value you provide and the ways your business is different than your competitors. This cohesiveness creates a powerful effect among your audience and helps you generate a loyal customer base.

You Can Target Your Marketing Resources on the Specific Audience Most Likely to Become a Customer

Traditional marketing methods such as TV, print, radio or billboard advertising provide very limited control over who your ad reaches. While you can make certain calculated decisions with these channels – demographic information is available for viewership of many popular TV shows and magazines – there’s still no guarantee that the people seeing your ad will actually be interested in your product or service.

Digital marketing removes a great deal of this uncertainty from the process. You have the ability to target the specific audience that is most likely to resonate with your message and become a customer. Digital marketing makes this possible in a variety of ways:

• You can target your social media ads to only be delivered to the profiles of individuals who meet the specific demographic information you identify in your buyer personas
• You can use organic SEO strategies and paid search (PPC) campaigns to increase the likelihood that your website and other digital marketing efforts reach individuals who are searching for information associated with the products or services you provide
• You can create gated content pieces that allow you to capture the email addresses of individuals who are interested in your product or service, allowing you to follow up with them using targeted email marketing journeys which will build trust and credibility in your company so that you remain top of mind as these individuals move closer towards their buying decision
• You have the ability to create sub-groups within your target audience to ensure these individuals receive the most relevant information for their needs

Digital marketing allows you to compile data that will help you better understand your buyer personas and refine your marketing strategy to address their needs more effectively. Over time, these refinements should improve the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, allowing you to improve your ability to connect with your audience and convert leads.

You Can Engage Your Audience at Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey

Most people don’t make purchases on impulse. Instead, it’s common for them to engage in a lengthy process where they research their options to understand what they need. Part of this research will involve learning more about specific products and services, but it will also give them an opportunity to learn more about the companies which provide these products and services.

When you’re able to engage your audience in the early stages of this buyer’s journey, it gives you a greater opportunity to capture their attention and move them through your sales funnel. Digital marketing allows you to accomplish this at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

With digital marketing, you have the ability to create content that targets every stage of this journey. Therefore, you can meet your audience where they are at the moment. In addition, you can track your audience through the journey to better understand their buying process. As you gain a deeper understanding of their behavior, you’ll be able to refine your marketing efforts to convert more leads.

Results Are Easily Measured

One of the greatest limitations associated with traditional marketing strategies involves the ability to accurately measure the results of your efforts. It’s virtually impossible to identify how many people contacted you after watching your TV commercial or viewing your print ad. Digital marketing, on the other hand, delivers a wealth of data that allows you to accurately measure the success of your efforts.

You can use analytics data to gain a comprehensive understanding of your website traffic, including:

• How many people visit your website
• Which pages they visit
• How many pages they view while visiting your website
• What type of device (desktop, tablet, mobile) was used
• Where these visitors are from
• Where your website traffic is coming from (organic search, paid search, social media, etc.)

This data can help you prioritize which marketing channels to invest most heavily in. For example, if you’re getting most of your traffic from paid search, you may want to increase your budget for your most important PPC campaigns.

You can also use this data to track all your sales back to an individual’s first digital interaction with your company. This process, called attribution modeling, enables you to identify trends in the way your audience is engaging with your online content. This information can be used to refine your efforts at every stage of the buyer’s journey to keep your audience more engaged and increase the likelihood of converting them into a new customer.

Find Answers with our Marketing Strategy FAQs.

You’ll Maximize the ROI of Your Marketing Efforts

When you develop a digital marketing strategy, you’ll have a framework in place that allows you to track the ROI of each tactic used in your strategy. An effective digital marketing strategy will always outline the:

• Specific goals you’re trying to achieve
• The marketing tactics you’ll use to achieve these goals
• The success metrics necessary to track the effectiveness of your efforts
• The benchmarks that must be hit in order to achieve your desired outcome

Your analytics data allows you to track the day-to-day and month-to-month performance of every campaign. Over time, this will provide you with a detailed understanding of which tactics are performing well and which are struggling to deliver your desired results. You can use this data to refine your campaign, focusing on the tactics that generate the best results. You can also reallocate your budget so that you dedicate more resources to the channels that are contributing the most to your overall success. This will allow you to maximize the ROI of your marketing efforts.

It Becomes Easier to Compete with Bigger Companies

If you’re a small business, you most likely lack the deep resources possessed by the largest companies in your industry. With limited resources, it’s extremely challenging to compete in traditional marketing methods which require a tremendous investment of money to deliver results. Digital marketing creates an ability to target your efforts in a way that allows you to compete with these larger brands more effectively.

With some savvy SEO work, you can identify specific search queries and long-tail keywords which are being used by your target audience. By creating high quality content around these terms, you have an opportunity to outrank larger businesses who may not be focused on these valuable search terms. Creating content that resonates better with your audience than what is being produced by bigger brands gives you the ability to reach a larger number of people than is possible with a limited marketing budget that is focused on traditional methods.

Read our article: Current Marketing Trends – Getting Your Content Marketing Strategy Started

You Can Improve Your Conversion Rate and Generate Higher Quality Leads

Perhaps the most important benefit you’ll experience from all the data generated by your digital marketing efforts is the ability to improve your conversion rate. You can review data associated with the various CTAs on your website and run A/B testing to see which are most effective. You can also identify which of your marketing methods typically result in the most conversions, allowing you to invest a larger percentage of your resources in the strategies which have proven to be most effective.

In addition, you have a greater ability to target specific audiences with digital marketing. This allows you to focus your efforts on the segments of your audience which yield the highest quality leads – both in terms of their likelihood of becoming customers and the amount of money they’re likely to spend with your business once they convert. This not only helps improve your conversion rate, but also can boost the revenue generated by each new lead.

Getting Started Building Your Digital Marketing Strategy

If you already have a robust digital marketing strategy, congratulations. You are way ahead of many of your competitors. For those businesses that have been struggling with creating and implementing a strategy, here are some tips to help you get started:

• Identify your marketing goals – Less is more. If you establish 10 or more goals, you will struggle to create a cohesive strategy that achieves each of them. Pick the 3-5 goals that will move your business forward the most and focus on those.
• Identify KPIs for each goal – How will you measure whether you’ve successfully achieved each of your goals? What metrics are most effective at measuring this success?
• Understand your target audience – Create a series of personas that provide detailed information about each segment of your target audience. Include demographic information, pain points, what types of messages resonate with them, and what will motivate them to take action.
• Determine which tactics will most effectively achieve your goals – Are you focused mainly on organic search? Paid search? Does your audience engage with you most on social media? Make sure you’re implementing the proper strategies to achieve the goals you’ve established.
• Continuously monitor and refine – After implementing your digital marketing strategy, make sure you regularly review your data to measure the success of your efforts. When necessary, make adjustments to your strategy to improve the outcomes.

Read our other Marketing Strategy Articles full of Helpful Information.

Webolutions Can Help You Develop and Implement a Digital Marketing Strategy

Developing an effective digital marketing strategy is a complex process that takes considerable experience and expertise to get right. Unless your business has the resources to employ a team of in-house marketing specialists, it’s generally more effective to work with a seasoned digital marketing agency who can help you craft and implement a strategy that aligns with your goals. With nearly three decades of experience, Webolutions can set you up for success.

Webolutions is the only strategic digital marketing agency in the United States delivering a transformational Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach to grow your business faster, smarter and easier. We lead you on a collaborative journey to identify what is special about you as a company. Our team will then conduct thorough market research to clearly understand what your competitors are doing and saying.

As part of this process, we’ll create a Market Positioning Action Plan™ that clearly differentiates you and makes you stand out from the competitors in your industry. This plan will be used to develop your Brand Platform™, which creates a cohesive story and brand messaging that will be used throughout every aspect of your marketing efforts. Based on this information, we’ll develop a detailed digital marketing strategy that brings your story to life and achieves your goals for the upcoming year.

Our team provides comprehensive digital marketing services, and we will recommend the right mix of methods to convey your brand story most effectively to your target audience. We’ll implement the right communications and tracking systems necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy. Over time, we’ll make any adjustments and refinements necessary to achieve your marketing goals.

This exclusive approach results in faster, easier company growth that allows you to thrive for years to come.

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation.

The post 10 Reasons You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Having an abundance of marketing metrics at your disposal is certainly a major benefit for your business, but it can often be challenging to identify the right metrics to focus on. While there are a variety of common metrics that all businesses typically evaluate, there are many others that fly under the radar. In many instances, focusing on some of these overlooked metrics can pay huge dividends and provide valuable information to help grow your business.

Tips for Identifying the Right Marketing Metrics to Track

It’s often helpful to look beyond the basic metrics associated with your marketing goals in order to gain a more holistic picture of how your marketing efforts are impacting the overall success of your business. The following tips will help you figure out which additional metrics to focus on:

• Track both marketing and sales metrics – Your marketing and sales departments must work in conjunction with each other to effectively grow your business. Evaluating data for both departments will provide you with a more comprehensive view of how your efforts are impacting the success of both teams and help you identify areas for improvement that will complement both teams.
• Consider metrics that provide deeper insights – Lead generation and revenue metrics are always critical to track, but it’s also important to evaluate items that provide deeper insights into the long-term value and success of your marketing efforts.
• Evaluate metrics at every stage of the buyer’s journey – Tracking metrics at every stage of the buyer’s journey, from awareness to conversion, allows you to optimize your ability to guide prospects through your funnel. This will help you maximize conversions.

Overlooked SEO Metrics

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a critical component to any digital marketing strategy. Without effective SEO, it will be extremely challenging to rank well on search engines and ensure your target audience is able to find you. If you’re unable to drive traffic to your website, it will be much harder to hit your lead generation goals.

