Sales & Marketing Authority, Bestselling Author & Business Motivational Speaker

A marketing strategy is like your roadmap to marketing success. Every small business owner should have an effective and detailed marketing strategy to consult as needed.

Whether you’re embarking on a new marketing campaign, improving your web presence, or simply sending a sales letter to a group of customers, every marketing move you make should fall under the umbrella of your marketing strategy.

Here are a few tips to help make your strategy as effective as possible.

Know the Market

The first thing your strategy should consider is your market. Who are your customers? What do they want? What do they want for free, what are they willing to pay for, and how much will they pay for it?

When you are rolling out a new product, you should have a picture in your mind of precisely who is going to buy it. If you don’t, then you should be doing a lot more research ahead of time.

Find your Niche

Every product and service on the market should be there as an answer to some need or problem. Moreover, what differentiates your product from your competitors’, and why should your potential customers choose you. Your marketing strategy should attempt to answer these questions.

Define your Goals

This is perhaps the most significant part of your marketing strategy. When you’ve identified who you are going to sell to, and on which basis you’re going to promote your product, you need to define a plan to move people from conviction to action.

In other words, convincing your potential customers that your product is the best product on the market is one thing, but how are you actually going to get them to open up their wallets and buy your product?

There are a number of ways that you can do this, including directing customers to your website, or getting them on the phone so that you can drive them to action personally. Whatever option you choose, it needs to be defined in detail beforehand. All the advertising in the world won’t get you anywhere if it doesn’t leave people with a definite channel through which they can buy your product.

Test your Results

Testing is the final key to any marketing strategy. You will never get everything perfect ahead of time. Your marketing roadmap should ideally be in a constant state of flux. As you implement new marketing campaigns, you should be testing what works and what doesn’t work. Improve on the good, and get rid of the bad.

Happy marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Marketing Consultant – Sales Expert - Motivational Speaker

So we’ve all heard of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and a few of us will even have a good understanding of the basic principles of SEO and will be able to use these to generate more traffic for our company websites and blogs. But as always the platforms for online marketing are changing, and as we move into 2012 we need to not only be focusing our efforts on increased SEO for our sites, we also now need to be thinking about our social media marketing goals and how we can further engage our audiences for the year ahead.

Social Media Optimisation (SMO) is the new SEO and it can do wonders for your business in terms of generating more leads and increasing awareness of your brand – so how can you optimise your corporate social media accounts to get the most out of them in 2012?

Well, there are two basic components to any good SMO campaign. Firstly, you need to link your social media sites to your website and blog content through the likes of social media share buttons. By adding a Facebook “like” button, a “Tweet This” button or Google Plus’ “+1” button to your content your audience can easily share your content with others and give recommendation to your work, which any visitors to your site will be able to see through the number of likes and shares each your posts or pages have had.

The second component to a successful SMO campaign comes from the contributions you make yourself – by providing high quality content which continuously engages your audience, then sharing this to all of your social media platforms yourself so that all of your followers have regular updates to keep them interested.

It is also very important when creating improved SMO for your business that either you yourself, your marketing team or your company as a defined brand itself interacts with your audience directly, through posting comments on your own sites, interacting with your followers and engaging in discussion and debate on other relevant blogs and forums. Simply plastering your content all over your social media platforms is not enough – you need to engage your audience and interact with them in a way which drives discussion and sparks further interest.

In basic terms, in order to be successful with SMO your content needs to be engaging and up-to-date, and it needs to be made easy for your audience to share this content across as many social media platforms as possible.

SMO is just as important for your business as SEO has been, as not only can it drive traffic to your sites, creating increased lead generation and in turn boost your sales, but it is also aimed at increasing your direct contact with your current followers – which in turn will push your online reach out across your targeted markets and allow you to engage with more and more potential clients.

The main downfall with pursuing an SMO campaign is that it can be very time consuming, and if you don’t have a dedicated team to push SMO it can be very difficult to maintain a strong online presence for your business – so look out for future posts about some great online tools which can help streamline your social media efforts and increase SMO in one foul swoop.

