Empowered

by Dominica Lumazar

  How have you made your customer the hero?

  As a bonus, I created a priceless list of resources that I have curated over many years to fast track your business success and help you achieve your business and leadership goals. This includes valuable information about the psychology of color and other topics covered in this book.

  Go to www.TheEmpoweredBook.com/bonuses to get this bonus now!

  Chapter 8

  Maximizing Marketing

  “Marketing must appeal first to emotions, then logic.”

  — Dave Ramsey

  Your brand supports your marketing efforts. Strategic marketing is the action a business takes to promote its product or services. It is also key in building brand awareness and exposure. There are many different ways of approaching a marketing plan depending on who the target audience is and what your goals are.

  No matter how you choose to market, put yourself in your consumer’s shoes before launching the next campaign. Does it capture you emotionally first? Budwiser is the king of capturing the hearts of millions, especially during the Superbowl. 2014 was no exception. They released an ad titled “Best Buds” during the big game, and it was perfect. It shows an adorable golden lab puppy meeting a neighboring Clydesdale horse. The puppy keeps getting out of his yard so he can go spend time with his new friend. Beer, puppies, best friends, all to the tune of Passenger’s “Let Her Go.” It doesn't even blatantly say anything about beer. It suggests to the audience to grab a cold one and enjoy the tenderness of watching an unlikely friendship, while drinking an all-American beer.

  You might be thinking, “I’m just the business owner, I know nothing about marketing” but the truth is we are all marketers in one way or another. You market yourself by the clothes you choose to wear every day, or what type of vehicle or form of public transportation you choose. Even if you have a marketing department or outside team helping you implement, you should have a general understanding of marketing.

  As business owners, we must be continually curious about what struggles someone might be having, or what makes them get out of bed in the morning. We need to have an understanding of what they believe and, ultimately, we want to know what they dream about. In Seth Godin’s book This Is Marketing, he says it perfectly: “People aren’t eager to pay you with their attention. The fact that you bought an ad doesn’t earn you something that is priceless. Instead, we can hope that people might voluntarily trade their attention. Trade it for something they need or want. Trade it because they’re genuinely interested. Trade it because they trust you to keep your promise.”7

  So, how do we maximize marketing? Keep your promise. Stay curious, while inviting your audience, your students, or your followers to invest their time into your promise. You want to design a plan that encourages and suggests rather then just shows the product and service and calls it a day. Remember the Budwiser way!

  Getting Your Marketing Message to the Masses

  It’s important to note that during this process, you’ll want to focus on creating education-based, value packed information and roll it into:

  Social media: Post valuable content to your business Facebook,Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. Remember to respond to questions and engage with your followers, or hire someone to do it.

  Run targeted social media ads with retargeting.

  Create video tutorials on your industry topics.

  Offer free “how to” checklists.

  Media exposure: Create a list of journalists within your industry and reach out to them. You may just get lucky and have someone write about your business. This may seem intimidating at first, but we never receive what we don’t ask for. Give it a try!

  Start a blog.

  Set up an email marketing funnel.

  Create a newsletter to continue growing your email list.

  Google your company: You may be surprised to find some reviews or comments. Regularly review your online reputation to make sure your customers are getting the best possible experience from your company.

  Take ACTION! In order to become successful, we must take action on the strategy. Yes, there might be some trial and error, but that’s what continues to make us the best at what we do. Never settle for just OK results. Think of the strategic testing process like refining your best recipe. With a little extra dash of salt to bring out the flavor, it just might be the best dish you’ve ever made.

  Keep in mind that just because you didn't necessarily get the result you wanted right away, this doesn't mean the campaign was a failure. You can review your campaign analytics instantly. Use that information and make adjustments along the way. Stay the course and don’t give up on a strategy just because it’s too hard or it takes too long. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Sometimes the best strategies pay off months or even years later.

  Inbound Marketing is the process of attracting the attention of potential customers, through content creation, before they are even ready to buy. It's one of the best and most cost-effective ways to convert cold traffic into customers and supporters of your business. Inbound marketing focuses on people's interest and beliefs first. This form of marketing is the equivalent of shaking the hand of your prospect and having a conversation with them before asking for a sale.

  Outbound Marketing, or what some like to call “old-school marketing,” includes traditional approaches, such as direct mail, cold calling, television ads, radio spot ads, and trade shows. This may be the old way of finding leads, but it is still very effective, depending on your niche. Marketers who prefer outbound marketing aren’t focused on providing entertainment or getting to know each lead. They want to show their product or service and make the sale.

