Marketing Tips to Transform your Business

Marketing in 2020 can be overwhelming. Everywhere you turn there is something new to try out and another person claiming that they have the best – or only – way to get more customers to see and buy your product or service. 

This blog will cut through this mess and lay down clear principles for marketing in 2020 that will provide results. We have spent countless hours and money to discover what works and what doesn’t work, and now we are going to share that with you.

#1 Market Message Match

Here’s a simple but painful reality we see all too often across all of our clients when we first speak to them: their marketing may be attracting the wrong type of customer for their business. This is why when we work with a business we want to make sure they are being strategic as to who they are going after and the words/messages used to attract them. For example, many of our clients are from Birmingham, yet fail to target their content to their largest market i.e. the people from the Birmingham area.  

No doubt you have many customers that you like and want to have more of them. The key to identifying them and to create marketing messages that resonate with them is understanding their miracles and miseries. Their miracles are all the things they want, dream, and desire viz. all the things that your business is going to help them achieve. Their miseries are all of their fears, pains and frustrations viz. everything they are trying to get away from. You need to position your business as a metaphorical bridge that can help them move from where they are now to where they would like to be. 

Also, you want to be a painkiller rather than a vitamin. You aim is to relieve some immediate problem they are experiencing right now, rather than offering some product/service that will help relieve some problem in the future. 

#2 Avoid the Wasteland

Profitable marketing is just as much about what you don’t do as what you do. For example, we recently saved one of our clients in the West Midlands over £10,000 by simply eliminating a marketing channel they were using that wasn’t providing any real results. Therefore, they freed up the other marketing channels that they were running, making them significantly more effective, boosting their return on investment. 

To make sure you are doing the right thing, the first thing you want to do is clearly identify your ideal customer that you want to reach and find out where they are spending their time online. Then go there, and only there. Maybe they are on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, or certain websites. Our clients usually experience most of their success on Facebook advertising, as they can easily identify their target audience there. If you do decide to advertise in the newspaper, on the radio, or on a billboard, then make sure you send your audience to an online source or call a distinct phone number so you can track that return on investment. Ultimately, you want to be sure the marketing channels you are using are actually delivering results…

For example, we recently had a client from the Greater Birmingham area that wanted to continue advertising on a local radio station as they thought this was delivering them great ROI. So we set up a website to allow that traffic to be measured. In the end, we discovered that we could serve that traffic via Facebook at £1/click, instead of the £500/click that they were experiencing through radio advertising. 

#3 Build an automated system

The reason marketing can be so overwhelming and people get frustrated is because it seems as though there are hundreds of different marketing avenues and messages to try. This is why it is so important to establish a system that gets leads and converts customers on autopilot. The best way to do this, and is what we do at Osito when generating new leads, is to set up a simple social selling system: this puts something of value in front of a customer which they can access by completing a form containing their name and email, and then we nurture that relationship to convert those leads into customers. 

#4 Value Optimisation

One of the most important metrics in marketing is the concept of CLV, meaning customer lifetime value. CLV is simply the value of a customer to your business over their lifetime. If you don’t know your customer’s lifetime value, you should stop reading now and figure this out because the higher this number is, the more profit you will be able to generate (figure out customer lifetime value here). This is why, sometimes, the best way to boost your business is to simply focus on your current database of customers and provide more value to them. 

#5 Build a Referral Engine

Referrals are one of the greatest forms of marketing available today. Everybody loves word-of-mouth marketing because the customers it drives tend to be very high value.Although, be warned, it is dangerous to rely on referral marketing as you don’t know who will actually refer or what they will actually say about your business. We recommend you build a referral engine or automated system that allows you to go out there and collect more referrals in a streamlined way. You need to make sure you say the right things and know exactly when you ask for the referral. Whatever you choose make sure that the referral system is aligned with your business and the kind of referrals you are looking to get. Simply by installing a proper referral engine that leverages a current customer base, you can generate an addition 10 to 20 percent revenue.