Tag: Marketing Strategy
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How To Test Your Startup Idea With A MVP And A Landing Page
Are you an aspiring entrepreneur looking to test the waters with your new business idea? Do you want to know if your product will be accepted by the market before investing a significant amount of time and money? If your answer is yes, then creating a minimum viable product (MVP) and a landing page might…
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From Bud Lite To Backlash: The Importance of Customer-Centric Marketing
In today’s rapidly changing market, understanding who your customers are has become a critical aspect of successful brand management. Consumers are no longer passive participants in the marketplace; they now seek products that reflect their values and beliefs. This shift in consumer behavior has compelled companies to take a hard look at why customers choose…
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Mastering The Art Of Pricing: Strategies For Profitable Product & Service Pricing
Crafting the right pricing strategy is a fundamental element for the success and profitability of any business. However, pricing is not a one-time task; it requires ongoing efforts and adjustments. As you establish your new business, you will likely need to fine-tune your prices until you find the optimal formula that boosts sales and profits.…
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5 Essential Vetting Considerations Before Writing A Winning Business Plan
When starting a business, one of the most important steps is to write a business plan. However, many entrepreneurs make the mistake of diving straight into writing the plan without taking the time to properly vet their business model concept first. It is crucial to do the necessary research and critical thinking before putting pen…
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The Importance of Using A Unique Selling Proposition (USP) To Get Noticed
In the past, I have posted about how every business wants to stand out from the competition and make an impact on their target audience. But with so many businesses vying for attention in the marketplace, how do you make sure that your brand is the one that gets noticed? The answer lies in your…
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Mastering Demand Generation: Aligning Content To The Buyer’s Journey For Retaining Buyers
In today’s competitive business landscape, not all marketing content is created equal. A one-size-fits-all approach simply does not work anymore. To truly engage buyers and nurture them towards conversion, marketers need to align their content with the buyer’s journey. This means understanding the different stages of the buying process and developing content strategies that meet…
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The Power Of A Silver Bullet: Crafting A Compelling Elevator Pitch
Imagine stepping into an elevator with a potential investor who has the power to fund your business idea. You have just a few moments to capture their attention and convince them that your idea is worth investing in. This is where the elevator pitch comes in – a concise and compelling summary of your business…
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Vetting Research: The Key To Building A Strong Business Model
Starting a new business can be an uphill battle. According to statistics, about 20% of startups won’t survive past their first year. One common mistake entrepreneurs make is to create and love a solution to a problem they have experienced without determining whether anyone else wants the product or service. After filing a non-provisional patent…
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Niche Down To A Market Of One
In today’s fast-paced world, businesses are having to adjust to a transformed customer base, with clientele possessing instant access to more information than ever. This shift can benefit both parties, ideally helping to minimize frustration or delay. An informed customer experiencing clear cut and transparent communication is always the end goal. But who is that…
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How To Measure Real Sales Success During Inflationary Periods
In recent years, many businesses have been reporting an increase in sales revenues. However, the truth of the matter is that this increase may not be as significant as it appears. The reason behind this perceived growth is often due to inflation and the rise in prices, not actual sales. Inflation can cause the value…
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Reducing The Risk Of New Product Failures: Vetting Your Idea Using Concept Testing
In today’s world, many new products and services fail when they follow the traditional method of development and introduction. This involves creating a business plan, pitching the plan to investors, launching the business, and starting to sell. According to Harvard Business School, about 95% of the approximately 30,000 new products launched each year fail following…
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Unlocking Business Growth: The Importance Of A Solid Customer Acquisition Strategy
In a previous post entitled “Calculating Your Customer Acquisition Cost: A Step-by-Step Guide to Understanding Your CAC”, I discussed how to go calculate a customer acquisition cost (CAC). In this blog post, I want to delve further into why having a customer acquisition strategy is critical to scaling a business. A customer acquisition strategy is…
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Creating A Customer-Centric Experience: Understanding & Meeting Customer Expectations For Business Success
