Marketing Strategy

Visualize Your Marketing Strategy To Form A Solid Foundation For All Marketing Communication.

~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

Social media actions and even plans can exist on their own, but without having an understanding of the marketing and business behind them, they could be acting in vain. Even communication focused disciplines such as advertising and public relations now acknowledge the need for broader marketing and business knowledge. Incite’s State of Corporate Social Media report of global corporate social media professionals found that 90% say social media is an important part of their marketing strategy and 80% say that social media is an important part of their business strategy.

To help understand how social media fits into the bigger picture of marketing and business I have created a visual template for a basic marketing strategy that emphasizes the consumer perspective. This template can help improve social media efforts by providing an understanding of the larger marketing and business perspective. It can help you speak the language of business.

To be honest most C-Suite executives probably don’t care about followers and engagement rates. To get approval and funding for social strategies you need to translate social media action into broader business goals such as sales, market share, awareness, customer retention, leads, etc. The template can also help create a new marketing plan or help plan the marketing piece for a startup. See below, but also download a free PDF here.visualmarketingstrategytemplate-blankVision/Mission: Why do you exist? To make money is not a sustainable answer for employees or customers. What does the company behind the product/service stand for and where are you headed? Think: solving a greater problem, spreading a bigger message, supporting a cause, community, the environment or being the absolute best at something specific.

Back Story: People buy for rational and emotional reasons that can come from your origin story. Show your human side of starting in a garage, using your last $5, making a childhood dream come true, an event that put the cause on your heart, something you couldn’t get as a customer, happy accident, etc. Even big companies showcase their humble roots.

Business Objectives: All marketing action must help support business needs such as sales, average spend, market share, leads, contracts, awareness, customer satisfaction, retention, referrals, volunteers, donations, etc. To do this a marketing plan must start with those specific objectives clearly defined. Make sure they are SMART: Specific (quantified such as XX% or $XX), Measurable (data you can access), Achievable (not too high), Relevant (support vision/mission), Timely (due date like X months or X years).

Products/Services: List product and service offerings, lines and versions. Describe them from the consumer’s perspective turning product/service features into consumer benefits. Look for gaps in product lines and offerings from your company, but also competitors. You may need to return to this section after industry, target market and competitor analysis.

The next section focuses on situation analysis, with important areas such as industry, competitors and target market plus elements of the marketing mix or Four Ps. The important part is converting everything to the consumer’s perspective and summarize by answering the customer centric question in each section.

Industry Overview: Is the industry/category growing or declining? What innovations and trends are important? Are there gaps in offerings? What do consumers care about most? What are their pain points? Threats? Opportunities? Sum this up by answering the question, “What is their unmet need?”

Target Market: Clearly define the group most likely to have this need with demographic (gender, age, income, education), psychographic (attitudes, values, lifestyle) and behavioral (products used, brand loyalty, usage) bases. From this answer the question, “Who needs it the most?”

Key Competitors: Identify several top competitors by market share/sales in same industry and/or by replacement products/services outside the category. What do you offer that is different? With this understanding summarize, “Why should they pick you?”

Distribution Channels: What are the convenient ways the consumer can get the product/service: A single channel or multiple channels; Your own or through partners like retailers or brokers; Online or physical store? Try to determine, “Where do they want it?”

Pricing Strategy: Will the consumer pay a premium or look for the lowest price? Do they want to pay per month for access or all at once? Do they need a free version or trial? What forms of payment do they prefer? From this answer, “What will they pay for it?”

Main Message: Try to summarize all the information above into a positioning statement written to the target market. You can follow a template like this, “For the <target consumer> who <state need>, the <product/category> provides <state benefit>, unlike <primary competitor>, the <product> <state difference>.” Boil it all down to answer, “How would you say all this to them in one sentence?”

From here the decision is what consumer touchpoints need to be used to communicate or promote this message to the target consumers. Or from the consumer perspective, “How will they experience this message?”

Advertising: Do paid messages in traditional media such as TV, print, radio, outdoor, newspaper, or local school programs, stadium signs, FSIs, etc. fit your target’s media use and your budget?

Public Relations: Can you make it newsworthy? Earn media coverage from journalist/bloggers, create events, conferences, speeches and publish brand newsletters/magazines for consumer, employee, and community relations.

Digital Marketing: How will they find it online? Start with a user centered website optimized for search (SEO), then consider search ads, content marketing, blogging, email, online ads, video, affiliate and mobile marketing.

