Lite1.4 Blog

For you to succeed as a small business often times comes down to the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. You will need to employ many of the powerful marketing strategies available.

Long-term success means having a consistent revenue. However, the continuity of success for a small business is not just about a numbers game; it also acquires a greater depth.

Checking from a marketing point-of-view, a long-term success can be achieved. If you are able to consistently maximize the ROI from your campaigns.

Targeting

Consider the segmentation as the process of evaluating the market. The next step to go, which is marketing has to do with the decision making. We make decisions after all, regarding where we should be focus. Analyzing the market may end up resulting in various segments. It is not unexpected that we may find many of the opportunities out there waiting for us. Still, we will need to decide which one we have chosen to go for. The criteria used are quite so simple.

The first of it has to do with whether we have the essential resources to start entering a certain segmentation of the market. Perhaps, it seems like we have to make our horizons smaller. And then settle for pieces of the market we can actually serve. We do not want to run into something that is bigger than what our pocket can afford.

The second part is for you to see where we can have the most profit. This will mainly be answered if we can check in which area that it is possible. Where we can expect to have the greatest customer value over time.

You should keep in mind that a business is not just built in only one day and its profits should be expected to follow a particular plan. Do not think of the profits short-term. Instead of turning into the markets where manufacturing the product is of a low cost. You want to step into markets where the price you can put on the product is justified to be very high.

Differentiation

Differentiation is known to be the step where we want to find some details that will let our product stand out from all the competitions around. The techniques to be done are numerous but the main idea is to consider what is already provided by the competition. And create something new that will be really hard to copy so that you will have enough time to launch and to establish your product.

Positioning

Once everything is cleared out the company will have to find smart ways to communicate the beneficial aspects of the product to the potential customers. The identification of the market that has been done afore time as an initial step. Provides a whole bunch of useful information to help clarify how the particular group of consumers should be approached.

Hilal notes that for a long time email has fallen victim to a mass-marketing approach. Given increased and also scrutiny on how the consumer data is collected and is deployed. However, in the current climate this can also be the primary vehicle for an increased personalization in both messaging and also promotion. A paradigm shift that needs to occur to not only the drive sales, but the foster growth and the retention among customers.

“ The Email campaigns will be critical for engaging the buyers and getting them to take action if based on the first data.” Says Sara Spivey, the chief marketing officer at the Braze. “ The New developments that is currently in the email personalization, like AMP [accelerated mobile pages] for email, will give the marketers a great toolkit to keep their email communication relevant. And to keep it within the boundaries of increasing privacy requirements for a very long time to come.”

 

Making Use of Email to Drive the Retail Renaissance

During the year 2020, the retail sector had to struggle to cope with the brick-and-mortar lockdown crisis. That resulted in the sluggish sales. The unique opportunity that these unprecedented conditions afforded the retailers. However, meant a doubling down on the digital strategies that not only meant for better stores of actionable consumer data. But it was also an increase in digital outreach. One study showed that the email volume increased by about 27% over the last year. As we are emerging from the pandemic conditions, the retailers are facing pent-up consumer demand. And the digital framework to engage both in-person and also in digital audiences.

This unique scenario begs the question: How does a retailer keep an online customer relationships? And the business models flourishing while also still encouraging people back to the physical stores?

“The answer will simply be through how well and how possible you can both understand the customer audience you have built in the pandemic. And then you still effectively engage with it to cross-pollinate the virtual and also the physical experiences you can now offer.” Says Richard Jones, the chief marketing officer of Cheetah Digital. “The modern email marketing platforms will either look like the CDPs (consumer data platform). Or they may indeed be the fully fledged CDPs in their own right.

They are extremely rich sources that contains information to segment and to analyze an audience. So that they will understand what messages to send and to whom and on what channels to drive an outcome. The Email marketers are in a great position to help their customers explore both the physical and the online experiences a retailer offers. By understanding each of the customer and what will excite them.”

At a time when the National Retail Federation is projecting the astounding growth that is in the retail sector. And coupled with the increased scrutiny over the consumer data. If the email is leveraged correctly and utilized as personalized, it will add value.