  Online Marketing

  In today's growing technical world, there are various avenues marketing funds can be allocated. Of course, one of the more popular choices is to spend funds on social media advertising platforms: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Adwords, Amazon, Adroll, the list goes on. Ten years ago, putting 15% of your overall revenue back into marketing may have been enough to yield the return on your investment you were looking for. Thanks to social media, many markets are now flooded, and it’s become more challenging to catch the eyes of your target audience. Maybe you own a brick and mortar business, and sending out mailers or flyers was the extent of your marketing, and it worked for you. However, with how saturated the market is in just about every industry, it is important that you pay attention to what is happening on the Internet, and how to use online marketing to your advantage to support your marketing efforts.

  Many of my clients shy away from wanting to use anything technical because they're so used to doing things their way. I’m here to tell you that if you have the same attitude, it's time to change. If you want to grow, uncomfortable or not, you have to change with the times. Keep in mind that the days of the direct marketing, overnight million dollar business is unlikely. Have patience with your team as we have entered into the day and age of long-term strategy. But if executed correctly, the payoff is worth the wait.

  Mobile Optimization

  According to a report from Quartz, “As of now, 70% of internet access is through mobile phones.”8 Back in 2010, the average user would be on their mobile device for maybe twenty minutes, and the user experience wasn’t great and very slow. But with the abundance of apps, faster internet, social media, and the convenience of having our email in our pocket, the average smartphone owner spends up to five hours a day (sometimes more) on their smart device.

  Organic Online Marketing Strategies

  Does your company have a website? Optimize it! Make sure it’s mobile friendly, and fully responsive. This means it looks and navigates the same across all devices; desktop, laptop, mobile, and tablet.

  Optimize your social media accounts. Remember what you learned about brand consistency? Posting consistently will also boost your organic rankings within social media’s algorithms. Posting once a day on Instagram will drive more traffic for your p
referred hashtags over other accounts only posting a few times a month.

  Post evergreen content. The term “evergreen” refers to content that is always relevant. This type of content is going to provide the site with organic search engine optimization to help boost your overall website’s ranking.

  Watch for traffic patterns: understand your analytics, look at the visitors. Do they just visit the home page and then leave? What do you want the overall goal to be when your customer comes to your website? Do you want them to take action? If so, make it obvious.

  Use email lists. Do you have your customers’ emails but have never ran an email marketing offer? Take those emails and put them into an email software system. My recommendation is ActiveCampaign. There's always money in an email list when your customers are already familiar with your company. Make it work for you.

  Organic marketing will start to become intuitive to you. Eventually, you can take exactly what you have learned through just watching your own trends within your company, and then allocate some of your marketing budget toward online advertising to help boost those efforts. No matter how much money you spend on marketing, going in blind is a big mistake.

  Marketing Content: The Difference Between Content Creation and Curation

  So you’ve created some valuable content—now what? The curation process is just as important as the content creation process.

  Content creation is a process that generates topics to appeal to your target audience, whether it’s written or visual, video, blog, infographic, etc.

  Content curation is the process of gathering relevant information, the content you’ve created, or a topic of interest you’ve written, and then presenting it in an organized manner to your target audience, such as a post on social media.

  As you or your marketing team continue to create valuable content, be clear about who you’re creating the content for beforehand. It will make both the creation and curation process go smoothly.

  Remarketing

  A really powerful tool many online marketers use is called remarketing, also referred to as retargeting. Remarketing is a method of online advertising that enables websites to show targeted ads to users who have already visited their website. The purpose is to increase conversion rates and your overall return on investment. You've probably been on Amazon looking at an item you’re considering buying, but then you decide to check your Facebook. You’re surprised to see the same exact item with a link back to Amazon inside your newsfeed. You’re probably thinking, “How do they know that?” That is ad remarketing. Some call it creepy, but for us marketers, it's powerful and effective. It gives another chance to remind people about your products or services, even if they’ve left your website.

  The Power of Influencers

  Hiring an influencer can be a very powerful way to market your brand or product to an audience you’re wanting to capture.

  Usually, this is a paid transaction via social media. Depending on your marketing goals, and with the right influencer, it could be a very quick way to get in front of a targeted following of people who have an interest in your brand. It may just be the powerful marketing tool you need to stay ahead of your competitors.

  There are different levels of influencers to consider. For example, Kim Kardashian gets paid one million dollars for just one tweet about a product or brand. However, she is one of the biggest influencers on the planet and currently has one of the top ten largest social media followings. Don’t be discouraged, though, because there are many other influencers who have active and engaged audiences who will share your brand with their following for significantly less, sometimes just for keeping the product you send them. Let’s look at some of the ways you could go about it.