The following overlooked metrics can help you understand the impact of your SEO efforts.

Average Position

Average position can be used to determine how your overall search rankings are performing over time. This metric is calculated by taking the sum of all your keyword rankings and dividing this figure by the total number of keywords you’re tracking on your website.

Branded Searches

Branded searches refer to search queries that contain your brand name or a variation of your name. Branded search terms should always be segmented out and evaluated separately from the other keywords you track since they typically have a higher click through rate, convert at higher levels, and allow you to understand the impact of your brand awareness among your target audience more clearly.

Conversion Rates

Not all website traffic is created equal. A certain keyword may drive a tremendous amount of traffic to your website, but this traffic doesn’t help you grow your business if it doesn’t covert. Knowing conversion rates helps you understand which keywords are bringing in the highest quality visitors – in other words, the visitors that are most likely to turn into a sale or contact you for a consultation. Often, a keyword bringing in fewer monthly visitors but converting at a much higher rate may be more valuable to target than a keyword driving a ton of traffic but not delivering many conversions.

Overlooked Content Marketing Metrics

Content is a critical component of your marketing strategy. It supports SEO, helps convey your brand messaging, establishes your business as an authoritative expert, and lets your audience know why they should choose you over your competitors. The following content marketing metrics are frequently overlooked, but provide great insight into how well your content is addressing the needs of your audience.

Returning Visitors

While it’s possible to generate leads from one-time viewers of your content, these people are often simply reading your blog posts or web pages as part of their research process. However, when the same user returns to your blog or a specific piece of content over and over again, it is a sign that they find the information you provide to be very useful. This will significantly increase the likelihood that they will eventually choose you when they’re ready to make a purchase.

For this reason, returning visitors is an important content marketing metric to track. Google Analytics not only tracks the total number of website visitors you have, but they also let you know how many of these visitors are new vs. returning users. By tracking this metric month over month, you can determine whether your number of returning visitors is growing, shrinking or remaining constant. This is an effectively way to understand how well you’re cultivating an upper tier of audience members who:

• Are highly engaged in your business
• View you as a trusted leader
• Regularly share your content with their social networks
• Are more likely to eventually become a customer/client

Engaged Readers

While the average time spent on a page is a commonly used metric to track the engagement level of your readers, it doesn’t always provide a full picture to the true engagement level of your viewers. For example, if you have a video embedded near the top of a page, someone who views the entire video will increase the average time spent on this page. But if that person never goes below the video to read the rest of the page, they aren’t necessarily engaging with your content.

A more effective way to assess the engagement of your readers is to set up event tracking goals in Google Analytics which tell you how far a reader scrolls down the page. There are two useful goals to set:

• Readers – Someone will be considered a “reader” of your page or blog if they engage with the majority of content on the page. You can set whatever scrolling point you feel demonstrates this level of engagement, and anyone who reaches this point in the page will be considered a reader.
• Finishers – You can set a scroll point to the average length of your blog posts to determine who many of these people are actually reading the entire post.

Content Downloads

Gated content pieces are an effective strategy to grow your list of contacts. These are downloadable pieces of content such as guides, eBooks, white papers, or brochures that are offered in exchange for a user providing their email address. Gated content allows you to retarget these users with other aspects of your marketing strategy, such as via email marketing campaigns, to help nurture them through your funnel.

Tracking content downloads helps you understand which of these larger content pieces resonate most with your audience, and it helps you identify individuals who are eager to consume your content. If you create several gated content pieces to support different points in the marketing funnel, this metric will also help you to measure the success of content at each of these points in your funnel.

Overlooked Email Marketing Metrics

Email marketing is an effective way to leverage your contact list to grow your business. By engaging with your audience through regular email newsletters, you can establish yourself as an authoritative expert, grow your brand, and stay top of mind for when they are ready to purchase. While open and click-through rates are commonly tracked, the following overlooked metrics will provide you with a deeper insight into the success of your email marketing efforts.

Opens by Device

If you know how your audience likes to read your emails, it will help you identify the optimal design to provide the best user experience. While you should always choose a design that provides a good experience on mobile and desktop, you should take additional steps to prioritize the experience on the type of device the majority of your audience is using. This is especially true if your audience typically reads your emails on their phone.

List Growth

Adding new readers to your email list is critical to the success of your efforts. Even if you maintain a low unsubscribe rate, the size of your lists will gradually decrease over time if you fail to grow your audience.

Tracking list growth will help you understand when you need to invest more energy and resources into adding more readers. This can be accomplished by encouraging existing readers to share your content, adding more CTAs to your website prompting visitors to subscribe, or creating new gated content pieces to encourage website visitors to give you their email contact information.

Traffic Drivers

It’s important to know which links in your email are actually driving traffic back to your website or blog posts. You can set up UTM tracking codes in Google Analytics that will allow you to track which links in your emails are delivering the most viewers back to your desired location. This helps you determine which email content is the most and least engaging, which content drives the most and least traffic, and which content generates the most and least sales.

Overlooked Social Media Metrics

Social media has become an increasingly important component of marketing strategies over the last decade. These platforms allow you to connect with your audience in vastly different ways than you do on your website and blog. You can interact with your audience in an authentic way that helps you grow your brand and expand your reach. The following overlooked metrics can help you gain important insights into the performance of your social media efforts.

Audience Growth Rate

Audience growth rate refers to the change in your audience size on a specific social media platform over time. This metric is helpful in understanding how well a specific post or an entire social media campaign is performing. You can determine how your efforts are impacting your growth rate by measuring the number of new followers you gained for a specific period of time immediately following your new social media activity. To turn this growth rate into a percentage, divide the number of new followers you gained by your total audience number and multiply by 100.

Traffic Drivers

As with email marketing, this is an important metric that will help you understand which of your social media platforms are sending the most viewers to your website. Knowing your leading social media traffic drivers will help you make informed decisions regarding which platforms to invest the most time and resources on when developing future social media campaigns.

Comments

When your organic social media posts or paid social ads receive a large number of comments, it’s a good indication that you’re doing a good job connecting with your audience. This can inform your approach to future posts and ads. By crafting new posts and ads that are similar in tone and content to the prior ones that received the most comments, you’re more likely to experience similar success.

Posts and ads with a lot of comments also provide an additional benefit. If you take the time to read through the comments, you can learn a lot about your audience, including:

• How the feel about your company and your products
• How they speak about your products and services
• Common themes that arise among your audience

These insights can be turned into actionable data that helps you more effectively connect with your audience in the future.

Webolutions Can Help You Grow Your Business

At Webolutions, we understand that a data-driven approach is necessary to ensure your marketing efforts achieve maximum impact. As part of our comprehensive digital marketing services, we’ll create a Performance Intelligence Roadmap™ that identifies the right metrics to track in order to accurately measure the performance of your campaign, allowing us to make adjustments over time that will maximize your marketing ROI.

We follow a meticulous process when developing your Performance Intelligence Roadmap™. It includes the following steps:

• Collaborating with your team to clearly define your marketing goals for the coming year
• Creating a model, based on industry numbers or your past performance (if available), that clearly defines your different marketing channels, the related contributions to leads/sales, and the key funnel data points you need for success in achieving your annual marketing goals
• Outlining the data points needed and ensure these data points are accessible from your existing systems
• Outlining what actionable information you need to see quickly and easily to understand your performance and make the adjustments necessary to improve this performance
• Developing the tracking systems or dashboards to aggregate the data into useful information
• Applying your performance intelligence solutions through active monitoring, smart reviews and adjustments to continuously improve your results

You’ll benefit from our Real-Time Performance Intelligence Dashboards™ which give you access to your most up-to-date data in graphical models that are easy to visualize and understand. This will allow you to see the critical information and trends associated with your marketing campaign.

With our proven method for gathering performance intelligence data, you’ll be able to grow your business smarter, faster and easier.

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. Webolutions serves clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

The post 12 Overlooked Marketing Metrics to Grow Your Business appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

What is a Social Media Strategy?

A social media strategy is a plan that outlines how a business will use social media to achieve its marketing goals.

In this comprehensive guide, we will discuss the key components of a social media strategy, provide examples and case studies, offer step-by-step instructions for developing a social media strategy, and discuss common mistakes to avoid.

The Importance of a Social Media Strategy

A social media strategy is essential for any business that wants to succeed in today’s digital landscape.

Reasons Why a Social Media Strategy is Important

1. It helps to create a consistent brand image

A social media strategy helps businesses to create a consistent brand image across all social media platforms. By having a clear and consistent message, businesses can establish trust and credibility with their audience.

2. It helps to reach a wider audience

Social media platforms have billions of users worldwide, making them an excellent way to reach a wider audience. A social media strategy helps businesses to identify their target audience and create content that resonates with them.

3. It helps to increase engagement

Social media platforms are designed for interaction and engagement. A social media strategy helps businesses to create content that encourages engagement and interaction with their audience.

4. It helps to drive traffic and sales

Social media platforms can be a powerful tool for driving traffic and sales. A social media strategy helps businesses to create content that drives traffic to their website and encourages users to make a purchase.

Key Components of a Social Media Strategy

A social media strategy is made up of several key components. Here are the four most important components:

1. Audience Research

The first step in developing a social media strategy is to conduct audience research. This involves identifying your target audience and understanding their needs, interests, and behaviors. By understanding your audience, you can create content that resonates with them and engage with them on social media platforms where they are most active.