 

As new data strategies has become the norm, the email remains a vital tool in the marketers’ arsenals.

The way and manner brands and marketers are now feeling about the email appears to be cyclical. Every few years it seems like there is an industry-wide reevaluation of its efficacy. As the landscape of digital strategies has continued to evolve. However, more of emphasis has been placed on better consumer data, now is the exact time for marketers to fully embrace the email. Embrace the email as an essential part of their personalization and their promotions efforts.

Consumer Data

Considering the report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) most recent report, as well as the forthcoming legislation that is surrounding the consumer data. Brands are now in a position where they can center their data and marketing strategies around the concept of a value exchange. This value exchange can be a loyalty programs, a better personalized consumer experiences, an individualized promotions. It can even be a free content in exchange for consumer data. Email is a very vital channel within this framework because it has long been a conduit for one-to-one communication between a brand and a consumer.

By the leveraging of more robust first-party data, and also the focusing of outreach strategies under the umbrella of the value exchange. The brands are in a unique position to begin transforming their email programs into an engine. That will not only be of help in driving the unprecedented projections for retail growth in the forthcoming year. Also will be reinforcing the reopening strategies for the brick-and-mortar retailers.

Email As the Relationship Builder

Email surprisingly is resilient; as a communication channel that has underpinned the invention of the internet. It is the single most pervasive mode of the one-to-one communication for the brand to the consumer messaging. Because of its prevalence in everybody’s lives, email is now a fertile testing ground. To make actionable the increased investment in more robust data. Like the first and the zero-party data.

So to say, with respect to the data and the consumer control. The email is known also as one of the most highly regulated modes of communication. The Consumers are given multiple options for them to control settings of which emails that they receive, even unsubscribe, and alter other preferences. Their inbox is also their own—it is a space that they own personally. And can browse at their pace, all based on their personal interest.

“One of the most unique thing that is known about the email marketing is that it is completely context managed by the consumer.” Says Sherene Hilal, the senior vice-president of the product marketing and business operations at the Bluecore. The consumer actively opens and then explores their inbox. In which it makes the signal that is from the email marketing the most predictive of the repeat purchase and the high quality data mainly determines the price, the product, and the category affinity of a shopper.”

 

 

You might want to consider to create a private messaging group for your students. The community building is easy on a platform that people are already very familiar with. Eventually, as people will start to talk about your class, their networks will hear about it, which in turn will bring you more revenue.

 

Do a weekly webinar
Weekly webinars are like the podcasts, but they have got several advantages.

With a webinar, you usually have about 45 to 60 minutes and a structured format, so you do not have to think up new material constantly. Additionally, it will only take one webinar script to get the job done. Over time, you can still refine your webinar and you can even record it and release it throughout the week.

For you to market your online class through the webinars, you can create a 45 minute presentation on a topic. Topic that is broad that your online course covers. Then you deliver a clear call to action at the end that articulates your main ideas and your focuses on the main concerns of your target audience. You will need to promote your webinars on the social media and through targeted ads to really get the word out there.

Also, as you are attracting more participants, the sheer size of the audience will be adding a valuable social element to your presentation.

Translate your courses into other languages

You can also effectively reach millions more people by simply translating your course into another language.

Do not stress about doing it yourself, either. There are plenty types of translators that you can hire to get your courses running in a different language. You can also find those low-cost sites to support you in the finding of a contractor to translate your course for just a lower price range.

Or as an alternative, your video content may just include automatic subtitle generation or a feature to add custom subtitles online. This will just eliminate the need to record the entire course over again. All you just need to do is for you to create quality subtitles that will allow native speakers of other languages to help access your courses from all over the world.

The eLearning is the future

The key to the success of your eLearning course is simply marketing.

It is quite challenging for you to create, design, and then perfect a progressive course that fulfills a specific learning need. Despite its very importance in the bridging of an important skill gap, the course cannot sell itself.

People are in need of the course that you are offering, and it is only through good marketing that you can convince them that it is necessary.

Throughout our everyday life, we are surrounded by marketing. It has become an art form for the marketers to convince people they need certain products and services for their lives to be changed. eLearning marketing is no different.