In the past I have written about the importance of a human resource (HR) philosophy that focuses on communication and expectation. This type of HR philosophy is centered around the relationship between the employer and keeping a satisfied employee. This same type of relationship philosophy is important to have for a business and it’s customers.…
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Tips To Boost Your eMail Marketing Performance
New challenges like inflation and labor shortages have left small businesses lacking the time and resources to maintain a robust marketing program. A recent survey found that 69% of business owners handle all of their company’s marketing responsibilities. Email marketing technology has quickly become a necessity for businesses looking to keep pace with the competition.…
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Scale Your Business Using Retention & Endorsement
During a recent mentoring session, I was asked how can a business scale in today’s climate? For a business to scale, consider the following fact…studies show it costs five times more to sell to a new customer than to sell to a returning customer. So, instead of focusing all your attention on gaining more leads,…
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Your Time-Focus Should Change While Starting A Business
Before I get into today’s thought, I would like to share some facts. Small businesses make up 99.9% of all US businesses and create 1.5 million jobs annually. There were 32.5 million small U.S. businesses in 2021, according to the SBA. Of those, 22 million were individually operated, meaning they have no other employees other…
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Aligning The Marketing-Sales Process For Profit
During the pandemic, small business weaknesses were exposed. Many failed because they did not align their marketing and sales functions into an integrated process. By this I mean that marketing, the sales personnel and all of the company employees must work together in the areas of strategy, tools, and customer acquisition to maximize the business…
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Put eMail Into Your Marketing Strategy
There’s an old saying in online marketing: “The best time to start an email list was two years ago; the second best time to start is now.” Email, SEO and blogs continuously outperform their social media counterparts. According to several studies, about 58% of consumers check their email first thing in the morning…64% of small businesses…
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Calculating Your Customer Acquisition Cost: A Step-by-Step Guide to Understanding Your CAC
Recently while mentoring, a business owner asked how to calculate the customer acquisition cost (CAC) and customer lifetime value (CLV). CAC is the cost incurred in acquiring a new customer. The first step to creating a customer acquisition strategy is to understand your customer acquisition cost (CAC). CAC is the cost of acquiring a new…
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The Search For A Product – Market Fit
Entrepreneurs basically have two options to get an answer on the viability of their product/service before attempting to carve out a new market for it. The true test of viability isn’t whether or not the product offering works for the intended purpose. It’s also not whether or not you can sell it to a customer.…
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Business Scaling Strategy During Recession
Every startup wants to scale, and a lot of them start scaling, but then they realize that as their top line is growing, their bottom line is shrinking. At the same time, in today’s inflationary environment, many businesses are seeing increased costs and are forced to turn to cost-cutting strategies like bulk-buying and automation while…
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Market Strategy Implementation Requires Supporting Tactics
Over the past years, the economy has taken a major digital shift that has impacted the way businesses connect and interact online with their customers. All company communication, sales demos, & business meetings have turned mostly virtual with remote and hybrid work environments. This digital shift has also shaped the consumer expectations of all businesses.…
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First, Define A Target Market
When I ask small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs, “Who is your target market?”, many answer with one word…“everyone”. While many may think everyone could benefit from their product/service offering, they soon begin to realize that everyone is not their customer. Initially, it is critical that entrepreneurs identify a big market that has underserved customers.This…
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How To Establish Pricing For Your Offering
I am often asked how to establish a product/service price. Here are some background thoughts: Even with these thoughts in mind, determining the price to set for a product or service can be challenging if some historical price and demand data is not available. So be sure to considered the following questions when setting a…
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Product Concept Landing Page Testing
There are many ways to test customer acceptance of a digital or physical product offering concept or service. Some marketers use focus groups while others use mailing lists and surveys. The internet has provided yet another platform for evaluating new product acceptance that involves landing pages. A product landing page is a web page designed…
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Write Content Using Buyer Journey Funnels
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience and to influence profitable customer action.