To conduct audience research, you can use a variety of tools, including social media analytics, surveys, and focus groups. Social media analytics can provide valuable insights into your audience’s demographics, interests, and behaviors. Surveys and focus groups can provide more in-depth insights into your audience’s preferences and opinions.

2. Platform Selection

Once you have a clear understanding of your target audience, the next step is to select the social media platforms that are most relevant to your business. Not all social media platforms are created equal, and each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses.

For example, if your target audience is primarily professionals and businesses, LinkedIn may be the best platform to reach them. If your target audience is primarily young adults, Instagram and Snapchat may be the best platforms to reach them.

When selecting social media platforms, it’s important to consider the platform’s user demographics, features, and engagement rates.

3. Content Planning

Content planning is the process of creating and scheduling social media content that aligns with your business goals and resonates with your target audience. Effective social media content should be informative, entertaining, and engaging.

To create effective social media content, you should consider the following:

* Content themes: Identify the key themes that your content will focus on. These themes should align with your business goals and resonate with your target audience.
* Content types: Determine the types of content that you will create, such as blog posts, videos, images, and infographics.
* Content calendar: Create a content calendar that outlines when and where your content will be posted. This will help you stay organized and ensure that your content is posted consistently.

4. Performance Measurement

The final component of a social media strategy is performance measurement. This involves tracking and analyzing your social media metrics to determine the effectiveness of your strategy.

The metrics that you should track will depend on your business goals, but some common metrics include:

* Engagement rate: The number of likes, comments, and shares on your posts.
* Reach: The number of unique users who see your posts.
* Click-through rate: The number of users who click on a link in your post.
* Conversion rate: The number of users who take a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form.

By tracking these metrics, you can determine what is working and what needs to be improved in your social media strategy.

Examples and Case Studies

A well-crafted social media strategy can have a significant impact on a business’s marketing efforts. Here are some examples and case studies of businesses that have successfully implemented social media strategies:

1. Wendy’s

Wendy’s is a fast-food chain that has gained a reputation for its witty and irreverent social media presence. Wendy’s social media strategy focuses on engaging with its audience through humor and pop culture references.

For example, when a Twitter user asked Wendy’s how many retweets they needed for a year’s supply of chicken nuggets, Wendy’s responded with “18 million.” This tweet went viral and became the most retweeted tweet of all time, with over 3.5 million retweets.

Wendy’s social media strategy has helped the brand to stand out in a crowded fast-food market and has generated significant buzz and engagement on social media platforms.

2. Dollar Shave Club

Dollar Shave Club is a subscription-based razor company that has built its brand through social media marketing. The company’s social media strategy focuses on creating humorous and relatable content that resonates with its target audience of young men.

For example, Dollar Shave Club’s “Our Blades Are F***ing Great” video went viral and helped to establish the brand as a disruptor in the razor industry.

Dollar Shave Club’s social media strategy has helped the brand to build a loyal following and generate significant revenue through its subscription model.

Step-by-Step Instructions for Developing a Social Media Strategy

Now that you understand the key components of a social media strategy, let’s dive into the step-by-step instructions for developing a social media strategy for your business or brand:

1. Define Your Business Goals

The first step in developing a social media strategy is to define your business goals. What do you want to achieve through social media marketing? Do you want to increase brand awareness, generate leads, or drive sales?

2. Conduct Audience Research

Once you have defined your business goals, the next step is to conduct audience research to identify your target audience and understand their needs, interests, and behaviors.

3. Select Social Media Platforms

Based on your audience research, select the social media platforms that are most relevant to your business.

4. Develop a Content Plan

Create a content plan that aligns with your business goals and resonates with your target audience. Determine the types of content that you will create, the themes that your content will focus on, and the frequency with which you will post.

5. Create a Content Calendar

Create a content calendar that outlines when and where your content will be posted. This will help you stay organized and ensure that your content is posted consistently.

6. Monitor and Measure Performance

Track and analyze your social media metrics to determine the effectiveness of your strategy. Use this data to make adjustments and improve your strategy over time.

Common Social Media Mistakes to Avoid

When developing a social media strategy, there are some common mistakes that businesses should avoid. Here are three of the most common mistakes:

1. Focusing on Quantity Over Quality

Posting too frequently or creating low-quality content can hurt your social media strategy. Instead, focus on creating high-quality content that resonates with your target audience.

2. Ignoring Engagement

Social media is a two-way conversation, and it’s important to engage with your audience by responding to comments and messages.

3. Neglecting Platform-Specific Features

Each social media platform has its own unique features and strengths. Neglecting these features can limit the effectiveness of your social media strategy.

Tips for Measuring Success and Making Adjustments

Here are some tips for measuring the success of your social media strategy and making adjustments as needed:

1. Set Benchmarks

Set benchmarks for your social media metrics so that you can track your progress over time.

2. Analyze Your Data

Use social media analytics tools to track and analyze your social media metrics. Use this data to make adjustments to your strategy as needed.

3. Experiment with New Strategies

Social media is constantly evolving, and it’s important to experiment with new strategies and tactics to stay ahead of the curve.

Summary

Developing a social media strategy is a critical component of any business’s marketing efforts. By conducting audience research, selecting the right social media platforms, creating high-quality content, and tracking your metrics, you can create a social media strategy that drives engagement, generates leads, and increases revenue. Remember to stay flexible and experiment with new strategies to stay ahead of the curve in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape.

References

* Social Media Marketing Industry Report 2021 by Social Media Examiner
* The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing by HubSpot
* Social Media Marketing: The Ultimate Guide by Neil Patel
* How to Create a Social Media Strategy in 8 Easy Steps by Hootsuite
* The Beginner’s Guide to Social Media Strategy by Sprout Social

The post The Ultimate Guide to Developing a Social Media Strategy for Your Business appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Determining the right digital marketing strategy to connect with your target audience, build your brand and grow your business can be challenging. There are more digital marketing channels than ever before, and not every option will be a good fit to achieve your goals. Without the help of a dedicated marketing strategy consultant, you may struggle to arrive at the right mix of tactics to effectively grow your business.

In addition, many of the marketing strategies you implement will require specialized expertise, both in the planning and execution phases, to achieve the best possible results. Working with a marketing strategy consultant will provide the expertise and specialization necessary to maximize the ROI on your efforts and ensure your marketing budget is being used wisely.

While the benefits of working with a third-party marketing strategy agency may be clear, choosing the right one isn’t always easy. There are many agencies out there vying for your business, and not all of them will be a good fit for what you’re trying to accomplish. Choosing the right marketing strategy consultant is critical to the ongoing growth and success of your business, and you should engage in a thorough evaluation process to ensure you get this important decision right.

The following tips will help you identify the right marketing strategy agency to build your brand, generate quality leads and grow your business.

Define Your Goals

In order to effectively evaluate potential marketing strategy agencies to partner with, you must first have a clear understanding of what you’re trying to achieve. Different agencies will have different strengths and areas of expertise, so you’ll want to choose a marketing strategy consultant that is ideally suited to achieve your specific goals.

Are you looking to generate more qualified leads? Launch a new product line? Increase your ecommerce sales? Overhaul your branding? These goals all require a different approach and expertise. Knowing your goals can help you narrow down your list to the marketing strategy agencies that specialize in what you’re trying to accomplish, and it enables you to identify the success metrics necessary to evaluate their performance.

Set Your Budget

It’s also important to set a budget at the start of your search. Unless your company has unlimited financial resources to throw at your marketing efforts, you’ll need to find an agency that can most efficiently and effectively make use of your available budget to maximize the ROI of your efforts.

Most good marketing strategy agencies should be able to work within your budget and set realistic expectations for what can be accomplished with the resources available to them. They should be able to present a variety of options for how to best use your budget and explain the pros and cons of each strategy. Ultimately, this will help you to better understand what is possible, allowing you to prioritize the strategies that most closely align with your goals.

Create a Short List of Marketing Strategy Consultant Candidates

Once you’ve identified several potential marketing strategy consultants who possess an expertise and specialization that aligns with your goals and offers services that are within your budget, it’s time to narrow your options down. Use the following criteria to determine the best two to three marketing strategy agencies to engage in deeper discussions before making a final decision.

A Customized Approach

Choose a marketing strategy agency who is interested in you and who demonstrates a desire to understand your overarching business goals and your unique situation:

• Are you receiving a boilerplate proposal, or is the agency providing custom recommendations to achieve your specific goals?
• Does the agency introduce new ideas and fresh ways of looking at your situation?
• Is the scope they present focused on your situation and goals or are you getting “we sell this, therefore you need it” type of reasoning?

Does the agency take a professional, solution-oriented approach to this relationship? For example, if your financial planner laid out a plan without first asking questions about your personal and family needs, you would not consider the plan. Your goals and situation are unique. Your partner should continuously seek to understand in order to ensure their solutions align with your needs. Good partners want dialogue to understand what is required, and marketing partners are no exception.

Industry Experience

Industry experience is an important factor to evaluate, as this may be an indicator that they will be a good fit for the needs of your business. Some marketing strategy agencies choose to specialize in certain niche industries. There can be a benefit to working with an agency that has extensive experience working with businesses in your specific industry since they most likely will possess a more sophisticated understanding of what your business does, and the unique factors associated with successfully marketing to your target audience.

However, this industry experience can also be a double-edged sword. Certain industry specific agencies may take a cookie cutter approach to marketing, touting this as a “tried and true method” to achieve results in your industry. The truth is that your business is completely unique, and the best marketing approach for your competitors may not be right for you. Therefore, this industry specialization should be balanced with a willingness to customize your strategy based on the specific goals you’ve established for your business.