When you make use of some tactics to get your learning solutions recognized by those that stand to benefit the most from them, then your company will thrive.

 

 

 

 

The growing demand for “technology enhanced” eLearning solutions is currently driving the growth of the industry. It comes as no surprise at all that such a booming industry would even thrive in marketing.

One of the exciting factor is that for you to keep your eLearners. You can make use of this opportunity to promote your company through the giveaways and endorsements. For you to keep your learners engaged once the course is over, use this medium to start reminding them. With announcements about new lessons and new modules.

Collect feedback

For your course to be very successful, the learners need evidence that it will deliver results. If learners know that the others have been satisfied with the learning experience that you have provided, they will be more likely to enroll.

For this reason, it is of high importance for you to include the testimonials of past students in the launch of your course. It is more likely that a product with a known and proven track record will attract investors. More than the one without any recommendations at all.

As another method, you can also conduct a focus group to help gather feedback. Make sure that you are very open to constructive criticism because it is helpful in the long run.

Take advantage of this information to improve your course and then you will gain more perspective on how your it is being perceived. You will gain a lot of credibility when your satisfied learners endorse your course. Employing these tactics will be of help to you in building a more successful marketing campaign and the learner journey.

Use your social media

No matter which of the social media platforms that you are using to promote your business, you should begin your post with some teaser information as soon as possible about your online course.

While you are building your social media following, remember to avoid making all of your content posts about your course alone. Instead, make sure your social media channels provide your target audience with interesting content to get them interested.

The content that you are creating might come from other sources, and that is fine. Your audience will become accustomed to checking in with you daily if that is if you regularly post quality content on your social media. Once you have an engaged user base, you will have no problem marketing your own online course.

You can even utilize some certain apps to help you in marketing your courses to the exact audience that you are trying to reach. For example, some of the book summary apps are being used by authors to help them sell their books. This makes it pretty easier for people to start investing in buying a book when they have a summary. There is less or nothing to lose because the customer feels like they have gotten more information on the product.

The Business-to-Business (B2B) is a company that is providing services or products to other businesses, such as those that are involving a manufacturer and a wholesaler or a retailer.

The Business-to-Consumer (B2C) is the company that sells directly to the individual consumers. They are two separate business models that are serving different customer types: businesses and the other is direct to consumers.

Now, there are some factors that you will want to consider when you are creating your own customer profile—as much as the B2B is different from the B2C, so also are their consumers. So, here are some tremendous start-off questions to be asked and answered yourself so for you to get one step closer to understanding your consumer’s profile.

B2B
1. Do your goods or your services benefit a specific geographic location more than the other?
2. What particular range of revenue would a company need to have to afford your goods or your services?
3. Does your business target some specific personas within these businesses, whether it be the COO or the Director of Marketing?
4. What industries do you know would likely need or want the goods or services that you provide?

B2C
1. What kind of person would benefit from your goods or services?
2. Do your goods or your services benefit a specific geographic location more than another location?
3. Do your goods or your services help a particular target or a set of people, whether parents, seniors or the teens?
4. What is your consumer’s personal income bracket, and can they afford your goods or services?

You want to dip a little deeper? Good, it is advisable you should. You can check out some templates to build out your unique customer profiles. Keep in mind, that there is no such thing as just one type of customer. It is a great idea for you to build out more than one!

 

A Marketing Plan

Having a goal without a plan is really just a wish! And I hate to break it out to you, but four-leaf clovers do not work. So, let us start making a plan!!

Now, you should remember the three main marketing pillars that should be the foundation of every of the startup founder’s marketing plan are: the social media, the emails and the traditional/SMS.

There are so many reasons why it is very crucial to add social media to your marketing plan, and it is simple. First, it is the place where people spend most of their time online. This is not to say that you do not need a website. Of course you sure do, but there are about one billion active users on the Instagram even as we speak. The social commerce also entails the leveraging of social media algorithms to understand the customers’ social behaviours and their preferences.

Unfortunately, there is no magical manual for you to start a new business. I know, if only there was, right? And there is no such thing as the overnight success stories… that is all just hidden hard work. And no, we are not trying to make you scared or discourage you from becoming a startup founder. We just want to make sure you that know it is not an easy feat.