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Thoughts On Business Startups
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, just under 5 million new businesses were launched between January 2021 and November 2021—an increase of 55% compared to the same period in 2019. Most of these new companies are being launched by first-time entrepreneurs. A recent survey released by Digital.com reveals that 32% of Americans planning to start…
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Evolving Markets Implies Changing Strategy & Tactics
Business conditions keep changing: successful new products attract competitors; more legacy brands are moving to D2C; businesses within every industry are adjusting to a transformed customer base; consumers are rejecting “stuff” in favor of experiences. We’re already in the middle of the most disruptive decade yet. Business owners have to be ready for whatever comes…
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Business Values Analogy
In past videos, workshops and blogs, I have discussed a real-time strategic business planning process. It starts with a business concept vision that is overlaid upon SWOT analysis and typical business areas like values, goals and constraints to arrive at a unified plan. Today, I would like to focus on that tough-to-define word…values. Instead of asking…
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Vetting A Business Model Concept Using Pricing
In several recent thought posts on vetting a business model concept, I focused on defining the market size and positioning as key elements of a business model concept vetting feasibility analysis. Another key step in the vetting process is to critically think about how you can create/deliver the offered product/service to the identified customer target…
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Vetting A Business Model Concept Using Market Positioning
In the recent post of this series on vetting your business model concept, I focused on defining the market size as one element in a business model concept vetting feasibility analysis. When discussing market strategy of a business model, it’s inevitable that positioning will be brought up. A company’s positioning strategy is affected by a…
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Vetting A Business Model Concept Using Market Size
Many first time entrepreneurs make the mistake of going directly from idea to business plan and implementation. Without first “vetting” the business idea, entrepreneurs increase the chance of losing time and money. The vetting process may include validating the product/service value proposition by customer testing using the least costly modeling method (minimal viable product) to…
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Startup Brand PR Strategies
Are you starting a new business or looking to grow an existing company? If so, then it’s helpful to learn how to work with traditional media and online press outlets in order to maximize the power of coverage. And while there are standard PR strategy basics that are handy to know, one of the best…
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Facing An Inflation Price Increase Decision?
In the past, I have talked about adopting a pricing strategy that aligns your business value proposition (VP) with your cost of goods sold (COGS). In other words, set pricing by ignoring your competition and focus on customer value. By focusing on the value to the customer (removing their pain point), you immediately take the…
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Thinking About Franchising Your Business?
Expanding your business can help you have a higher profit. Franchising and licensing are two ways to reach a broader audience to build your revenue. Franchising and licensing are two different ways to share your brand information in exchange for a fee. The distinctions between franchising and licensing center around control and operation: Franchise agreement:…
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Is B2B The Right Distribution Channel Fit?
The 4 Ps of marketing are Place, Price, Product and Promotion. By carefully integrating all of these marketing strategies into a marketing mix, companies can ensure they have a visible, in-demand product or service that is competitively priced and promoted to their customers. Lately, I have had a lot of questions about one of the 4 Ps…Place.…
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Marketing Analysis Math – Don’t Freak Out
In its simplest form, business is math. If the unit economics work in a businessʼs favor, then the business will succeed, otherwise, the business will fail eventually. Even if youʼre math-phobic, there are a few essential metrics that you should know to better serve your business. I know, there might be others who are able…
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Human Resource Inflection Point Testing
In past blogs, I have discussed how businesses should always begin with an idea that is tested to see who will buy, for how much, and whether the exercise can be repeated. Small businesses must retain this way of marketing, constantly testing new offerings to new segments while the company continues to market the things…
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How To Build Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty has become a necessity for the growth and longevity of a business. However, many businesses today have adopted a transactional rather than a relational experience for their customers. Companies seem to have forgotten that without customers, there is no business. Over the years, I have learned from professional experience what it takes to…
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How To Choose A Company Name
While mentoring a startup founder last month, I was asked to comment about using their personal name as the company name. I did not share what I thought about it, but instead offered thoughts on how to critically think about using their name. First, I asked if their name was well known in the industry…
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Validate Your Concept Without Spending A Fortune