Don’t dismiss a potential marketing strategy agency simply because they haven’t worked with other businesses in your industry before. Often, agencies that work with businesses in a wide range of industries have a broad understanding of how different marketing tactics work to achieve specific goals, regardless of the industry.

In fact, working with a partner who can demonstrate experience across a broad array of industries is the most likely to be able to introduce fresh ideas. Many companies have broken through by employing strategies first tested and proven in industries other than their own. An agency with such a portfolio is most likely to connect those dots and present those paths for your consideration.

A good marketing strategy consultant should be able to evaluate your industry, your online presence, your goals, and the efforts used by your competitors to develop an effective strategy that will achieve your desired outcome. Often, working with someone who isn’t laser focused on the specific nuances of your industry will provide a fresh approach that can deliver superior marketing outcomes.

Transparency

Full transparency is essential anytime you’re entering into a new business relationship. It’s critical to your ability to build trust with your new marketing strategy agency. When you engage a potential consultant in an initial discussion, make sure they are completely upfront about every aspect of their recommendations, including the:

• Reasoning behind their approach
• Tools, channels and budget required to implement the strategy
• Expected timeline to develop and implement the strategy
• Metrics necessary to evaluate success
• Realistic expectations for what can be achieved
• Alternative options that may be able to achieve your goals

Lack of transparency during the initial consultation process is one of the biggest red flags you’ll encounter. If you feel like the consultant isn’t being completely open and honest with you from the start, it’s best to eliminate them as a candidate.

Credibility

Choosing a marketing strategy agency to work with is an important decision. Ideally, this will be a long-term partnership that will help you achieve sustained growth and profitability for years to come. Getting this decision right the first time will help you avoid the inevitable delays in progress that typically occur if you have to pivot and start the process over with a new agency in a year or two. Therefore, you’ll want to vet the agency’s credibility and experience prior to including them on your short list.

There are several ways you can evaluate their credibility:

• Look at their website – This is one of the easiest and most important ways to evaluate a marketing strategy agency. Since helping you build a strong online presence will be one of their most important jobs, seeing how effectively they market themselves online will give you a good sense of what you can expect. Evaluate the following factors:
  • Website design – Is their website design modern and professional? Does it contain clear, compelling calls to action (CTAs) that make it easier to generate leads?
  • Search engine results – Does the agency’s website appear high in Google search results? This will indicate that they have a strong SEO background and should give you greater confidence that they can achieve strong SEO results for you.
  • Branding and messaging – Do they convey a strong, cohesive brand throughout their website and social media profiles? Are the brand logos, colors, imagery and typography consistent? Does their messaging effectively and consistently convey their brand across all channels?
• Review their portfolio – Most agencies will post a portfolio with examples of their recent projects. This is a great way to get a sense of the quality of work they produce. If the agency doesn’t have portfolio pieces on their website, ask them to send you a few to review.
• Read client testimonials – Most marketing strategy agencies include some testimonials on their website. Read through these to get a sense of what other clients have to say about working with them.
• Read client reviews – Look at review sites such as Clutch, Google and Yelp. Does the agency consistently have good reviews on these sites? What are clients saying in these reviews, and do they seem authentic?

Check References

Once you’ve narrowed down your short list, ask the agency to provide you with a few references from former or existing clients that you can speak with. Checking references is an important step that will give you peace of mind that you’re choosing a quality marketing strategy agency. If you find some red flags in your conversations with these references, you can eliminate that particular candidate before spending a significant amount of time reviewing specific proposals.

Request Detailed Recommendations

Marketing can be a bit of a rabbit hole. There are so many approaches you can take to this important aspect of running your business, and it’s important to be aligned with your agency on the specific marketing strategy services that they recommend.

Before choosing your dedicated partner, ask each of the agencies on your short list to provide you with detailed recommendations of the specific marketing strategy services they believe will deliver your desired results. Ideally, these recommendations should be made as part of a conversation that provides greater context to help you understand the reasoning behind the recommendations being made.

During this conversation, you should also have the opportunity to ask any questions you may have regarding the approach being recommended. If you’re unable to receive comprehensive answers to your questions, it’s generally a sign the agency may not be the right fit for your needs.

Assess the Agency’s Ability to Deliver Your Desired Results

While your marketing strategy consultant should be expected to help you dream and ideate, the reality is that ideas are easier to produce than results. At the end of the day, the results achieved are the true measure of the success of your marketing efforts. Therefore, your best choice is likely a partner who can demonstrate live, actual results.

When you defined your goals, you should have identified specific success metrics that would help you evaluate the performance of the marketing agency implementing your campaign. Ask the agency to send you specific examples of the results they’ve achieved with campaigns they’ve run for clients receiving similar services contained in your recommendations. Examine the performance data in these reports carefully to make sure they can demonstrate a track record of success that is similar to the KPI results you’re looking to achieve.

Webolutions Can Develop a Marketing Strategy That Grows Your Business

The complex, ever evolving nature of marketing makes it very challenging to develop the right strategy on your own. If you’re ready to work with a dedicated marketing strategy consultant who can help you build your brand, generate more leads and grow your business, Webolutions can help.

As Denver’s leading marketing strategy agency since 1994, we’ve worked with businesses of all sizes in a wide range of industries. During this time, we’ve developed a strong track record of success – and we have both the hard data and industry accolades to prove it.

At Webolutions, we take a data-driven, holistic approach to developing your marketing strategy. We’ll customize our recommendations based on the specifics of your industry, the factors impacting your market, and the value you bring to your customers/clients. This ensures your plan leverages the methods and channels that will most effectively achieve your goals.

Our transformational Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach to marketing strategy and implementation has been designed to grow your business faster, smarter and easier. With this unique approach, we’ll help you achieve highly competitive differentiation by conveying your purpose, core values, mission, specific set of strengths and unique culture to your audience. By defining your true value and establishing what makes your business special, we can deliver the results necessary to position you for success for years to come.

In addition, our team includes some of the most highly experienced digital marketing professionals in the industry. With broad areas of expertise in just about every subspecialty of digital marketing, we have the chops to implement any strategy at the highest levels, and we provide you with robust performance intelligence data that lets you evaluate the success of our efforts.

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. Webolutions provides marketing strategy services to clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.

The post How to Choose a Marketing Strategy Consultant appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Your marketing efforts are essential to the success of your business. When the right marketing strategies are identified and implemented, you have the ability to reach a larger audience and focus on the segment of the population that is most likely to resonate with your message and become a new customer/client. Conversely, a poorly formulated or bloated marketing strategy can make it exceedingly challenging to achieve your goals.

At Webolutions, we provide comprehensive digital marketing services to businesses in a wide range of industries. When we first start working with a company, we always engage them in a collaborative discovery journey to better understand their goals and what makes them unique. As part of this journey, we dive into their existing marketing strategy to determine what has worked well for them and what needs to be improved upon. Often, we find that these businesses have been muddling along for years without an optimized and streamlined marketing strategy.

This phenomenon is understandable, even if it’s less than an ideal way to approach your marketing strategy. It’s common for businesses to “throw the kitchen sink” at their marketing efforts, hoping that a broad and all encompassing strategy will usher in a larger number of leads. Unfortunately, this can have the opposite of its intended effect – it typically results in bloated budgets that yield a smaller return on investment (ROI) and fails to target the segment of your audience that will drive the most impactful business.

As we enter 2023, businesses are setting their strategies for the upcoming year. This provides an opportunity to reflect on what’s worked well to date and what can be done better. We recently wrote about the importance of streamlining your overall business initiatives to create a better company. But it’s also important to home in on your marketing efforts to streamline this strategy. By streamlining your marketing initiatives, you can improve your ROI on these efforts and grow your business faster.

When we talk about streamlining your marketing strategies, we’re referring to the process of simplifying your efforts to focus on the initiatives that yield the most impactful results. Rather than “throwing the kitchen sink” at your marketing strategy, we’re suggesting that you take a “less is more” approach that devotes your resources to the few strategies that will move the needle most.

By taking the following steps, you can streamline your 2023 marketing strategy to focus on the right audience and channels to drive the leads that will help you achieve your overall business goals.

Optimize Your Data Management Software

We live in an age when an abundance of valuable data is readily available, providing real time insights into the success of your strategies. In order to leverage this data in a way that provides actionable insights, you must have effective software and tracking systems to manage this data.

Even small businesses with modest marketing budgets likely utilize multiple channels and strategies to reach their audience. If you don’t have an effective data management system to track which channels and strategies target which segments of your audience, you run the risk of inundating and oversaturating consumers rather than leaving them wanting to learn more about your business.

By optimizing your data management software, you can more effectively track the day to day results of your efforts. This will help you eliminate inefficient approaches and avoid overwhelming potential customers by flooding them with information they didn’t request and/or don’t value.

Keep in mind that for your data management software to deliver the greatest impact on your marketing efforts, you must monitor your results regularly to gain a clear understanding of how your strategy is performing and what changes may be necessary to elevate your results. Then, you’ll need to be proactive about making the adjustments necessary to improve your outcomes.

Focus on Your Core Demographic

One of the biggest pitfalls associated with a bloated, unfocused marketing strategy is that you fail to emphasize the section of your audience that tends to convert at the highest levels and deliver the most revenue to your business. This segment is referred to as your qualified leads.

Focusing on targeting qualified leads rather than a broader demographic will deliver a variety of benefits:

• Improve your sales team’s close rate
• Reduce the number of leads required to achieve your revenue goals
• Save money on marketing expenses
• Improve the overall ROI of your marketing efforts

Leverage Geo-Targeting Strategies

Location is often everything in marketing. If the success of your business depends on targeting an audience in a specific location, then your marketing efforts should reflect this. Online searches are the primary way most consumers research their options. Leveraging geo-targeting strategies will allow you to more effectively show up in the locations where you’re most likely to generate the new customers your business needs.

