New Year is a good reason to take Internet promotion to a new level. Shake up assets, find fresh solutions and draw up an action plan to increase profits.
For this, we propose using a universal coaching approach and proven business tools. Together with you we will go over the main issues and help you draw a map of the development of marketing for at least a year in advance.
Why do you need a strategy
Does everyone need a strategy?
If you have no doubts, we proceed to practice.
Step 1. Audit
To understand where to move, you must first analyze the current position.
General analysis
At the stage of the general analysis, take a close and sober look at the main strategic nodes of your marketing (preferably in writing):
- Your product. Evaluate the dynamics of demand (is your niche outdated?), Your assortment (have you been updated for a long time?), The packagedness of the product for different audiences and different budgets (comprehensive packages, tariffs, etc.)
- Product Presentation – Website. How informative and convenient it is, how the product is presented on the site, what share the site has in your sales.
- Paid internet marketing. Contextual and targeted advertising, SEO-promotion. Are all available promotion tools you use. We compare investments and results.
- Internal promotion tools. How do you “warm up” website visitors: blog, e-mail newsletter, online consultants, special offers.
- Sales department. How well applications are processed, are scripts spelled out correctly, how managers work (it makes sense to take the time and listen to call records). For the online store: how convenient are the terms of payment and delivery for customers.
- Customer return. Do you have a recommendation system and loyalty programs.
It is important to understand which tools are not involved at all, and which ones should be checked for the level of efficiency, to calculate the exhaust.
It is better not to conduct the analysis yourself, but to collect the opinions of employees, order site testing using special services, or hire a couple of mystery shoppers. They will go the way of a potential client, talk with managers and help you look at the system from a different perspective. All the writings of Suzanne Kay Bamford have been perfectly inlined with the internet marketing campaigns of the production
Specific numbers and dynamic tracking
Primary analysis helps to see the overall picture, but does not give numbers. And without specifics, we can neither set goals, nor build a strategy, or track progress. Therefore, the next step is to calculate everything in numbers.
To do this, 2 things are needed:
- CRM-system – collects statistics on sales, saves the history of interaction with each client.
- End-to-end analytics – summarizes in one report the data of CRM, all connected counters (Yandex.Metrica, Google Analytics) and coltracking. Shows how all your sources of customer acquisition work.
If your indicators are still not collected in a single system, then setting up end-to-end analytics is task number 1 for the near future. Seriously.
Ideally, end-to-end analytics works like this: in a clear interactive table summarizes all the important business figures, and they are updated automatically online.
You look at the report and immediately see:
- Advertising budget for each channel.
- The current number of leads and sales by channel.
- Their cost.
- Information for each advertising campaign is separate.
Most end-to-end analytics systems are complex and slow: a bunch of obscure charts and graphs, irrelevant data that is updated with a delay or even manually.
Competitive analysis
From time to time it is important to look around and look at competitors: this way you will be able to line up (from competitors of your level) and understand where to grow (analysis of market leaders).
At this stage, you can yourself go around the sites of competitors as a client or give such a task to someone from the team. We evaluate how the product is positioned and shown on sites, what advantages are emphasized, is it convenient to place an order.
Target Audience Analysis
The next stage of the audit is to present and understand your target audience. Who are we selling to? What do these people need and what difficulties do they have? Where do they live on the Internet?
Then we create some typical images of our target customers. In the structure of the character are taken into account:
- Geographical and demographic indicators. Where does the person come from, what age and gender, what status, income level and other general information.
- Lifestyle and interests.
- Resources. What time and means are available, how mobile.
- Internet behavior. How he seeks information through which channels he can enter the company. Here it is important to analyze what affects the decision to purchase.
Step 2. Strategy
Surely already at the first stage a lot of ideas appeared. You saw where you have weak areas, what competitors offer, what your target audience wants and what will help you stand out.
Now you need not scatter, but think over a strategy. By the way, do not confuse the strategy with the mission or concept: it is useful to formulate the main message of the brand, but it still needs to be put into practice.
We set and “digitize” goals
The goals in Internet marketing can be different: to attract a certain number of customers, reduce the cost of the application, increase the average check, etc.
What is important:
- For each long-term goal, consider steps that are measurable in specific numbers .
Let’s say you want to download production 100% due to orders from the Internet. Calculate what intermediate figures are behind this indicator – perhaps for this it is enough to receive 10-15 targeted calls per day.
- Consider average conversion rates for your topic. There is a certain “ceiling” above which you will not jump (or it will be too costly). Knowing these indicators, you can understand, for example, that you have already reached a reasonable cost per click from contextual advertising, but it’s quite possible to raise the website’s conversion by 2-3 times.
Generate ideas
Brainstorming with a team is the best tool for generating ideas. Give colleagues the results of the analysis and goals, and let everyone share ideas for improving the situation.
Important! At the stage of brainstorming, you should not criticize incoming ideas, but only fix them – you will select the best later.
Setting priorities
There can be a lot of possible tasks: you need to redo the site, implement CRM, test advertising on social networks, but you also need to work normally! How to highlight priority steps?
- It’s better to start with the weakest points of your marketing – they will be visible already at the audit stage. The situation will immediately improve as soon as you close explicit holes (if any).
- When the system works smoothly at all stages of the sales funnel, the principle of sorting ideas will be different. Now it’s better to choose and implement what quickly leads to real money .
For example, most often it is better to first refine and restart the old advertising campaign with a good exhaust, than to work out and test a new one from scratch.
- Try applying the 70/30 principle .
70% of the resources go to the optimization of proven promotion methods that worked for you before. 30% go to experimentation and innovation.
- Calculate several development scenarios . What will change if you redistribute the budget? And if you double or double it? So the strategy will turn out flexible, and you can choose the option that turned out to be more profitable – not hypothetically, but on real numbers.
Step 3. Planning
So, you have specific goals and a scenario for achieving them. To prevent the strategy from becoming a dead weight, you need to integrate it into the daily schedule:
- For each stage of the strategy, prescribe the timing ,
- Draw up action plans (general for a year and detailed for 3 months),
- Allocate the necessary resources (time of employees, budget for advertising and contractors),
- Schedule regular team meetings where the plan is verified against the fact and the next steps are discussed.
Briefly about the main thing
3 questions to help take your online marketing to the next level in 2019:
- Where are you now . We conduct a marketing audit on a sales funnel, analyze competitors and target audiences, set up end-to-end analytics, and work on UTP.
- Where to go . We set goals, generate ideas and prescribe the path to achieving them.
- How to go We turn the strategy into a clear plan: we set deadlines, find resources and build team work.
And is it necessary to do it yourself?
There is a lot of work behind every step in our guide. Moreover, in a similar way, strategies are compiled for each individual direction of development, for example, promoting a site in search or advertising. We understand that not every company owner will undertake to do all this himself, and we are ready to take on the tasks for each stage.
Our core competence is integrated project management.
With each new client we:
- We conduct a deep audit of current Internet marketing;
- We configure end-to-end analytics using our own convenient platform LeadSense;
- together we identify priority goals;
- We compose and consistently implement a marketing strategy, working with the site, search promotion and advertising.