Improve Your Marketing Strategy – Think Smart With Your Marketing Strategy, Not Just Numbers
How to improve your marketing strategy? Business marketing is a complicated subject to master. This is generally because there are so many different components. They have to come together for your marketing campaign to work effectively. The time of date you release promotional materials. Also the type of adverts you release. And, also the state of your competition will all have a large effect on your success. There are times when a perfectly-designed marketing campaign will fail because it was revealed at the incorrect time, and there are times when you’ll be given the perfect window of opportunity but fail to capitalize on it.
This is all a bit vague. So let’s go into some practical examples of why you need to be smarter with your marketing strategy. And, don’t instead of focusing purely on numbers and statistics.
Brute-force marketing strategies are phasing out
In the past, all marketers and companies cared about was increasing their numbers. Whether it was the number of visitors on their sites or the number of clicks their advertisements received, general actions were tracked and this was how you measured the success of your marketing campaign.
Sadly, that no longer works due to the many ways that these systems can be abused. For instance, asking all of your friends to click on your banner advertisements at home will generate some numbers and be recorded. But, they were never going to purchase your product anyway so the numbers tell nothing.
Instead of brute-forcing your way by focusing on statistics and numbers, it’s better to use smarter methods like behavioral segmentation which focus on targeting your advertising materials to specific audiences based on their past actions. For example, if you’re selling smartphones and your target has been browsing for a new phone. Then, systems will automatically pick this up and show your smartphone-related adverts in an attempt to appeal to their needs.
This is a much smarter method of approaching marketing. And, relies on reading your customers instead of just aiming to increase an arbitrary number.
Followers aren’t everything on social media
Speaking of arbitrary numbers, there’s never been a more useless statistic in business marketing than the number of followers you have on social media.
Imagine this: a company has 500,000 followers that rarely ever Tweet about the business and rarely mention the products. This isn’t likely, but it’s just to illustrate the example. Now imagine a company with only 100,000 followers. Still a larger number, but it’s roughly 20% of the larger company. If you try and quantify this, then you’ll instantly conclude that the business with 500,000 followers is more successful. However, the numbers don’t tell the whole story.
What if those 100,000 followers spread more messages combined than the 500,000 for the larger company? What if there are several industry figureheads among those 100,000 followers that are actively spreading your products and recommending them? This type of word-of-mouth marketing works brilliantly. And, it’s why you need to stop putting such a heavy emphasis on numbers. In terms of social media, focus more on interacting with your followers and engaging them in conversations, not just collecting them to see an arbitrary number grow.
Value-added marketing should be on top of your marketing campaign
You will find ads almost everywhere. From your mobile phone to your PC and traditional media outlets, including television and print. Brands are always fighting for customer attention, and businesses find it challenging to grab the attention of their target clients because of “advertising blindness.” This is where customers consciously or subconsciously ignore ad messages because they find them annoying or intrusive.
So, what can you do to attract more customers? Because customers no longer want to engage with ads and are doing everything possible to avoid them, you may want to include value-added marketing in your software marketing strategy. This means offering your customers more than just the product or service they’re buying. For instance, you can provide your customers with free support and training, samples and free products, and referral rewards.