The purpose of marketing is to build brand awareness, which engages customers, increase sales and grows your business. There are many ways to improve your marketing communications, but we’ve reduced it down to 5 steps to develop an effective marketing communication.
1. Keep Consistent
Your brand is the face of your company and customers start to form assumptions, opinions and ideas before they have even started to investigate your product or service – that’s why brand consistency is so important! Brand consistency builds up customer trust by showing them you’re professional, stable and established because you know exactly who you are and people know what to expect. Building strong brand consistency doesn’t happen overnight, but it’s better to start sooner rather than later - and be transparent by informing your customer of the change.
How do I build a strong brand? Ensure you’re voicing the same message and sharpen your image. Have a ‘clean’ and uncluttered design with short text and imagery that reflects you. Ensure your logo and contact details are the same across all your marketing collateral.
2. Know Your Audience
Often, you’re targeting ‘whoever wants’ your products or service, which can sometimes end up being everyone. To successfully communicate with your audience, you need to understand them, but how do you even start to understand your audience?
Analyze your current clients such as their demographics, purchase pattern and what platforms they’re using, and create a customer persona by writing/drawing it down. This will help to remind you who you’re targeting and allows you to focus certain marketing campaigns, saving you time and money.
What do I do if I don’t know my audience?
If, after your research, there are still missing gaps, you can look at your competitor’s audience on social media, send your existing clients a survey or monitor your clients using Google Analytics. If your traffic is mainly coming from mobile, ensure your site is mobile friendly. If your audience is between 16-30 it may be worthwhile targeting them on social media. Or if you’re a national company, ensure there is no language barrier, but remember, keep everything consistent!
3. Advertise
Advertising can be seen as costly or time-consuming but it doesn’t have to be and it can be fun! People don’t just buy into a company with money, they buy with emotions too. Being ‘human’ and not always business focused can help you seem transparent and friendly, especially on social media.
How do I best advertise? Don’t spread yourself too thinly and be focused and tight on your channels. Create social posts, print such as a flyer or write blogs specific to the purpose. Try not to use the same content – not only is this bad for search engine optimisation purposes, but the content needs to be relevant to the specific forms of advertising.
4. Manage your leads
You’ve built a strong and consistent brand and know who you’re targeting. After targeting them, people are interested – now what? Managing your leads doesn’t always have to involve a customer relationship management (CRM) system – it can be an Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet should include information such as name and contact details, but also categories of service or product, and it’s also interesting to know how they found you.
Is managing your leads really that important? Yes! Segmenting your contacts enables you to target specific campaigns to your preferred audience, this also helps you to further understand your audience and help you to know if your efforts have worked.
5. Evaluate!
When you set objectives, always ensure you have an end goal. Measure traffic and engagement month on month, track conversions or read customer reviews to ensure you’ve reached your aim. If your budget is small, run a shorter test to a smaller audience, but don’t expect results to come quickly – it takes time. Learning how your audience reacts to your campaigns will allow you to constantly change and improve them for future campaigns. Remember that it’s okay to keep constantly tweaking areas, especially online.
For more information on better ways to improve your marketing communications, or for our CRM spreadsheet to manage your leads, contact a member of the team today.