The satisfaction that you get from creating something (either big or small) feels so good, but it also add in some negativity, and there comes some complications. But with more satisfaction comes more of the obstacles that you will have to leap over.

One thing that we know for sure is that every startup journey starts with an existential crisis. We understand fully well that this investment becomes a branch of their life, and every other person that is a startup founder knows this.

So we want to first inform you that you should take a deep breath and then relax. Then, we are going to walk you through some of the explicit goals that you will need to set and some of the strategies that will help you to succeed.

Early Important Goals For Startups

Get Online

A crucial lesson that has been learned these past couple of years and that lesson is that being online is an absolute must if you want to survive. Of course, this also goes for any startup founder. The Dog walking company? Get online. The Personal trainer? Get online. The Scuba Diving Pizza Delivery Man? Interesting, but also, you can get online.

So how is it possible to you ‘get online’? There are a couple ways.
The First one is your website: This is your hub for the people to understand who you are and what you are selling.

Second, social: This is a great place where you can reach your target audience, you can also build brand awareness, and educate your consumers on the benefits of your goods or your services. You must have a firm understanding of your audience and also the message you want to get across before you start introducing your company to the whole world.

Provide Unique Profiles

As a startup founder, you have at least for one time or the thought once if your business plan is unique. Which is very smart. With so many businesses that are out there, you will want to stand out and offer something that is new and different to the world. This also stands to be true to our customers. So you must be able to establish and create your ideal customer. Remember that this will be changed and be also refined over time, but you must have the understanding of who would benefit from your products or services the most.

Now you must be thinking and calculating, how do I do this? A great place for you to start is to determine if you are a B2B or you are a B2C. And you just need to refresh your memory, here is what they mean:

The Business-to-Business (B2B) is a company that is providing services or products to other businesses, such as those that are involving a manufacturer and a wholesaler or a retailer.

The Business-to-Consumer (B2C) is the company that sells directly to the individual consumers. They are two separate business models that are serving different customer types: businesses and the other is direct to consumers.

The Email marketing is the single most effective marketing channel that is out there. If you want to do it well, it is not easy, but it is very worth the effort. Studies consistently have shown that emailing a subscriber base will regularly translates into revenue over time.

These email marketing best practices can possibly set you on a strong path to help you fine-tune your email marketing strategy. As another revenue that is generating the marketing channel.

Driving Traffic

The whole point of you sending your email messages is to drive traffic to your landing page. It is really just that very simple. If you are not driving the clicks to your page, your email subscribers can not be converted into customers.

The key to driving the traffic to your landing page is just quite simple. Just have one primary call to action (CTA) in your email message. Having multiple CTAs will only lead to distraction to the reader and will make them confused. When they are confused, they will leave your email or delete it.

That proposition (why should the consumers give their email addresses or other data to brands?) is recently the central driver for any of the modern marketer’s strategy.

Whatever eventually the solution or the combination of solutions that replaces the third-party cookies and the mobile ad targeting/tracking. The brands that have been most successful in motivating their audiences to opt in and to share their data are the ones that should be given the most useful first-party data. For centering their identity management and the marketing. The better the identity management, the better the brand can be able to deliver its part of the value exchange.

Also, the brands that has the most robust first-party data are the ones that will likely fare better in the maintaining of the brand loyalty. Through useful customer relationships and also the increasing of their customer base through the customer referrals and the second-party data exchanges.

 

Meeting Customer Need

Many marketers have now recognized that the third-party cookies were never that great of an asset. The Cookie matching techniques — needed to make them very useful across the web are simply notoriously inaccurate. Often times scoring an accuracy rates of not more than 40%, and the consumers continuously have been complaining about the ads following them across the sites. Sometimes even after they have purchased that product. The tracking and the attribution across the mobile apps have been plagued by the similar user irritation as well as fraud.

Marketers can now bring in their customers and their visitors as partners in meeting their needs. While they are reducing wasteful spending of the marketing budgets in the process. The key trick is just to understand that the quality of the visitor/customer data is now as very important to a brand as the quality of its products.

The Marketing strategy is a process that can give room for an organization to concentrate its limited resources on their greatest opportunities. So to increase their sales and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.