  You may consider temporarily hiring an influencer for a few posts which highlight your brand. You can also have influencers do in-depth reviews of your product, especially if it’s a product they would use and their audience is already looking to them for their opinion. You could reach out to an established company to see if they are interested in promoting your brand to their followers. Imagine you own a shoe company and have a new shoe coming out. You really look up to Tom’s Shoes and are inspired by their “One for One” mission and brand promise. You also believe people who like their shoes would also like your brand’s shoes. You could reach out to Tom’s and say, “I love what you guys are doing. Is there any way you guys could do a little promotion on my new shoe?” Tom’s might get back to you and say, “We're going to go ahead and promote your shoe as the shoe designer entrepreneur of the month.” Then you could present an ad you want them to share to their social media following and if approved, they will post it to their followers.

  Alternatively, you may want to consider hiring an influencer as a full time employee who has an established, highly targeted following. When an influencer has a full time job of making your company shine, the sky’s the limit.

  Online Resources to Support Business Growth

  Fiverr: A site that offers services for $5 or more. It’s a great resource for graphic design or small projects. Fiverr is a great opportunity to see if there’s an interest in your digital product or service.

  Upwork: A fantastic resource for business owners to find qualified people to join their team. You can hire contractors and offer your own services as well. Similar to Fiverr, but geared toward business professionals.

  Etsy: If you're just starting out, and you have a handmade product you haven't tested yet, and you're not exactly sure if it's something you're going to quit your day job to pursue, that's when you go to Etsy. I have experienced incredible success using Etsy with a client of mine who has a laser engraving company. They weren't sure if it was something they wanted to do full-time or not. So, I suggested they create a store on Etsy and just test the market. They got their first sale within 24 hours of posting the service, and within 72 hours, they had over fifty sales. I helped them build their team so they could be cost and time effective while making sure they actually had decent margins. There are powerful online store platforms like Etsy which will help you build an ecommerce website so you don’t have to do it on your own.

  Entrepreneur.com: Offers a fantastic resource for business forms and templates. You can browse through their list of various business forms, checklists, and resources for marketing, legal, finance, and so much more. https://www.entrepreneur.com/formnet

  Business USA: Has everything you’ll ever need to know on the legality of starting a business including hiring employees, tax requirements, self-employment, patents, military or veteran, business insurance, and more. https://www.usa.gov/start-business

  Maximizing Marketing

  Action Steps

  Marketing can be very frustrating, but it doesn't have to be. Keep in mind: it's the same for everyone in the very beginning. Remember to follow organic trends before investing your marketing budget in paid advertising.

  What organic online marketing strategy will you try first?

  It’s essential to develop different tactics and strategies in your overall big picture marketing plan. Once those strategies have been developed, you can begin to test them. If you’re unfamiliar with how to design different testing strategies, my team and I at Sweet D Marketing would be more than happy to help.

  What online resources will you use to help with your business growth?

  Make sure you're having fun along the way when you're designing and developing these strategies. Regardless of what the result is, in the end, you're still going to learn from it. The key is to continue learning, growing, and evolving to be better for your business and your customers.

  How will you get your marketing message out to potential clients?

  As a bonus, I created a priceless list of resources that I have curated over many years to fast track your business success and help you achieve your business and leadership goals. This includes valuable information about ActiveCampaign and other topics covered in this book.

  To get this bonus, go to
www.TheEmpoweredBook.com/bonuses

  Chapter 9

  Retaining Customers

  “If people believe they share values with a company,

  they will stay loyal to the brand.”

  — Howard Schultz

  The customer retention rate is defined by how well a company keeps its paying customers over a period of time. The big question is, how do you do that?

  Retaining customers is a balancing act. There are many tactics, but no shortcuts. By consistently paying attention to your customer retention rates, as the business owner, you will learn more than you ever thought possible about your business, service, or product. Keep in mind that it's much more cost effective to retain your customers than to acquire new ones.

  It’s common for a business owner to get so hyper-focused on generating new income, they lose track or forget about past and current customers.

  It's important to look at the lifetime value of a customer rather than your initial costs. One might think, “It cost me $100 to get this customer, and I'm only breaking even.” If you don't have any processes or strategies in place through your customer service and through your marketing strategies to take people on a journey to continue spending their money with your company, then it stops at their initial transaction, and you’re dead in the water. Aside from having excellent customer service and a wonderful product, you should always be working on strategies to keep customers coming back.