Limit the Marketing Channels You Use

There are a multitude of marketing channels available to drive the traffic you need to grow your customer base. This can create an overwhelming situation where you spread your resources too thin in an attempt to garner leads from a wide range of sources.

A more effective approach is to limit the marketing channels you use to drive leads. Rather than investing your limited resources across a wide range of channels, choose a few that will deliver the greatest impact to your business. The right channels to focus on will vary based on a variety of factors, including your industry, your target audience and your business model.

Webolutions Can Help Streamline Your Marketing Initiatives

Webolutions has been Denver’s leading strategic marketing agency since 1994. Our team uses a unique Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach to help you grow your business smarter, faster and easier. As part of this approach, we lead your team on a collaborative journey to unlock the things that make your company special. This information will help us establish your industry leading market positioning in order to clearly differentiate you from your competitors.

Your market positioning will be used to develop and implement a marketing strategy that effectively and consistently conveys your brand messaging to the segment of your audience that will drive the most impactful growth to your business. Our exclusive Collaborative ROI Projection Model™ will help you focus your marketing resources on the specific channels and tactics necessary to achieve your goals. For greater focus and prioritization, this model allows you to evaluate the real ROI a potential marketing strategy may yield prior to its costly implementation. This model is a critical way we’re able to streamline your marketing strategy to maximize your ROI.

To speak with one of our experts about how you can streamline your marketing strategies for your company of at least $5 million in annual sales, call us at 303-300-2640 and request a free streamlining consultation. During this 60-minute introductory meeting, we’ll help you start creating a plan for success. You can also email any questions to info@webolutions.com.

The post Streamline Your Marketing Strategy to Grow Your Business Faster appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Your marketing efforts are critical to the success of your business. They are the primary way to connect with your audience, grow your brand and establish yourself as a trusted industry leader. However, these things don’t happen on their own. It takes a well planned, cohesive marketing strategy to ensure your precious resources – both financial and manpower – are used wisely and maximize the return on your investment.

We’re firmly in the fourth quarter of the year, and this is the time to conduct annual planning. While it’s important to invest the time in an annual plan that addresses your overall business goals, you also need to create a specific annual marketing plan that will help you achieve these overarching business initiatives. Ideally, this plan should be finalized and ready to go at the start of January so that you can hit the ground running next year. In order for that to happen, you need to begin your annual marketing planning now.

At Webolutions, our purpose is To Empower Passionate People to Thrive. This drives everything we do for our clients, and it has compelled us to go beyond simply providing marketing services. In order to ensure our efforts generate the best possible results for our clients, we actively engage them in an annual planning process each year which helps them crystalize their goals for their marketing efforts. This plan then forms the blueprint for our ongoing recommendations as the year progresses.

In order to better understand what is involved in annual marketing planning, we recommend reading the following article from HubSpot:

5 Steps to Create an Outstanding Marketing Plan

Key Takeaways from this Article

This article breaks down the process of creating your annual marketing plan into three parts:

• Outlining your marketing plan
• Creating your marketing plan
• Creating a marketing plan timeline

While there is significant overlap between the components of these parts, it’s beneficial to examine each one separately.

Outlining Your Marketing Plan

The more granular you get in your marketing plan outline, the easier it will be to create and implement this plan. In addition, having a strong outline will provide important guidance regarding the metrics you should use to assess the success of your efforts.

Your marketing plan outline should include the following elements:

• Business summary – A summary of your organization that includes your company name, where you’re headquartered and your mission statement.
• Business initiatives – This should focus on specific initiatives related to marketing as opposed to big-picture company initiatives.
• Customer analysis – Conduct some market research to build your buyer personas (a fictional description of the traits associated with your ideal customer).
• Competitor analysis – As part of your market research, evaluate your primary competitors to more clearly understand what they do well and potential opportunities for you to provide value to your customers/clients that they do not.
• SWOT analysis – Conduct a deep dive into your business to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The strengths and weaknesses should focus on internal items specific to your company, while opportunities and threats should focus on external items related to the state of the world today.
• Market strategy – Based on the legwork completed in the previous steps, create a plan for how your business should compete in your market. This can include items such as product/service mix, price, process, and more.
• Budget – Determine how much money your company is going to dedicate to the marketing team in order to pursue the initiatives and goals you’ve established in this outline.
• Marketing channels – Identify the marketing channels you’ll use to publish the content that will educate your audience, convey your brand story, and generate leads.
• Financial projections – Based on the budget you set and the marketing channels you choose, you can develop financial projections that establish your expected ROI for your marketing efforts. While these won’t be 100% accurate, they will provide a useful guide to measure your results against over the coming year.

See our article: How to Get Your Marketing Budget Approved

FREE Annual Planning Consultation with a Webolutions Expert

Since 1994, we've helped literally thousands of businesses locally and nationwide to achieve their business goals. From Annual Planning to Differentiating Brand Development and from Enterprise Website Design and Development to Business Performance Intelligence Systems, we're here to help you thrive. Connect with Webolutions, Denver's leading digital marketing agency, for your free consultation with one of our experts.

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Creating Your Marketing Plan

This article outlines a 5-step process to creating your annual marketing plan:

• Conduct a situation analysis – Use your SWOT analysis and your competitor analysis to develop a clear understanding of your market positioning. As part of this process, identify what you can offer that gives your company a competitive advantage and make you stand apart from others in your industry.
• Define your target audience – Use the buyer personas created during the outline phase to understand what your ideal customer wants. This information can be used to help you define your goals (to be created in the next step).
• Write SMART goals – You can’t improve the ROI on your marketing efforts without a clear understanding of your goals. Use the information generated from your situation analysis and defining your target audience to create SMART goals. SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. The SMART goals you establish will be used to identify the best tactics to achieve these goals.
• Analyze your tactics – Once you’ve defined your goals, determine which marketing tactics will most effectively achieve these goals.
• Set your budget – Before you begin implementing the tactics identified in step 4, you’ll need to set your budget for each tactic. This budget should include the time, financial resources, assets, and manpower required to implement the tactics in your marketing plan.

Creating Your Marketing Plan Timeline

Since this is an annual plan, you need to establish a timeline for implementing the different components of this plan. This allows your team to understand all appropriate deadlines for the projects, campaigns and events associated with your marketing plan. If you prefer greater granularity, you can break up this timeline on a quarterly basis.

When creating deadlines for the components of your marketing plan, make sure to:

• Estimate how long each task will take
• Account for holidays and other special events which may impact the ability of your team to complete these tasks

As you work through the tasks in your plan, track the time it takes to complete them. This will allow you to compare the actual time to your time estimates to determine how accurate your estimates are. If necessary, you may need to adjust some of your upcoming deadlines to reflect the actual amount of time these tasks have taken to complete.

Use Pre-Existing Templates to Organize Your Efforts

The article also provides several marketing plan templates you can use as you work through this three-stage process. Using one of these templates may help you stay organized and ensure you don’t skip an important step in the process.

Additional Resources to Help You Understand How to Conduct Annual Marketing Planning

We recommend the following articles to further expand your knowledge of how to conduct your annual marketing planning. Many of the tips you’ll find in these articles are similar to the takeaways from the HubSpot article, but when taken together, they can help give you a deeper insight into how to approach this process.

• How to Create a Winning Marketing Plan
• 6 Steps to Simply Build Your Annual Marketing Plan
• Developing an Annual Marketing Plan for the New Year

Putting this Information into Practice

Creating an annual marketing plan can be a daunting process. The key to navigating this process is to take it step by step. By working through all the components listed above in sequential order, you’ll compile the data necessary to understand your goals. This will then help you identify the right tactics to include in your plan.

Let Webolutions Help

At Webolutions, we provide comprehensive strategic marketing services to help your business grow and thrive. We leverage our exclusive Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach when working with our clients on annual planning. This unique approach leads you on a collaborative journey to identify what is special about your company. As part of this journey, we will work through the components of the marketing plan outline to understand your specific goals and the best way to position you as an industry leader.

Based on these goals, we’ll recommend a tactical strategy to best use your resources in order to convey your brand story, generate more leads, and grow your client/customer base. We’ll also set up Real-Time Performance Intelligence Dashboards which provide up-to-date data regarding the performance of your marketing efforts in an organized, visual, easy to understand format. This data will help us make any adjustments as needed over the course of the year to more effectively achieve your goals.

Webolutions is a full-spectrum management consulting and strategic growth implementation company. We help businesses across the country identify and effectively bring their unique story to life, allowing them to scale faster, smarter, and easier.

Areas of expertise:

• Differentiating Brand Development
• Marketing & Communications Strategies
• Customer Journey Mapping & Execution
• Enterprise Website & Application Development
• Cross-Platform Data Systems Integration
• Organizational Development Strategies
• Team Alignment, Culture, & Performance Solutions
• Business Performance Intelligence Systems

To speak with one of our experts about how we can help you implement a successful annual planning rhythm for your company of at least $5 million in annual sales, call us at 303-300-2640 and request a Free Annual Planning Consultation. During this 60-minute introduction, we’ll help you start outlining your plan. You can also email any questions to info@webolutions.com.

The post How to Create an Annual Marketing Plan That Will Grow Your Business appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

In this article, we outline the key elements of an effective annual plan, the steps for effective execution, and how to establish a success rhythm. When implemented well, these insights will help you enjoy your leadership role more and grow your business faster, smarter, and easier.