The Strategic planning involves an analysis of the strategic initial situation of the company prior to the formulation. The evaluation and the selection of the market-oriented competitive position that contributes to the company’s goals and the marketing objectives.

At one level, the first-party data is acting as the hub because it is the lynchpin for the identity management. Which merges the various sets of data into the integrated profiles of actual individuals. Using specific connectors like the email addresses, for instance, the marketers can possibly tie together different elements of the consumer behavior across the purchase records both online and offline. The website visits, the customer communications and other sources into one identity. Additionally, the third-party data can also be layered on top of the first-party data. Giving a broader understanding of the visitor or the customer.

Value Exchanges

On another level, the first-party data becomes the central. When a brand is taking a look at expanding its audience reach through the second-party arrangements.

These type of exchanges, often conducted anonymously in the clean rooms and/or the privacy sandboxes. Allow brands to match attributes, and sometimes identities, with other brands in ways that it protects the users’ privacy. However, such an arrangement will only work out in the long run that is if the participating brands have a high quality data.

To say in other words, the quality of your first-party data is not only that hugely valuable to providing the type of information. The offers and relationships that your own customers and visitors want. It is also very essential to allow you grow your customer base through the exchanges with other brands. Where an exchange of equal value is very vital to a continued cooperation.

Value of  Exchange in Advertising

Additionally, the quality of the user data directly affects the advertising attribution. Without an accurate attribution, the marketers are just spending money blindly.

However, it is another type of value exchange that has currently become the centrepiece of the brand’s marketing efforts. Namely, the value exchange between a customer or visitor on the one hand and then the brand on the other hand. You want the visitors to provide you with an email address for a mailing list, or to register and login. Or to offer other kinds of information or the consent because doing so will be of benefit to them as well as to you.

Over countless years of the commerce, marketers have successfully fine-tuned the skills. Skills that is needed to convey the benefits of a product or the service to their known and unknown prospects. The marketers have to hone the ability to possibly convey the benefits to customers and visitors of providing their own information.

1. You Are Not Having An Interaction With Followers

Do you post your content without really paying any or less attention to what the people have to say about it? If so, then you are taking the “social” out of the social media. It is very important for you to interact with fans and with your customers via your channels. It is a good way for you to get feedback, to get address complaints, and see what you are doing right.

2. You Are Being Too Spammy

The age of sales talk is now slowly dying down on the internet. Today’s internet is more of a conduit for the conversation and the information than anything else. Go over and view the last few things that you have shared on your social media accounts. If you are sounding more like a robot or like a telemarketer than an accessible human being, then it is time for you to figure out how you can better relate to your audience.

3. You Are Not Managing The Interaction

Should any unacceptable behavior or any language at all make its way onto your business page, you should try and consider laying down some house rules. Also create a document that clearly spells out the disruptive behavior—such as any inflammatory posts and any spamming—and also make it accessible to everyone who is interacting on your social sites or your blog. If anyone breaks any of the rules that you have set down, you can either give them a warning or you can just block them from your pages altogether.

4. You Are Wasting Too Much Time Posting Updates

For you to start updating each of your social networks one at a time can be very tedious. If you are still posting some updates one at a time, now you need to consider simplifying the process with a scheduling tool like the HootSuite. This program gives you the opportunity to monitor multiple Twitter and multiple Facebook accounts and pages from the same interface, and even it lets you to schedule your posts and also your tweets ahead of time.

5. You Are Not Being Original

Anyone can share, anybody can retweet, and rehash news that they have read elsewhere, but do you have anything that originally yours that you can say to your audience? Sure, doing the retweeting and the sharing of valuable information is a great idea, but you should not forget to also take time to create and share your original content. If you have any need of help in the content creation area, you can just hire an outside help. A professional writer, a photographer, or a social media consultant can be of great help to you helping you to create original, sharable content for your online communities.

If any of the above stated applies to you, then do not worry. You are not alone. As mentioned before, the social media moves very fast, and it can also be hard to keep up. Every business should take a look at their strategy every few months so to make sure it is still working for them. No matter what it is, there is always room for your improvement.