Many studies show that businesses fail because they do not take the time to validate “vet” their business idea by building a minimum viable product and gathering feedback from potential customers. To expand on this thought, business failures happen not because the founder didn’t have money in the bank to invest or because they didn’t…
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Think Hourglass – The Buyer’s Life Cycle
In the past, I have blogged about the importance of understanding the buyer’s journey and how it relates to the marketing/sales funnel. Have you ever thought about how to change that funnel into an hour glass shape by focusing on retaining customers? First, let me quickly review of the buyer’s journey — sales funnel concept:…
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Unique Selling Proposition & Business Core Values
While mentoring startups through the early business concept development stage, I have found that many entrepreneurs have a hard time articulating their business target market concept in terms of a unique selling proposition (USP). A USP is a statement of what makes your business standout from the competition. It might speak to a key UNIQUE…
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Build Your Brand Recognition
For a small business, it can be very important to have a brand name everyone recognizes. People identify businesses in terms of the brand that the business has been able to create. You better define how your business is unique or more valuable than the competition because if you don’t do this well, your customers…
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2022 SWOT Analysis – Marketing
Consumer expectations are perpetually shifting, and while there’s been some pretty dramatic evolution since the pandemic arrived, fundamentally, this is nothing new. When it comes to shopping, especially online, today’s consumers have one powerful tool at their disposal: choice. It’s driving their decisions about everything from where they shop to who they buy from to…
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Distribution Channel Assessment Worksheet
When it comes to determining a distribution strategy for your business, the problem you’re really solving is, “what is the best way to get my product/service to my customers?” To answer this, there are a several important factors you must be considered but first you must understand the fundamental differences between distribution channels. At the…
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You Don’t Have To Pivot In A Crisis
When COVID burst upon the scene in early 2020, startup ventures faced dramatic shifts in markets and the importance of agility became axiomatic: If you wanted your venture to survive, let alone thrive, pundits (including ourselves) almost universally advocated deep internal cuts accompanied by pivots to new markets and business models. Many business owners, however,…
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Common Startup Branding Mistakes
Being an entrepreneur and launching a brand isn’t easy. It takes a lot of skill, hard work and usually a little luck. When it comes to branding decisions, sometimes one bad mistake can derail even the best idea. To be sure, this doesn’t happen to you, make sure you avoid making any of these six…
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Should You Sell Through A Distributor
There are many reasons why a company might use a distributor as a channel to market. For instance, some companies need to increase market share and simply lack the sales competencies to capitalize on opportunities. Sometimes companies have a solid product offering, but lack the ability to get that product to market. Yet, sometimes companies…
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How To Integrate Sales & Marketing Strategies
Your Sales and Marketing strategy is your plan for reaching, engaging, and converting target prospects into profitable customers. It’s the charter that guides Marketing and Sales in their daily activities, helping them clarify shared objectives and how to achieve them. Without a strategy, all your Marketing and Sales activities and tactics might be for nothing.…
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Set Your Marketing Program Up For Success
You can’t run a successful business without marketing it. And while in today’s constantly changing landscape there is no “right” way to market, there are ways that will be optimal for your industry. The trick is finding these tactics. Strategies that work for another industry may not necessarily work for yours and vice versa. Even…
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Thought Leadership Vs Content Marketing Tactics
Thought leadership is getting a lot of attention among those aiming their marketing to increase brand recognition. So does content marketing, which is often touted for its ability to create top-of-funnel and marketing-qualified leads. So what are the differences in these two marketing strategies? Here are some thoughts to contemplate. Content marketing is top-down; thought leadership is…
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Content Marketing Mistakes
Currently content marketing is one of the smartest investments a small business can make, especially if you are in the early startup stages. Content marketing is a way to provide your potential customers with informative content to questions they seek. According to a 2020 Hubspot survey around 40% of marketers say that content marketing is…
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How To Start Selling Digital Products
Despite fluctuations in the economy, eCommerce continues to flourish – and with technological advances expanding the use of online communities and bringing digital media consumption to the mainstream, it’s no wonder that digital products are still on the rise. Digital products have become so pervasive that nearly all of the top professional bloggers, speakers, and…
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Effective Sales Process Management
How do prospects decide to purchase your product or service? Does a single decision maker find a product or service and buy on the spot, or does s/he go through many steps and approvals first? Perhaps there are multiple people or departments involved in the decision, each with their own needs? Your sales process management…
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Why Direct-To-Customer Succeeds or Fails