How Effective Annual Planning Makes Growing Your Business Easier

Two critical elements fundamentally increase the odds of success in any endeavor. These are

1. An Effective Strategy (think)
2. Effective Execution (act)

Without an effective strategy, you have no direction. You have not clearly defined where you want to go, what might get in your way and / or what might be the shortest path to achieve your goals. If you are the fastest runner or the hardest worker, but you do not have a defined strategy or goal, you cannot use your skills effectively to win.

The same holds true for a company with a great strategy, but ineffective execution. Both are required to maximize your effectiveness and win.

An effective annual plan provides:

Marketplace Insights & Clarity

• What market(s) are you truly in?
• What is changing and shifting within your market(s)?

Clarity of Your Positioning

• How do you compare – products, services, price, etc.
• Are your creating and communicating true differentiation?

Core Strengths Identification

• What do / can you do that is truly better than anyone else?
• Are you effectively leveraging this to create a competitive advantage?

Strategic Decluttering

• Are you clear on your specific goals?
• Are you clear on the specific strategies needed to achieve your goals?

 Team Alignment

• Is your team connected to your vision (purpose, core values and mission numbers)?
• Is your team excited by and engaged in your vision
• Do your team’s individual success measures align with your goals?

Executable Key Success Measures

• Do you know exactly what you need to measure to succeed?
• Do you have the necessary performance intelligence systems to monitor success?

Annual Planning Challenges

Effective annual planning is not easy. It takes time, research, collaboration, and thoughtful introspection. It is not something that you can do casually. Some of the excuses we routinely hear when talking with clients about need for annual planning include:

• We already understand our market and where we are going.

Annual planning is not about proving yourself right. This is a limiting mindset. It is about taking a step back, immersing yourself in the process, doing the work, and uncovering fresh new ideas and insights that lead you and your organization to far greater success.

• We’ve never done this before, and things are fine.

There is a profound saying, “The true enemy of success is success”. Imagine what a successful company could have achieved if they clearly understood all the dynamics available to capitalize on their strengths? Annual planning will streamline the amount of effort and vastly amplify the success of a company like this.

• The world is too dynamic. Any plan we create will not be correct.

The expected outcome of annual planning is not an exact map of what will happen throughout the year within your business. It is a model with which you can gain clarity. It provides a deeper understanding into everything that may impact your business and how those events might impact you. When you plan and evaluate these factors, you more prepared for unforeseen events. This empowers you to identify threats and take corrective action more quickly.

• We are too busy. There isn’t time for this.

This is my favorite on the list. Not having time for effective annual planning is a tell-tale sign of an organization without a plan. Any organization that makes this excuse is exactly the type of organization who truly needs to invest time in annual planning. You cannot succeed running fast and hard in an undefined direction. This quote by John Wooden says it all: “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over.”

If you are not utilizing annual planning in your business, you are missing out on a huge opportunity. Forget about the excuses and make time for this. You will reap the benefits.

FREE Annual Planning Consultation with a Webolutions Expert

Since 1994, we've helped literally thousands of businesses locally and nationwide to achieve their business goals. From Annual Planning to Differentiating Brand Development and from Enterprise Website Design and Development to Business Performance Intelligence Systems, we're here to help you thrive. Connect with Webolutions, Denver's leading digital marketing agency, for your free consultation with one of our experts.

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Steps for Effective Annual Planning

The steps below are your roadmap for effective annual planning.

1.   Industry / Market Identification

Most businesses today can fit into multiple industries and/or markets. For example, Webolutions actively competes with companies in all the following:

• Industries
  • Digital Marketing Agencies
  • Web Design & Development Companies
  • Branding Agencies
  • SEO Companies
  • Organization Development Companies
  • Customer Journey / CRM Consultants
  • Data Analytics & Performance Intelligence
• Markets
  • Denver Metro Area
  • National

The first step is to create a list of the all the industries and markets in which your company competes. It is good to start with a broad list. Ask your team for input on this.

2.   Competitive Understanding

This is a step that some businesses skip. However, it provides valuable insights. For each industry identified above, you should create a list of the competitors. We typically use market research tools to help identify these companies. You can ask your sales team or even your clients who they see as your competitors. The key is to identify all the top companies with which you compete for each of your identified industries and within each of your identified markets. Blockbuster made this mistake when they did not consider Netflix a competitive risk for their business. This exercise is from where some of most important insights will come.

Next, dig in deeper for each competitor. Some of the information we gather when doing this planning for our clients includes:

• Company size – annual sales, number of employees
• Website presence – domain authority, inbound links, number of pages, information architecture, keyword targets / markets for search, paid ad spend, etc.
• Website engagement strategy – messaging, USPs, calls to action, offers
• Range of products / service offerings – list specific items as well as categories of your product / service offerings
• Cost products / service offerings – include cost of materials as well as labor costs

3.   Self-Assessment

This is when you must forget about your ego and objectively review the data. Forget about what you think you might know. Look at your company from the viewpoint of your potential new customers / clients. Look at how your competitors are positioning themselves. Look at how they are evolving to compete against you or beat you.

There may be larger companies who provide a wider range of products or services than you and there may be niche companies who focus on a single product, service or a unique way that someone is delivering something which may or may not be a part of your current offering. List out the things your competitors are doing well and the fresh ideas this inspires.

Next, based on the data, outline:

• Areas of concern
• Areas in which you need to improve
• Your unique and highly relevant competitive advantage(s)
• Areas of leadership opportunity

4.   Trends & Lessons Learned

For each identified industry or market, you must identify the changes taking place that may impact your business. Some of these trends might be:

• Workforce shifts – labor availability, pay rates, benefits, remote work
• Social shifts – health conscious, sustainability, mental health
• Economic shifts – inflation, interest rates

Next, identify the key lessons you’ve learned in the past which may come into play for your future planning. Some of these might be:

• We need better team performance measures to drive results
• Paid marketing performs better when…
• Our closing rate on sales increases when…

Taking the time to work through these two items provides you with insights and perspectives you would not otherwise have. It better prepares you for future success.

5.   SWOT Analysis

Most everyone knows what a SWOT is and has participated in one at some point in time. However, we often see this executed poorly. If it isn’t done correctly, your results will leave much to be desired. Some fundamental elements of a successful SWOT include:

• Opportunities & Threats must be external factors to the company. I see this done incorrectly all the time.
• Keep your list relevant. A potential Threat could be that the world might end. But this suggestion has no relevant value as any plan adjusting for this would be mute. Unless you are space company.

Your Competitive Understanding and Self-Assessment work (steps 2 and 3 above) should provide some great information and insights for your SWOT.

Often, a SWOT is done for the whole company. Our suggestion is to conduct a separate SWOT for each primary operational area of the company to provide more clarity. Some of the primary operational areas might include:

• Sales
• Marketing
• HR
• Innovation
• Finance
• Team Empowerment
• Customer Service

6.   Critical Areas of Focus

From your SWOT results, you should be able to identify some key intersections. You may have Strengths and Opportunities that intersect creating new possibilities. You may have Threats and Weaknesses that you must address.

As you review these intersections, make a list of your learnings. These learnings will become your critical areas of focus for the next year or beyond. They constitute the things to which you must pay attention in your business. List these critical areas of focus in order of priority starting with those which will have the largest impact if not addressed.

7.   Company Vision & Goals Review

Now that you understand your industry / market, competition, trends, lessons learned, self-assessment, strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities AND have an ordered list of critical focus areas, it is time to look at things through a different lens.

From Jim Collins’ (Author of Beyond Entrepreneurship, Good To Great, Built To Last, and Great By Choice) work, a company vision is a combination of your core values, purpose, and goals. This is your guiding compass for all strategic decision making. If you do not yet have a strategic plan with these critical elements, you must create this first for effective annual planning.

Based on your vision, review your critical area of focus. Ensure these align with your vision and goals. This will help you to start formulating your strategy for the coming year.

8.   Strategic Initiatives

This is where your annual planning begins to take shape. Based on your critical areas of focus, as these are aligned and prioritized based on your vision, you can now begin to identify your strategic initiatives.

Guidance for your strategic initiatives:

• These can span multiple years along your mission
• These should be broad in nature
• You should limit these to no more than 5

Some possible strategic initiatives could be:

• Double our client base in the US by X year
• Create a world class culture
• Provide industry customer service

9.   Annual Operational Priorities

Now, for each of your strategic initiatives, you need to create annual operational priorities. Annual operational priorities are the things that you MUST do in the coming year to achieve your goals. This is where the broad becomes more focused on the upcoming year.

Let’s take a look at one of these together. Let’s say that we have a strategic initiative to “Double our client base in the US by X year.” Some of the annual operational priorities on which we need to focus and achieve in the coming year may be:

• Develop the systems & understanding to consistently generate our required leads
• Develop the programs & systems to retain 95%+ of our existing customers

Do your best to limit your annual operational priorities to no more than 4 per strategic initiative and be sure to keep these somewhat broad in nature. We will be drilling down further as we develop the next items.

10.   Quarterly Operational Priorities

Quarterly operational priorities are the initiatives you will implement on a quarterly basis to achieve your annual operational priorities. These will help you establish timelines for your initiatives and gain more clarity into the required activities.

Let’s run though an example together

• Strategic Initiative – “Double our client base in the US by X year”
• Annual Operational Priority – Develop the systems & understanding to consistently generate our required leads
• Q1 Quarterly Operational Priority – Begin a paid ad program

In this scenario, in Q1 the company will begin a paid ad program as part of the strategy to achieve the annual operational priority. As you work through these steps, you will gain greater clarity and sense for exactly what will take place quarter by quarter.

