Online Marketing Made Simple

Five Steps to a Simple and Effective Marketing System

Marketing agencies try to sell you their magic snake oil. They tell you how sophisticated your online marketing should be and how you’re doing everything wrong. 

Here’s a truth for you to digest. To get the results you want, you don’t need to do sophisticated things. Just because the giants in your industry have super sophisticated marketing, doesn’t mean you need to. 

You just need to reach the right buyer, at the right time, through the right medium, with the right message.

Make your online marketing simple, and you’ll get results. Here’s how to do this in five steps.

Step #1: Understand your buyer

Here’s where that sophistication often trips up. Right at the beginning. Marketing isn’t about your product, it’s about your customer. You must target the right customer to get results. If a marketing agency says it’s got the formula to sell ice to Eskimos, ignore them. Go to the agency who suggest you should be selling ice in Florida.

You’ve got to know all there is to know about your buyer – their demographics, their location, their education, their earnings – but mostly, you must understand their motivations. Emotion drives purchasing decisions. 

According to Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman, 95% of all buying decisions are made subconsciously. Create the right emotional impact with your message, and you’ll have the customer eating out of your hand.

Step #2: Make your message concise and impactful

Cut to the chase. You’ve got a limited time to make an impact. Whether email marketing or content marketing, selling products or services, simple marketing sells. Here’s how you do this:

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Learn to feel the pain of their problem.
Avoid jargon and technical language. Most of your buyers want the outcome, not the method.
Make your message say it all. The fewer words, the better.
Be original.
Make your customer smile.

Want a few examples of a simple marketing system in action? How about these marketing slogans:

• Tide’s In – Dirt’s Out (Tide)

• Save Money. Live Better. (Wal-Mart)

• Have It Your Way (Burger King)

• Think Different. (Apple)

• Quality Never Goes Out Of Style. (Levi's)

• There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s MasterCard. (MasterCard)

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Step #3: Focus on quality

You should also drive home the quality of your product or service. You’ll sell at better prices. Think flavorful French cuisine versus a boring McBurger – which gets your juices flowing?

When developing your digital marketing strategy, focus on quality. Blog posts should deliver the promise of their headline. Add a big sprinkle of SEO optimization and you’ll drive traffic to your website. Your conversion rates will improve, and your sales will rocket.

Step #4: Be consistent

Develop your voice and use it to sell. When people know what to expect, they come back for more. Keep your style and tone consistent, too. Don’t upset your customer by changing halfway through. They have come to rock a Bruce Springsteen concert, not marvel at Andrea Bocelli’s tenor tones.

Be consistent in all aspects of your content marketing. Deliver your message in the same voice as you always do. Consistency sells. You only need to ask Lee Child this. His readers come back for more because they know what to expect. Even the slightest change (say, for example, getting your brother involved in the writing) can cost you customer loyalty.

(Read our article ‘How Do You Differentiate Your Content Marketing?’ for more insight.)

Step #5: Inspire action

A simple marketing system inspires action, every time. With your inbound marketing, always include a call to action.

This is where you roll back to understanding your customer. Not everything is about making a sale. Crazy, right? Isn’t that why you publish content, to sell? Well, yes, but it depends where on the sales funnel you have engaged the potential customer.

The nearer the start of the customer journey, the less likely you are to sell. So why waste a great call to action opportunity? Instead, think about calls to action that provoke thought, or conversation, or comments. 

As your customer moves down the sales funnel, consider CTAs that deliver extra useful resources – like downloading an eBook in exchange for an email address.

You will often sell more by not trying so hard to sell! (It’s a long game.)

Simplify your online marketing now!

People tend to overthink what marketing is and how to do it. They try a lot of shiny new tactics and get bored easily. They forget about the most important pieces: the customer, their authority, their message.

Don’t make the same mistake. Focus on your customer. Create content that engages your target audience and confirms your authority. Keep your message concise.

To learn more about the simplicity of online marketing, contact BlabberJax today.

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