The term Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) refers to companies that make products and sell them to consumers, usually online but some in their own branded stores, avoiding traditional multi-brand retailers like department stores. One example is Warby Parker (I just bought glasses from them) but there are many others. The concept is simple: sell the product to…
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Price/Value Strategy Entrepreneur Mistake
Pursuing a high or premium price strategy is frightening and risky, but for many companies, it is the best option. Recently, I mentored a business who is producing a high quality product that clearly differentiates from their competition. The company’s pricing strategy was to undercut their competitors in order to get a foothold in the…
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Start Measuring Downstream Brand Metrics
The Apple’s iOS 15 update rolled out on September 20, 2021 includes new privacy features which could significantly impact tools used by marketers/advertisers. The changes include Mail Privacy Protection which prevents senders from learning whether an email has been opened and hides IP addresses so senders can’t learn a user’s location or use it to…
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Build Your Brand Message
Every brand has a unique selling proposition — the one thing they do better than everyone else. Unfortunately, founders often make the mistake of trying to focus on the same unique selling proposition as their biggest competitor, or they try to market themselves as being “the best” in almost every facet of their business. Naturally,…
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Digital Front Doors Are Here To Stay
The customer journey is being transformed using digital tools and creative customer engagement strategies. Customers can: try on glasses at home and order them online; take classes and learn new skills from industry experts; order groceries, make appointments, and get medical care all from our cellphones and laptops. As I pointed out in my January…
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Causes For Low Sales Generation
When I started my first business, I was not envisioning an overnight success with orders pouring in night and day. Nevertheless, I was expecting some growth and hoped it would increase consistently as I built the company brand over a period of time. I spent considerable time and resources planning the marketing campaign and reaching…
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Grow Your Sales Pipeline
How do I get more leads? This is a common question posed by many consultants, entrepreneurs and organizations. Depending on your industry, the question may be even harder to answer these days. Creating engagement content that creates a lead magnet (free content given away in exchange for your audience’s contact information) is one of the…
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Effective Elevator Pitch Basics
How to Effectively Describe Your Product in One Sentence Start crafting an elevator pitch by asking yourself a set of critical questions. Whether you’re an artist, service provider, or entrepreneur, you likely want to get your product/service in front of as many people as possible. You know that you need to market the product/service to…
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Brand Management Strategy
A branding strategy is essentially a roadmap for how you’ll develop and communicate your brand identity to customers. It involves defining who your target audience is, what type of branding content they might want or need from you and where they can find it (including social media channels). It’s about coming up with relevant brand values…
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Power of Third Party Endorsement
Third Party Endorsement (Word of Mouth) The saying goes that when you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. But when your customers love what you do, you’ll find yourself in a position to unlock the most powerful form of marketing that exists: third party endorsement OR what some call…
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Website Design Thoughts
Business owners wish to impress clients and prospects with their website design, and rightfully so. But today, your visitors want functionality and ease. Within seconds of downloading your page they expect to know who you are, what you have to offer, and how your offer of products or services will solve their “problem”. Fancy, over-designed…
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Inconvenient Truths About Content
Content marketing is, without a doubt, the most over-hyped and least-understood marketing tool for entrepreneurs and small businesses owners. And it’s certainly not the panacea it’s been made out to be. The interactive web (social media, blogs, videos, etc.) has made content marketing relatively easy and inexpensive. And therein lies the rub. As with entrepreneurship,…
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Business Growth Strategies
Most small companies have plans to grow their business and increase sales and profits. However, there are certain methods companies should use for implementing a growth strategy. The method a company uses to expand its business is largely contingent upon its financial situation, the competition and even government regulation. Some common growth strategies in business…
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Common Sense Sales Strategy
As companies focus on content creation and delivery, the marketplace is being flooded with high-quality information. In fact, most of the companies I mentor have reported they are lost in a maze of options, choices and noise. The problem buyers (especially B2B) see is that there is too much high quality content information and that…
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Digital Ad ROI Measurement
The effectiveness of digital ads is wildly oversold. A large-scale study of ads on eBay found that brand search ad effectiveness was overestimated by up to 4,100%. A similar analysis of Facebook ads threw up a number of 4,000%. For all the data we have, it seems like companies still don’t have an answer to…
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Online Marketing or Spamming?