Happy marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Marketing Consultant – Sales Expert – Motivational Speaker

Everybody knows that there is an optimal email level somewhere out there; a magical line that you need to be careful not to cross for fear of people opting out and all your hard lead-generation work going straight down the drain.

If you’re interested in taking your email marketing to the next level this year, consider these simple tests before you hit the send button.

Apply the Scientific Method

Treat your explorations in email marketing like scientific experiments. Apply the scientific method, so that you can be sure that you’re learning from everything you do. Do this by establishing a meaningful hypothesis, taking test samples, and taking accurate measurements.

If you can remember back to junior high school, a hypothesis is an educated guess of what you expect will happen. For instance, you could hypothesise that doubling the frequency of your email will drive your click-through rates from 20% to 50%. Or you could hypothesise that doubling your email frequency would cut 20% from your subscriber list over 2 weeks (in this case, you shouldn’t complete the experiment).

Test samples are a crucial part of the email marketing process. When you want to implement a slightly new strategy, you should never be sending it to your entire subscriber list at the same time. Instead, take a small sample, one who you think will be most receptive to the change, and send it only to them. Based on their response, you can then implement whatever changes in frequency or content you’ve made to your whole list.

Lastly, make sure that every change you’re making to your email marketing campaign is being measured for optimisation. This means that if you make a change in the frequency that you’re sending out emails, then you should be measuring the effects on click-through rates (hopefully higher) as well as the effect on subscriber rates (if too many people are un-subscribing based on a change you made, you may want to think about changing it back).

Add Value

The golden rule of marketing is doubly true over email. Only send your readers something if it is of value to them. And don’t forget the corollary to that rule – don’t send anything to you subscribers if it doesn’t have specific value to them.

The readers of your website, and the people who gave you their email addresses and asked you to send them information did so because they are interested in you, your information, and the products and services that you provide. Take that information and use it wisely. They want to be sold to, but only if you have something of value.

Happy marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Marketing Consultant – Sales Expert - Motivational Speaker

It’s hard to believe, but 2012 will be upon us within 3 days. This is a perfect opportunity look at the direction of your business, where you’ve been in 2011, and where you want to be in 2012.

The best way to do this is with an end-of-year marketing analysis and report. Don’t worry, you’re not giving the report to anyone other than yourself!

Identify Three Successes

It’s always easier to take criticism when you start with the positives. To this end, identify 3 things that’s you’ve done successfully with your marketing this year. And I don’t just mean that you should say “I worked harder this year.” Look for:

• Measurable improvements over 2010 (click-through rates, ROI on campaigns, etc.).
• Successful new campaigns implemented.
• Higher sales volume, new clients won, or costs lowered.

Look for the things that you did best in 2011. Now, the key is to identify what you did to achieve your greatest successes in 2011, and then try to repeat them for 2012.

Identify Three Failures

This can be a lot more difficult than identifying the three successes. Look for things that you did, which didn’t work out as well as you had hoped, or actions that you didn’t take, which would have been good in hindsight. Consider:

• Moves that you didn’t make, or delayed on (making your site mobile-friendly, kick-starting your social media campaign).
• Clients that you lost, or more importantly, existing client relationships that you let stagnate.
• Unsuccessful marketing moves (failed campaigns, ill-advised advertisements).

It’s always said that a mistake is an opportunity to learn. So don’t just dwell on your mistakes from the past year. The purpose of identifying them is so that you can make sure you don’t repeat them.

Identify Where you Want to Be Next Year

This is the most important part of the analysis. Taking your successes and your failures from the past year, identify where you want to be at this time next year. Put these in concrete terms, and make a plan for how you’re going to get there.

So rather than telling yourself that you want to have a considerable social media presence, tell yourself that by this time next year you’ll have 500 fans on your Facebook page, 5,000 followers on Twitter, and at least 5 highly-rated videos on YouTube.

Happy New Year, and make sure that 2012 is your most productive year ever!

Happy marketing!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Marketing Consultant – Sales Expert - Motivational Speaker