Advertising is one of the best ways to generate leads and boost your business. No matter how fantastic your product is, without leads, you’re going to die broke.
Yes! Broke! Think about Tesla. He invented the X-Ray, AC electricity, and even the radio; some of the most revolutionary advances in history, but he died broke after failing to get his company Tesla Electric light off the ground. Digital Marketing is one of those magical ways to fire up your business, but it’s not guaranteed success- you really have to know the fine print, and this briefing covers the essentials of online advertising:
#1.1 Know your target audience
Finding your target audience needs a little bit of work. Don’t try the impossible task of conjuring a product that is to please all beings. No…that’s a recipe for disaster.
Determining your target audience
- Think about the needs your product fulfills and try to narrow down your target audience.
- Challenge your assumptions and even conduct both large scale and small scale surveys.
Strategies for reaching target audience
- Networking still stands tall as one of the best ways to reach your target audience. Facebook is still king and it’s used by 81% of 18-29-year-olds. If you’re trying to reach out to the youth, then you should take that route.
- Integrate your communication channels.
#1.2 Create a Strong Brand and Positioning
Brand positioning involves giving your target consumers a reason to buy your product in preference to your competitors. This is where you get to focus on how your product can catch the eye of your consumers.
For the perfect results:
- Determine your competition and how they’re positioning their brand.
- Determine how unique your brand is to the competition.
- Create a distinct value-based positioning idea.
- Ensure your brand position is sustainable across all contact points with the consumer.
- Come up with a brand positioning statement.
#1.3 Know your main competitors
Your competition has got a huge say in how your product sells, so take time and figure out exactly how your competitors are operating.
Competitor analysis tries to determine who your competition is, what strategies they’re using and how you can have the upper hand.
Steps in competitor analysis:
Identifying current and future competitors
- Target products and know the number of players currently in the market, both direct and indirect competition.
- Use Michael Porter’s framework in analysing competitors. It involves 4 factors:
- Competitors objective
- Competitors assumptions
- Competitors strategy
- Competitors capabilities
Define your competitor’s target market and market share
- Start by finding out the main existing clients of your competitors and see what slice of the market they’ve got.
- Perform a mini-market research to know why your competitors’ product sells. Is it because of their low price, availability or quality?
- You should then get the statistical trends of your competitors market share over time to enable you to make better decisions.
Perform a SWOT analysis
- Involves analysing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your competition.
- Also, remember to SWOT out your own company.
- SWOT assists in benchmarking your company and generating strategies to move forward.
- You could also use competitive analysis tools such as SimilarWeb to track and learn more about your competition.
Plan and execute strategies
- Once you’ve got all the details about your competition and how you compare against them, have a game plan.
- If your competition is far superior, you could either mimic the strategies they’re using or go innovative and ty take up the market by surprise.
#1.4 Budget up
After setting up your plans, don’t go diving in. Sit and budget. Know how much you’ve got and how much you’re willing to let go when advertising.
Question is, where do you start? And how much do you allocate for online marketing?
Narrow down on what works.
- Sometimes, spending over a large number of platforms can be costly, so try and focus on what works like Google and Facebook. You’ll have full control on such platforms.
Calculate income and expenditures
Acquiring complete knowledge of your company’s revenue is monumental.
- On average, B2B and B2C firms use about 7%-9% of their revenue on marketing.
- Smaller businesses spend more than 10%.
Analyse your spending and balance your checkbook
- Take a look at your past efforts. Which strategies were most successful? Which one’s showed zero promise?
- Conduct a brief analysis of your efforts in terms of retweets, lead generation, and even email subscribers. If it worked well, consider boosting such efforts.
#1.5 Set up advertising goals
- Be specific…very specific when setting your objectives. Yes, you want foot traffic, but what kind? You want them coming in high heels, flip-flops or cross trainers?
- Figure out which strategy and plan you’ll go for.
Conclusion
It’s important that you analyse your competition. Figure out where your competition is not advertising and rapidly expand your advertising into such areas. Try and find new target demographics that your competition isn’t focused on yet, you may just hit a goldmine.
And remember, the marketplace is under continuous evolution so you need to have a clear picture and adapt when need be.