Online Practices Marketers Need to Leave in 2020 Doing these five things doesn’t make you a good marketer, it just makes you a spammer. Some things are better left behind in 2020, and that includes certain social media practices. Lately, there is a lot of talk about the dangers of social media and the addictive…
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Key To Writing A Marketing Message
The key to market messaging is to write in reverse. Writing in reverse is simple: You have to reverse the roles of the writer (you) with the recipient (your audience). Think in terms of the outcome wanted by the reader. For instance, never tell the reader how to feel. Instead use evocative, concrete words that…
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Content & The Sales Funnel
Some content is designed to engage those at the top of the buying funnel, some to continue the conversation with the buyer & nurture leads in the middle buying stages & some is for sales to convert prospective clients into buyers. This is applying content specific marketing to the old “Sales Funnel — Hook; Story;…
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Demand Generation
Get more referrals Did you know B2B prospects are four times more likely to close when referred by someone they trust in their industry? The key to getting more referrals is to build trust with your existing clients. Since the year 2020, we can’t afford to leave these relationships untapped. Asking your clients for referrals…
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Testing Your Marketing Strategy
In business, what gets measured gets managed…that’s especially true for marketing. It’s important to test your marketing strategy — you won’t know if you’re on the right track until you take the time to analyze the results of your efforts. Your marketing is the link between your product & your customers, so don’t treat it as an…
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Business Values
In past workshops and blogs, I have discussed a real-time strategic business planning process. It starts with a business concept vision that is overlaid upon SWOT analysis and typical business areas like values, goals and constraints to arrive at a unified plan. Today, I would like to expand on that tough-to-define word…values. Instead of asking…
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Difference Between Markup & Margin
Markup is a term you hear tossed around from time-to-time…such as “that store really marks-up their products” but what does that actually mean? A markup is, technically, the amount thatʼs added to the cost of a product to derive the selling price. For example, a cheese retailer that wants to have a minimum of 50%…
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What Is A Business Concept Model
A business model is a conceptual structure that supports the viability of the business & explains who the business serves to, what it offers, how it offers it, and how it achieves its goals…Peter Drucker said that the business model is supposed to answer: The business model acts as the blueprint of the business and…
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Become An Affiliate Marketer
An affiliate marketer promotes offers or products that relate to them and/or their interests. They often appear very organic, and most likely, you won’t notice that it is a promotion at all. Whether you are aware or not, you’ve seen affiliate links everywhere, from social media influencer’s subtle or not so subtle product promotions to…
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Paid Social Marketing
There are two kinds of social marketing: organic and paid. With audience demographics and interests becoming more diverse than ever, paid social marketing is an efficient way to target customers with demographics and interests that align with your business. It’s considered best practice to invest in social marketing at least in the beginning stages of…
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Buyer Journey Map Format
In a previous thought post, I discussed, in detail, the benefits of buyer journey mapping. Since that time, I have been requested to post the spreadsheet format used in my past companies and workshops for building a buyer journey map. Several of you also requested the 5-Ws for building a successful buyer journey map. The…
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Bootstrapping Public Relations
Do-It-Yourself PR campaigns are difficult when bootstrapped, but still doable with the right strategies. The startup life is nothing short of an adventure that is made of a series of mini-quests along the way. Those quests become increasingly difficult to complete when operating in bootstrapped mode, which forces entrepreneurs to do more with less. The…
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Building Your Marketing Plan
A marketing plan is part of your business plan and is the foundation for identifying your market, attracting prospects, converting them into customers, and retaining them as customers. Usually a market plan operates at two levels, strategic and tactical. Strategic to identify the overall market play and tactical to execute on the marketing plan. It…
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Sales Process Steps
Any successful sales process is not based on how you want to sell; rather, it’s a reflection of how your customers want to buy. Over the past year, customers’ buying behavior has changed dramatically, so it is vital to tune, adapt or rebuild the sales process to reflect that change. One of the most significant…