Social Media: Where is the target audience active in social media? Look at social networks, blogs/forums, apps, ratings/reviews and podcasts. Look for ways to leverage geo-location, crowdsourcing, influencer marketing, social care, user generated content and native ads.

Direct Response: Consider direct to consumer calls to action in postcards, letters, fliers, catalogs, email, texts (SMS), TV (infomercials), radio and newspaper. Collect or purchase databases of email and/or physical addresses.

Sales Promotion: What special offers could get your target to buy, try or rebuy? Consider discounts, samples, gifts/premiums, coupons, vouchers, competitions, sweepstakes, joint promotions and special financing.

Personal Sales: High involvement products/services may require a salesperson for prospecting, customization of offerings to meet specific needs, demonstration/trial and after sale service to maintain lasting relationships.

Customer Relationship Management: CRM uses databases/software to build long-term relationships with customers for retention, extension and acquisition with special communication, services/offers and rewards often through loyalty programs.

When the forms of communication come together you want to ensure all marketing communication is integrated in message, tone and look (IMC). The final considerations have to do with time and money.

Time Table: Provide a time frame for implementation of marketing recommendations. Some functions must happen before others such as product development, pricing and distribution then promotion. Types of promotion such as Digital, PR, Social Media, Sales and Advertising must happen in a specific order.

Budget: The marketing budget can be determined by one of the following methods: All You Can Afford (what’s left over), Percentage of Sales (% of projected/past sales, consider industry standards), Match the Competition (spend what main competitors spend), Objective/Task (calculate what it will take to meet objectives).

As Philip Kotler says, “You should never go to battle before you’ve won the war on paper.” Whether you are a marketer creating a new marketing strategy for an existing company, an entrepreneur planning the marketing function for a startup or a social pro improving your business intelligence to have a greater understanding of the marketing and business behind an organization this visual marketing strategy should serve as a useful guide.

Voice Search Is Exploding: How This Changes Your Digital, Content And Social Media Marketing Strategies.

Voice Search Digital Content Social Media Marketing Strategy Quesenberry
~ K. Quesenberry ~ 2 Comments

Apple’s launch of the iPhone 4s in 2011 introduced the world to Siri. Since then we’ve had Google Voice, Microsoft Cortana, and Amazon Echo Alexis, but now voice search is poised for rapid growth. 55% of teens and 41% of adults use voice search more than once a day. Click To Tweet ComScore predicts that by 2020, half of all searches will be voice searches. Businesses can benefit from understanding how this shift will disrupt current search (SEO), content marketing and social media marketing strategies.

Voice Search Digital Content Social Media Marketing Strategy Quesenberry

Keyword searching is decreasing so sites optimized to keywords will see a decrease in traffic and engagement. Voice search sifts behavior from typing in key words or phrases to finding something by asking questions. This goes beyond long tail search strategies where marketers have combined multiple search terms to narrow results on smaller niche audiences. Long tail was in response to people using longer search phrases looking for more specific products and services. In voice search people use their voices to ask questions in full sentences.

Consumers are now asking questions of the Internet the way they would a person. With the growth of voice search, which uses natural language, there is increase in questions as part of the search phrasing. In fact, Search Engine Watch reports the use of search queries starting with “who,” “what,” “where” and “how” has increased by 61% year over year. This makes sense because many people now can use their voice and ask their phones.

Marketers must adjust so their content appears as a good answer. How? Think less keyword stuffing and meta tags and more full sentences and conversational copy. Respond to more natural language questions with more natural language answers – the way you would answer someone in person. Voice search results emphasize quality so you should think less like a marketer with heavy sales messages and more like a publisher or journalist – answering the “W” questions is the basis of writing a good news story. Also, all words become important Purna Virji of Moz gives the example that if the search phrase is “What is the cost for gas in my location?”, the words “is,” “the,” “for”, “in” and “my” are filler words. The filler words have nothing to do with a specific product or service, but they increase the words that match a voice query and can improve search placement.

Google Voice search has doubled over the last year. Click To TweetHow can you take advantage of this trend? Follow the four steps below.