Many companies begin the year with a loose annual plan. Then they get busy, and many initiatives fall by wayside. If this sounds familiar, this approach will help you stay on track and grow your company much faster.

11.   SMARTs

The final step in planning your annual initiatives is the development of detailed SMARTs. SMARTs by definition are:

• Specific – State what you’ll do, use action words
• Measurable = Provide metrics or data to evaluate success
• Achievable – Possible to accomplish, attainable
• Relevant – Aligned with your vison & goals
• Time-bound – Have a specific start date and completion date

SMARTs are the actual initiatives you need to complete to achieve your quarterly operational initiatives. Each SMART has several key elements, including:

• An accountable team member – the person who monitors its progress
• Clear success measures – exactly how everyone knows that it is done and what success looks like
• Timeline – Pick a specific start and end date
• An outline of what the SMART is – Steps you’d like to see followed, key references to include, etc.

Let’s run through some examples of SMARTs together

• Strategic Initiative – “Double our client base in the US by X year”
• Annual Operational Priority – Develop the systems & understanding to consistently generate our required leads
• Q1 Quarterly Operational Priority – Begin a paid ad program
• SMARTs
  • Hire a Successful Paid Ad Program Manager
    • Accountable Person – Joe – Operations Manager
    • Responsible Person – Sally – HR Manager
    • SMART Outline – Hire an experienced (5+ year) PPC Manager who has managed budgets over $100mm / mth in Pay Per Click, who can demonstrate knowledge of a Paid Ad Funnel, who has worked at a company in XYZ industry for at least 3 years, who fits with our company core values, who is able to come into the office for work,
    • SMART Timeline – By February 15^th of X year, the new person will be hired and successfully onboarded
  • Create A Viable Paid Ad Marketing Plan
    • Accountable Person – Joe – Operations Manager
    • Responsible Person – New Paid Ad Program Manager
    • SMART Outline – Using our sales goals, industry benchmarks, target audience information and market research, this plan will show expected spend, the different stages in the funnel, and the anticipated ROI from the new proposed Paid Ad Market Plan.
    • SMART Timeline – By March 25^th of X year, the plan will have been presented and reviewed by our senior marketing team for evaluation

12.   Specific Role Responsibilities – BIG 3s

SMARTs are one-time initiatives that a business MUST complete to achieve their business goals. Specific role responsibilities are the day-to-day role responsibilities of each team member required to ensure that the organization achieves its mission goals. Because we limit these specific role responsibilities for each person to just 3, we call these BIG 3s.

By limiting each person’s specific role responsibilities to just 3 things, we force ourselves to be extremely focused on exactly how we will measure the success of each person’s role. This provides our team members with the extreme clarity and confidence they need to excel at their role.

Each BIG 3 contains:

• The name of the responsibility
• A description of the responsibility
• Clearly defined success measures – based on data!

Each team members’ BIG 3s are tied directly to the company vision and our annual plan. When every team member successfully achieves their BIG 3s and SMARTs, the organization is sure to achieve their mission goals.

Successful Annual Planning Execution

This article contains several references to goals and key success measures. This is not by accident. To get where you are going, you need a plan. We stated earlier that an annual plan is a model with which you can gain clarity. This model is also a collection of KPIs against which you can actively measure your success, quickly identify issues, and rapidly make corrections.

When an effective annual plan has been properly put together, each team member’s SMARTs and BIG 3s are key indicators to the success of your business. Every team member should clearly understand and have access to the data to measure their individual success on a weekly or monthly basis. Defined success measures make this completely objective.

We use a system of green, yellow, and red for status reporting. If a SMART or BIG 3 is green, everything is on track and going as planned, per the data. If a SMART or BIG 3 is yellow, the team member is still achieving their goal, but there are some risks or issues we should start to address before they are not being successful. If a SMART or BIG 3 is red, the team member is not achieving that specific success measure and the matter requires immediate attention. Our company goals may be in jeopardy.

You can have your status report check ins as often as you choose. We would suggest at least once a month at a minimum. It is a bit like being on a diet and getting on the scale. The more often I get the data, the more likely I am to succeed.

Annual Planning FAQs

Q: Why is annual planning important?

An annual plan provides a data-based model of success for the upcoming year. In addition, your annual plan creation process creates fresh and unique business insights to keep the company aware of industry and market changes.

Q: What should be included in annual planning?

Annual planning should include research and the resulting insights from your industry, markets, competitive research, trends, lessons learned and your internal SWOT analysis.

Q: What goes into an annual plan?

An annual plan should include company vision, strategic goals, critical areas of focus, annual operational priorities, quarterly operational priorities, defined company initiatives (SMARTs) and individual role responsibilities.

Start Today

If you have not been doing annual planning, the task can seem daunting. The key is to get started this year. Do what you can. As you practice, you will improve. Each year, what goes into your annual plan will evolve and become more critical to your business success. No matter the level of time and effort you put into this, you will achieve a new level of clarity, understanding and wisdom about what your company needs to become more successful.

Summary

Annual planning creates a concrete plan for your company’s success in the coming year. It provides insight and perspective which would otherwise not exist. If you follow this roadmap, you find the experience extremely valuable and enlightening.

About Webolutions

Webolutions is a full-spectrum management consulting and strategic growth implementation company. We help businesses across the country identify and effectively bring their unique story to life, allowing them to scale faster, smarter, and easier.

Areas of expertise:

• Differentiating Brand Development
• Marketing & Communications Strategies
• Customer Journey Mapping & Execution
• Enterprise Website & Application Development
• Cross-Platform Data Systems Integration
• Organizational Development Strategies
• Team Alignment, Culture, & Performance Solutions
• Business Performance Intelligence Systems

A Special Offer

To speak with one of our experts about how we can help you implement a successful annual planning rhythm for your company of at least $5 million in annual sales, call us at 303-300-2640 and request a Free Annual Planning Consultation. During this 60-minute introduction, we’ll help you start outlining your plan. You can also email any questions to info@webolutions.com.

The post Annual Planning Roadmap – Your Guide to Greater Success appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

Defining your business’s differentiating relevance is about identifying those special things which set you apart from all your competitors. These define what is unique about you and the customer experience you provide. It is what characterizes you as you, and it is distinguishing. In addition, these differentiators must be highly desirable and relevant to your customers / clients.

For over 25 years, we have worked with companies of all sizes, in just about every industry, to help them take a closer look and identify what is truly special about them. This is part of our Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach which allows businesses to achieve extreme marketplace success ​through highly relevant, competitive differentiation based their unique core values, purpose, strengths, and culture.

In this post, we outline the steps for defining your business’s differentiating relevance to get you on the right track to putting this into use to drive more sales to your business.

How Defining Your Differentiating Relevance Drives Sales

With the average person seeing between 4,000 and 10,000 ads in a single day, people have become experts at triaging the barrage of information coming at them. In most cases, we simply ignore ads altogether. If I were to ask you to name five ads you’ve seen today, you probably could not. Then, taking this a step further, when you are in the market for a specific product or service, you will probably absorb more of the ads, but you are much faster at skimming and classifying these into your own mental buckets. It would be impossible to read everything that everyone has to say on a topic. So you typically generalize.

But, what if one of these ads actually said something that no one else was saying? What if someone said something that created a moment of re-evaluation in your decision-making process? What if one of the ads spoke directly to something that would directly benefit you in a way that you didn’t know was possible? Suddenly, you might stop, read a bit more, and try to learn more about this unique company.

By defining your differentiating relevance and actively communicating this, you will:

• Grab more attention from your target audience
• Enjoy higher close / purchase rates
• Benefit from larger initial sales
• Have higher customer / client retention rates
• Receive more referral sales

The beauty of all the changes we’ve seen in the world over these past few years is that your customers / clients are more open than ever to a company who provides something special and something unique. There are no boundaries to how you can lead your market forward except your commitment to do this well and your creativity.

Steps for Defining Your Differentiating Relevance

Defining your business’s differentiating relevance is not something you simply jot down. You can’t just wing this. Nearly every new client tells us the same thing. They already know what makes them special. But rarely have they taken the proper steps to create their truly differentiating relevance.

Most companies believe:

• Their product is better
• They care more
• Their customer service is better
• They are a true “partner” with their clients – we hear this one a lot

Yet, almost always, all their competitors’ websites make the exact same statements. So, by saying all the same things that all their competitors are saying, there is nothing differentiating about their messaging at all! Plus, when a consumer is comparing the products or services of serval competitors and they are saying exactly the same thing about why someone should purchase from them, the only way the consumer / client can make a decision is based on price. After all, everything else appears to be the same.

Let’s look at the steps to doing this right:

1.   Clearly Define Your Target Customer

The key to any compelling interaction is understanding your audience. To create your differentiating relevance, you need take the time to understand:

• Who are they demographically and sociologically?
• Why they might have an interest in your product or service?
• What experience do they have purchasing / using your product or service?
• What questions or concerns do they have about making a purchase?
• What are the most important factors they’ll consider in their decision making?
• What are their goals (be as specific as possible) for purchasing your product or service?
  • Ideally, how could this potentially impact their life?

2.   Understand Your Customer’s Challenges

The more you understand the lives of your audience, the more opportunities you have to create relevance.

Let’s say for a moment that you are selling welcome doormats to homeowners. Some of the challenges they may be experiencing in their lives today might include items that relate to the need for a doormat, while others could be challenges not traditionally associated with purchasing a doormat.

