How to attract new clients with a digital marketing strategy
At a time when many small business owners are struggling with lower sales, online marketing is an attractive tool to find new customers and keep your current ones. To explain how to engage with current and prospective customers and clients, NFIB featured Donna Botti, owner of Delos Incorporated, which creates online marketing strategies for businesses to bring them more traffic and sales.
“If you don’t feel like you have enough time for marketing, that things change too quickly and you can’t keep up with it, that you don’t have a marketing strategy so you practice what we call random acts of marketing, then this presentation should help you,” Donna began. If you don’t want to hire a marketing firm, then she explains how to create your own marketing strategy.
She explains that first you need to set goals for your marketing campaign. “Are you looking to get more leads? Are you getting people to buy your product? Are you trying to increase brand awareness? You can have multiple goals, but if you don’t know what your goals are and you’re not measuring them, then you have no way of knowing how it’s working.”
To figure out what your goals are, Donna recommends envisioning a “buyer’s journey”: the process where someone goes from thinking that they need a product or service to when they purchase the product or service. To do that, you need to know what your customers are like.
“It’s a noisy world out there, so if the message you send out doesn’t resonate with the right audience, you’ve wasted your time and money. You need to align your product, your message, and your audience.” Donna recommends imagining your ideal client, and what sort of messaging they’ll be receptive to. “Think about things from their perspective. What problems do they have? What are their goals and their aspirations? What are they trying to accomplish, what are their challenges and their pain points? When you can articulate some of these things, you’re going to have messaging that resonates with them.”
To do this, Donna recommends thinking about what someone actually wants when they buy your product. “Say you sell insurance. When you want to buy life insurance, what you really want is safety and security for your family. If you own a restaurant that’s a great romantic place to have a date, you aren’t selling a meal, you’re selling an opportunity to have a nice date. Change your messaging according to your audience and what they’re doing.”
If you don’t think this through, Donna says, “you’re not going to achieve the results you could if your product, message, and audience are in sync with one another. If the message doesn’t speak directly to your audience, they’re going to ignore it. If your product doesn’t solve their problem your audience wants to solve, then they have no reason to buy it, and if your message doesn’t match the product then the audience may be intrigued, but when they look closer, they’ll realize it’s not what they want.”
Donna goes on to discuss how to tell a story with your business’ messaging, how to make marketing content (or repurpose what you already have as marketing material), how to use social media, and how to get the most results from the least amount of effort in your messaging.