  1. Research the most common questions asked by your target audience. Search industry, interest and product forums. Search comments on ratings and industry appropriate review sites such as Yelp, Trip Advisor or even Amazon. Search questions and answer sites like Quora and your own Q&A page. Survey front line employees and sales people about most common questions and analyze your own social media accounts for common questions. If you don’t have a Q&A section on your website consider adding one.
  2. Search these common questions using voice search and see how the current answers are written. Use Siri, Google Voice, Cortana, Alexis to see what is currently appearing as the top results. This will help you identify current competition and provide a guideline for how to structure your own answers. Are there answers that are not being given? Concentrate there first, then work your way to trying to overtake competitor’s positions.
  3. Create website and social media content that directly answers those questions in simple clear sentences. Here remember the “who,” “what,” “where” and “how.” Provide clear and direct answers but fill out the information around the direct answers. Once you get the consumer on your site for the direct answer you can expand the topic. Also don’t forget to create content based on variations of the same questions such as how to fix, “how do I fix ____?,” “how do I stop ___?”, or who can fix ____?, “what do I do if ___?” Don’t forget all content that can be searched including blogs and press releases.
  4. Consider local voice search. If you are a business with a physical address you should consider a new element to potential customer questions. Here people may be asking questions based on geo-location such as “where is the nearest BBQ place?,” “where can I get an iPhone charger?”, Who has the closest free wi-fi?” Make sure your business is listed with physical locations in Google+ Local and other geo-location social media sites like Yelp, Foursquare and Facebook. Reviews on sites like Yelp and TripAdviser can also impact these search results.

Voice search for product research is increasing. Nearly 50% of people are now using voice search when researching products. If marketers want their products to be found they should start to consider new strategies that emphasize natural language over keywords.

Digital and content marketing benefits to voice search optimization: Optimizing your website, blog and press/media pages with new information in the right structure can help get your content noticed over competitors to drive more traffic from highly qualified leads.

Social media marketing benefits to voice search optimization: Voice search optimized content will draw more engagement because you will be providing answers addressing your target audience’s most common questions. A focus on discovering and answering your target’s questions leads to more valuable and relevant social content that will drive awareness views and shares.

Business benefits to voice search optimization: Adjusting to natural language search helps you think more like a consumer and less like a marketer. This improved understanding of what your customers are currently seeking can lead to new product and service ideas to improve your business offering.

Over time the better you get at answering natural language questions the better your results. Bill Slawski from Go Fish Digital says that sites frequently selected and ranked highly can be deemed more authoritative and thus appear in more top results and drive more traffic.

We are still early in this trend. If you start adjusting strategies now you could benefit from a competitive advantage over your slower competitors. Have you considered how voice search will change your digital strategies?

For more insights into the big picture in social media strategy consider Social Media Strategy: Marketing and Advertising in the Consumer Revolution.

To consider the bigger picture in measurement see Why You Need A Social Media Measurement Plan And How To Create One. To consider the bigger picture in social media marketing Ask These Questions To Ensure You Have The Right Strategy.

Do You Have To Be Active On Social Media? Do You Like Being Invited To A Party And Being Ignored?

~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

From top global brands to local businesses many are jumping into social media by opening accounts. Opening a social media account is easy, staying active (be social) is the hard, yet very important part. Inactive social accounts are like inviting your fiends to a party, but then not talking to them.

How can you be active?

Be prepared. That is the advice from Imperial College of London’s Employee Social Media Guidelines. Before opening a social media account and inviting people, have some content ready for the first few days/weeks (tweets, posts, events, notifications etc.) Imperial suggests the information be interesting, relevant and useful, but not always all three. Then the college raises an important question that too many of us forget, “Do you have adequate time to dedicate to this?” Social media is an active conversation with your audience. You must be prepared to be social and spend the time doing it.

Brandginuity advises some simple ways to stay active even if you don’t want to invest the time to write a blog. You can search and filter news from the vast Internet and share what is relevant to your consumers in your field. Glean information of interest from: 1. Online news alerts. 2. Forums, other blogs and relevant message boards. 3. Content from your every day life (observations). 4. Reposts of great past content. 5. Ideas sparked by other posts. 6. Tidbits and history from your industry. There is value in filtering through content and presenting what you feel will be of interest to your target audience.

ClickZ offers further advice for building an active social media community. They say the key is giving your followers value and that value can take many forms. Start by learning what your customers like and then giving it to them. It can be videos, PDFs, photos, infographics, etc. Ask yourself, What’s in it for them? But simply answering questions, being consistent, and saying thank you can have a huge impact. Here are ClickZ’s top 5 suggestions: 1. Be transparent. 2. Be consistent. 3. Don’t blatantly sell. 4. Appreciate contributions. 5. Say thank you. Common sense, when you think about it from the perspective of being social in a personal context.