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Applying Technology To Sales
Understanding the role technology can play in recovery and growth this year, sales leadership needs to consider taking a more holistic digital first approach. As more people adopt a digital mindset and use technology for almost everything, sales teams have to engage with customers in a relevant digital way. Making this shift lets sales leaders and…
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Think Inside Out To Avoid Branding Mistakes
It doesn’t matter how well you use marketing to tell your story if you miss what makes that story real. I still remember pre-pandemic when I went into a small coffee shop that served gourmet coffee, tea , artisan sandwiches, and gelato. There was a case with fresh-baked pastries, and it smelled like, well, gourmet…
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Sales Process Steps To Success
Any successful sales process is not based on how you want to sell; rather, it’s a reflection of how your customers want to buy. Over the past year, customers’ buying behavior has changed dramatically, so it is vital to tune, adapt or rebuild the sales process to reflect that change. One of the most significant…
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Branding Mistakes
Being an entrepreneur and launching a brand isn’t easy. It takes a lot of skill, hard work and usually a little luck. When it comes to branding decisions, sometimes one bad mistake can derail even the best idea. To be sure, this doesn’t happen to you, make sure you avoid making any of these six…
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Marketing – Buyer Journey Map
What is the buyer’s journey? The buyer’s journey describes the process your buyers go through as they become aware of a problem, evaluate potential solutions to their problem, and ultimately decide on the specific solution that’s right for them. In marketing terms, reduce this down to three stages: awareness, consideration and decision (some call this…
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Sales Forecast – Backbone of the Business Plan
The sales forecast is the backbone of your business plan. People measure a business and its growth by sales, and your sales forecast sets the standard for expenses, profits and growth. Usually, sales forecasts are based on past sales data, industry-wide comparisons, and current economic trends. It is easier to come up with a sales…
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Message Integration
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, is such a cliché that it has spawned its own cliché: If it ain’t broke, break it. Unfortunately, that’s just what many companies do unwittingly to their branding programs, playing into the hands of public enemy No. 1 in today’s marketing environment: fragmentation. More and more television networks,…
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Sales Funnel Content Checklist
A well-structured client acquisition process which runs across multiple communication platforms; Use metrics to guide the optimization of your funnel so you can hit your business KPIs (revenue and clients). The success of a digital advertising campaign depends on a variety of factors from targeting the right audience to converting them into customers. If you…
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Pricing Strategy for Products or Services
Properly pricing your product or service is key to your business’ success or failure. Smart pricing strategy starts with understanding the market price, which is the average price charged by all your competitors & the price at which their product or service is generally valued in the marketplace. You can then choose to charge a…
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Digital Sales Funnels
Digital Sales Funnel…A process comprised of a set of steps from the beginning of getting traffic to a landing page to the end till a part of that traffic makes a purchase…sales funnels differ across different business types…there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to funnels: B2B; Online Education; eCommerce; Subscription business. The key here is becoming…
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Marketing Failures During the Pandemic
During the pandemic, small business weaknesses are being exposed. Many small businesses are failing because they have not followed an integrated marketing/sales process. By this I mean that marketing, the sales personnel and all of the company employees must work together in the areas shown below such as the strategy, tools, and customer acquisition. Your…
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Pay Per Click Budget
Approximately 65 percent of all clicks made by searchers who are ready to make a purchase go to paid advertising (i.e., pay-per-click ads). So, what should you spend on PPC (pay-per-click or paid advertising)? This is a question many businesses ask. Regardless of whether you are starting out with PPC, launching a new strategy, or…
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Brand Loyalty And COVID
COVID-19 has already tested our patience, our focus, and our compassion. Now it could be testing our allegiance as well. Two recent studies show that U.S. consumers are shifting their loyalty to certain brands as the pandemic continues. And that has marketing departments scrambling to adjust how they connect with their audience. A July report…