Issues with their existing doormat may include:

• They do not currently have a doormat
• Their old doormat wore out
• They are tired of their existing doormat
• They just purchased a new home and want a new doormat
• Their old doormat was too light and blew away

Other potential issues which might be impacting their life may include:

• Fall is coming, and they need to prepare their yard for winter
• They are having people to the house for the holidays and want it to look nice
• Inflation is making their food and other costs higher
• They want to be more healthy

Be sure to list all the challenges your customer might be facing in their life.  Even if these challenges are not traditionally linked to a specific solution your product or service solves, understanding these issues opens your mind and creates potential opportunities for you provide unique relevance.

There are many ways to better understand your customers’ challenges. The easiest way is to simply ask them. You can send them a quick survey. Alternatively, you can write articles on your website and see if your customers engage with these. You can send an email update to everyone with links to some articles to determine your customers’ level of interest. You can test content on social media channels. You can purchase consumer research, based on your current customer list.

3.   Competitive Research

For each of your competitors, review their marketing strategy. Some of the key factors we typically review include:

• Their website size in number of indexed pages on Google
• Their website domain authority
• Their website’s inbound link profile and number of links
• Their social media audience size and level of engagement
• Their amount of monthly website visitors
• Their website messaging and offerings
• Their website imagery
• Their website calls to action

4.   Outline Your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats

Most of you are familiar with conducting a SWOT Analysis. However, many companies do not receive the full benefits of this exercise. Here are some tips for a more successful SWOT:

• Make sure when you outline your opportunities and threats that these are NOT internal. These are meant to be external factors. They can be things like rising costs, tight job market, increased competition, etc. Then, your strengths and weaknesses should be internal factors.
• When working with our clients, we take the SWOT one step further by creating a “SWOT Plus”. In this elevated process, instead of looking at the business as a whole, we conduct a SWOT for each primary operational area. Some of these areas include marketing, customer service, sales, operations and innovation. This provides far more in-depth insights and allows us to dig deeper into your business and identify more opportunities.
• When you are done with your SWOT, review the intersections between threats and strengths, weaknesses and opportunities to identify the critical issues to which you must pay attention over the coming year. Write these down and create a plan to maximize your performance.

5.   Outline Your Relevant Strengths

Now that you understand your audience, your competition’s marketing strategies, and the information in your SWOT, it is time to take stock and document your most relevant company strengths. Be honest and objective about the strengths you truly possess as a business. You can only build a competitive advantage based on strengths you actually have.

List the strengths your business possesses that provide you with the greatest competitive advantage, based on the relevancy (value) that you can create and provide to your audience. These are what you will leverage and capitalize on when defining your business’s differentiating relevance.

6.    Create Your Differentiating Messaging

This is where the rubber meets the road. Even with all the background and insights gained from the steps listed above, it is often difficult for companies to create their own differentiating relevance. They are often just too close to things. It can be difficult to see fresh, larger opportunities. Sometimes this may take an objective third party expert to help facilitate the conversation and help explore more unique possibilities. You can use a sales dialer to automate the process of dialing leads, which can speed up the sales process and increase sales productivity.

To help, here is a format that we use to simplify the process. If you’ve ever done mad libs, it works a bit the same way. The end result should be formatted as follows:

• We are the only ___________________
  • fill in the blank with what you might call your type of company that is different than everyone else – the more unique, but not confusing, the better
• in the _____________________ (optional if relevant)
  • fill in the blank with a description of your coverage area or reach
• That or with a ________________________
  • fill in the blank with something 100% unique to you that you do or are willing to do
• that, to, or focusing on ________________________
  • fill in the black with relevant benefit for your client / customer

From our doormat example, using the format above, a unique selling proposition (USP) might be something like this:

We are the only Doormat Lifestyle Innovators

                  in the Unites States

                  with the Welcome Home™ mobile app

                  that helps our customers enjoy truly better lives  

The “Welcome Home™” name of the app ties in with the notion of a doormat. Then, based on what we know about our audience, we can bring the USP to life in many unique ways. This opens a whole new set of doors for differentiation.

Here were some of the challenges our audience was facing and how we’d address these with our product line design:

• That their old doormat wore out
  • Durable, high quality, 10-year guarantee
• That their old doormat was too light and blew away
  • Heavy enough to stay put even in the strongest wind
• That they just purchased a new home and want a new doormat
  • Doormats for every season and occasion (including “Welcome To Our New Home”)

Obviously, no one would care about a mobile app if the doormat was poor quality. We must address their immediate questions and needs first. Here were some of the challenges our audience was facing and how we’d address these with our mobile app:

Product-related doormat challenges they are having:

• They do not currently have a doormat
  • Shop for the best quality, coolest doormats available
• Their old doormat wore out
  • We provide a 10 year, full-replacement warranty
• They are tired of their existing doormat
  • Shop for latest styles of many different types of doormats
• They just purchased a new home and want a new doormat
  • Find the perfect doormat for your home selector – based on type of house and your personality
• Their old doormat was too light and blew away
  • Shop doormats by weight or doormats resistant to windy conditions

Non product-related challenges in their life:

• Fall is coming, and they need to prepare their yard for winter
  • Getting ready for winter yard prep checklist with reminders and quick tips
• They are having people to the house for the holidays and want it to look nice
  • Guide to entertaining after COVID – etiquette, considerations & ideas
• Inflation is making their food and other costs higher
  • Inflation Fighting Tips for Living & Entertaining
• They want to be more healthy
  • Welcome to a Healthier Life in 10 Minutes a Day – Quick Insights

All successful companies evolve their messaging along the same path.

When we work with our clients, we gauge where their final message lands on this hierarchy.

• Commodity
• Product
• Service
• Experience
• Transformation

You can read more about this in the book, “The Experience Economy” by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore.

To think about a doormat company promising people that they will enjoy truly better lives is certainly a transformation in the way people think. It positions this company with clearly defined differentiating relevance that they can market.

Taking this data-driven and informed approach did far more than create a unique selling proposition. It created and drove an opportunity for the business to redefine itself, based on its strengths, and create something 100% unique within the industry. This shows leadership, creates PR opportunities and allows them to be far more relevant to their customers. As well, once a customer is on the app, the opportunity exists to sell them doormats for every season and occasion. This company evolves from someone who makes doormats (do you know what company made your doormat?) to a company who helps people enjoy truly better lives and sells a lot more doormats.

Some of the next elements we incorporate into bringing this message to life include clearly defining:

• The emotions that we want to create in our communications
• The attributes of the company we want to share
• The voice standards with which we will communicate across all channels
• The unique vocabulary we will use in our messaging
• The image & graphic standards, infographics, and icons we will use to tell the story
• The content marketing topics and strategy we will implement
• The customer journeys we will create

All successful companies evolve their messaging along the same path. You can read more about this in the book referenced above.

Share Your New Message

Once your differentiating relevancy had been defined, it must be shared through all communications, including your:

• Website
• Sales Presentations
• Speaking Events
• Blogging
• Email Communications
• Customer Journeys

This is now your differentiator. It is who you are.

Continually Evolve and Enhance

As with any messaging, you are going to receive feedback from your customers. The key is to listen to them and keep understanding them at a deeper level. As ideas or messaging improvement opportunities arise, continue to evolve your communications.

Defining Your Differentiating Relevancy FAQs

Q: Who should be involved in defining my company’s differentiating relevancy?

A: The most effective group is your senior leadership team. As the example above points out, this decision involves multiple disciplines within the company. The more senior involvement in the process, the more likely the resulting ideas and strategies can be successfully implemented.

Q: How can we tell if our differentiating relevancy idea will be successful?

A. The easiest way to get feedback about your idea is to talk with your customers. Tell them what you are thinking. Ask them if they would see this as a benefit. Ask them what they like about your product or doing business with you. Ask them how you can improve. This is one of your most valuable resources.

Q: I am not sure if we can do this internally. Who should we get to help?

A: Of course, this is work that we do with our clients on a regular basis, and we would love to help you define your differentiating relevance. Just give us a call and we can talk.

Get Started Today

Defining your differentiating relevance takes intention and commitment. But in today’s competitive marketplace, it is critical to establishing market leadership. To conduct a quick test within your organization:

• Ask your sales team for a list of the messages they use when closing new business
• Ask your sales team for a list of the competitors they come across most often
• Review these competitors’ websites and see if they are using the same selling messages

If so, it is time to define your differentiating messaging. It will have an immediate impact and begin driving more sales.

Summary

Defining your differentiating relevancy will drive more sales by:

• Grabbing more attention from your target audience(s)
• Differentiating you from your competitors
• Connecting you with the needs of customers
• Increasing new customer close rates
• Increasing customer referral leads
• Building a stronger, more recognized brand
• Increasing customer retention
• Increasing existing customer repeat sales

About Webolutions

Webolutions is a full-spectrum business consulting and strategic growth implementation company. We help businesses across the country identify and effectively bring their unique story life throughout all experiences, allowing them to scale faster, smarter, and easier.

Our specific areas of expertise include:

• Differentiating Brand Development
• Marketing & Communications Strategies
• Customer Journey Planning & Implementation
• Enterprise Website & Application Development
• Systems Integration
• Organizational Development Strategies
• Team Alignment & Performance Solutions
• Business Performance Intelligence Systems

A Special Offer

To speak with one of our experts about how you can create an amazing customer journey for your company of at least $5 million in annual sales, call us at 303-300-2640 and request a Free Differentiating Your Relevancy Consultation. During this 60-minute introduction, we discuss your audience, your specific customer benefits, share ideas and insights, and help you start outlining your plan. You can also email any questions to info@webolutions.com.

The post Define Your Business’s Differentiating Relevance to Drive Sales appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.