Where should you be active?

Deciding where to be active can be just as important as being active. It also can help you optimize your efforts. First let’s look at how top brands are using social platforms. The International Business Times reports that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube remain the most popular platforms globally and point out that Pinterest is more popular than Instagram. Vine, though very new platform, has also seen a lot of activity.

Search Engine Watch looks specifically at Fortune 500 companies and reports results from a new study to see how they are using (or not using) social media. Among these top performing organizations 77% have active Twitter accounts, 70% are on Facebook, 69% have a YouTube channel, 35% have Google+ pages, and 34% have active corporate blogs. Good to know, but the bottom line here is to do some individual research on your target consumer and find out where they are most active. Be active where they are active.

Still, Nigel Hollis from Millard Brown makes an excellent point to close off our topic, “Unless you have a clear rationale for why your brand should be active in social media, perhaps it would be better off not wasting time and resources on doing so.” That’s right. Don’t bother opening an account if you aren’t prepared to be active, but also don’t open an account if you are not sure how it fits into your business and marketing strategy. Too often too many of us treat social media as a separate project and not part of a coherent strategy. How does your social media fit with and leverage your traditional marketing efforts? If you don’t immediately know the answer, you need to go back and revaluate those efforts.

Before you throw a social media party, make sure the effort is strategic, integrated, and plan on being active.

There Are No Top 10 Best Rules for Social Media Marketing

~ K. Quesenberry ~ 3 Comments

The other day I was working in my home office when the FedEx Ground guy pulled up. I noticed on his dashboard was a box of Milk Bone dog biscuits. When I asked him about it, he said he keeps them in case of wild homeowners dogs. I thought that was a very smart strategy that is probably not in the official FedEx employee rules. It was something he learned from unique experience between him and his customers.

This led me to thinking about all those self proclaimed “Top Strategies for Social Media Success” lists that we see everywhere online and off. Bloggers and journalists love lists and we are told top 10 lists generate top traffic, so we write them. A simple Google search returns 135 million various forms of “top tips for social media marketing.” But if we are honest with ourselves (I’ve written plenty of these myself) there really is no one-list-fits-all social media strategy. What worked for Comcast Cable and Best Buy and Universal Studios latest movie launch probably will not work exactly for your local bank, tech start up or package good.

The problem with posts and articles like The Best Social Media Tells A Story, and Top 6 Social Media Marketing Tips, or  Social Media Marketing: How Do Top Brands Use Social Platforms is you can’t really build a social media plan out of them. Just because 80% of top brands are using Pinterest, does not mean that you should. Even if you did, how would you use it, what would you post there and how would that tie into what you’re doing on Facebook? Is it a good idea to tell a story in Social Media? Sure. But what story do you tell and where?

These are answers that can not be found in a blog post or article about the latest social media platform, technique, tip or survey result. Like my FedEx delivery guy, you need a strategy unique to your experience and customers. So how do you find your Milk Bone solution? Despite saying that lists don’t work, I suggest this basic social media strategy framework:

  1. Identify your business goals, marketing strategy and key performance indicators (KPIs).
  2. Determine your target audience, discover where they’re talking online and what they’re saying.
  3. Engage the target on their social platforms with meaningful branded content in a way that leverages each platform’s key capabilities.

Even this list is woefully incomplete, but at least it starts in a place rooted in your unique situation and starts to drive a strategy of choosing social platforms and creating content based on your business objectives, marketing strategy and target audience. Otherwise you are left to chase 135 million different people’s top tips that may or may not be good suggestions for your business.

Perhaps this explains why in a recent AMA survey only 9.9% of CMOs believe their social marketing is “very integrated” to the firm’s strategy and a full 15.2% admit that it is not integrated at all. This despite the same CMOs all planning to increase social media spending more than two folds in the next five years. If you want to really integrate social media into the rest of your marketing and business operations, you need to go beyond the tips and lists. Dig deeper with a good social media strategy book and/or workbook or enlist the help of a consultant who can take you through a more complete social media strategic planning process. And a white paper report such as “How to Integrate Social Media Into Your Marketing Strategy,” will help get you a lot further down the road towards true social media integration. The result will be a treat for you and your customers.