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Author: Phil Dossett

Phill Dossett is the strategy director at Engage, helping clients succeed by implementing clever digital tactics; including conversion optimised website development, advertising campaigns and marketing automation.

We’re living in uncertain times.

Now is not the time to sit back and weather the storm – it’s the time to adjust and adapt to a new way of digital marketing as the pandemic fades and we adjust to a new normal.

Where before your business may have focused its resources on a physical shop presence or sales reps to engage with customers, digital marketing may have just become your new best friend.

Now is the time to adapt your product offering to suit your customer’s needs, tune your value proposition to suit their adjusted psyche or improve operational aspects, like contactless delivery.

Even if you only dabbled in online marketing with a limited budget on Google Ads and the odd sporadic email campaign, now’s the time to double down on your digital marketing efforts.

So, what has changed – EVERYTHING

Many Kiwis have lost their jobs or face an uncertain future. Many businesses face issues staying afloat or adjusting to a new way.

Whether its lock-down or more relaxed social distancing this pandemic will affect the way our businesses market themselves, at the very least until a vaccination is mass produced sometime in 2021 – lets pray for an earlier breakthrough!

Take advantage of the silence

Do not sit and wait quietly for the economy to bounce back. Actively prepare for it. 

If you have a product or service that could provide sales opportunities through ecommerce, pursuing online options is ideal.

For those businesses where that’s not such a relevant option, you can still build brand awareness and engage in content and social marketing so that as things slowly turn to “normal”, customers already have you on their list.

Or perhaps this is not so much about change per say, but about addressing the shortcomings we knew existed in our businesses.

This period represents an amazing opportunity to turn your business on its head and get it more positively into the digital age.

Here are 15 digital marketing initiatives to keep your business going during this crisis, and how to attract new customers in the process…

1. Stay current

Your customers are looking for information and trust your company to deliver.

Place up-to-date information on a website mini-header and follow up with detail on special landing pages or in blog posts.

Sharp Covid Information
Sharp NZ keeping customers informed

Adjust your messaging to share information about any extra precautions that you’re taking, if you’re providing any extra services to the community or whether you’re experiencing delays.

If your hours of operation have changed for example, update your customer facing sites, including Google My Business.

Google My Business (GMB) is often the first impression that people get for your business and brand. It dramatically affects your visibility on Local Search, Google Maps, and organic rankings.

If you haven’t created and verified your GMB profile yet, you can do it right now.

Check your brand messaging. Is your home page headline still relevant? Could you tweak the language used to express empathy?

2. Stay connected

As you transition to running your business remotely, you can use digital tools to help maintain a strong connection with your customers.

For your customers, that might mean scheduling digital appointments with Calendly.

Host meetings, consultations or webinars with Zoom or GoToMeeting.

Create product demonstration videos and post on YouTube.

3. Refresh your website

We have seen a real spike during the last few weeks from companies wishing to create or update websites, launch new e-commerce channels and create social media campaigns focused on home-workers.

If your business previously put token efforts into digital channels – because like a lot of other businesses, you had built your networks offline and that had always seemed to work – now is the time to revisit them.

That could be as simple as giving your website and social pages a refresh.

Or it could mean an overhaul of your product offering and presentation.

Zoom home page
Updated home page messaging for Zoom

4. Optimise for Mobile

More so now, people search for local businesses from their mobile, so it’s critical that you provide a good mobile experience on your website.

Optimising websites for mobile has become more important since Google rolled out mobile-first indexing.

Is your business’ mobile experience pleasant? Keep to interesting imagery and short readable copy.

Are forms easy to complete? Make sure fields are large enough to select and next steps are obvious.

Pay special attention to the action of dropdown menus so that visitors can easily navigate around your site.

And another critical ranking factor for mobile websites is speed – test your performance with Think with Google.

5. Pivot to keep your current customers 

Can you find a way to adjust your product to fit where your customers are now?

It may be as simply as changing your messaging to reflecting the new way customers could use your product.

Or it could require a more radical change in delivery.  

Act quickly to make adjustments and get up and running. Then make sure all your customers know about your new offering.

If you’re a brick-and-mortar shop, quickly open an online store.

If you’re a restaurant, prepare your offering for take-out – pickup or delivery options. Work with Uber Eats or devise your own contactless delivery system. Update your website for ecommerce and fulfilment.

Yoga studios are offering virtual classes on Zoom.

If your Roller Blinds business, relying on home visits for detailed quoting, how could you shift this to self-measure quotes and virtual home video visits.

We all hope things will return to a degree of social normality but if consumers’ habits change to an acceptance of more ecommerce, how is your business placed?

6. Move to More Personalised Marketing

Digital transformation provides unparalleled opportunities to offer personalised service to customers.

Leverage marketing automation to understand customers and provide recommendations and experiences that are unique to them.

This personalised approach is clear when it comes to ecommerce with specialist automation programs like Sharpspring or Klaviyo.

But its relevant for all businesses, where at least clients could be segmented in to 2 or 3 broad groups and marketed to with at least some degree of personalisation.

7. Offer Discounts and Incentives

As a business, you need to give shoppers more reasons to buy from you and ways to find you when their attention might be directed elsewhere.

So you might have to get creative with your pricing. It’s a way to differentiate and it doesn’t have to come across salesy.

What discounts can you offer to new clients?

Can you introduce a loyalty program?

How can you improve your click and collect service or speed up your courier services or offer free shipping?

Perhaps your price offer is based on an up-sell – when you purchase this, get that at 20% off.

8. Experiment, Optimise and Test Again

Our growth marketing methodologies call for ongoing experimentation and testing.

We don’t expect to get everything right the first time and the role of tracking and reporting is to highlight what’s working and what is not.

If a campaign doesn’t get the results we expected it needs to be ditched or re-worked.

If a Google Ad, landing page, lead-generation offer combination is showing good results how could it be improved?

Ensure you’ve updated Goals within Google Analytics to reflect the success indicators of your marketing efforts.

If you struggle to add clear sales goals within your analytics (like a purchase or sales enquiry), at least add an Engaged Traffic goal that demonstrates some sort of interest from a specific visitor to your website. This could be in the form of users who visited 5+ pages within a session, or spent 4 or more minutes on your site.

Use Event parameters to record goals like the completion of an enquiry form or the viewing of a partially hidden phone number.

Consider offline analytics where we add activity, not captured by your website, back into Google Analytics to report on completion of a goals like the number of actual drawn-down loans for a finance company, or products sold from a specific channel where a quote is requested online but the actual sale transaction happens separate from the website.  

I strongly recommend using A/B testing tools to make sure your updates are more effective than the current content. A/B split testing statistically analyses which version of a landing page is preforming stronger.

While you can test wholesale changes side by side, often testing just a headline change or the change of a button colour, can lead to fruitful results.

AB split testing to improve conversion
AB test updates to your website to optimise conversions

Google Website Optimizer is a free website optimisation tool that helps online marketers increase visitor conversion rates and overall visitor satisfaction by continually testing different combinations of website content.  

Optimizely is an another fine experimentation platform that gives you the tools you need to make data-driven decisions in real time.

Be creative and quick and measure your success at every stage of the marketing strategies you experiment with.

  • Make sure your marketing experiments are easy to deliver.
  • If it works, well done! Rinse and repeat and continue to optimise. 
  • If it doesn’t work, try new things quickly and ruthlessly. 

9. Conduct a Mini-Audit of Your Content Assets

A full-blown content audit takes time and expertise, but there is much you can do during this slow period to improve your content performance with a mini-audit.

If you haven’t kept an inventory of your content assets to date, this is a great time to get started.

Use a spreadsheet to note all the active and current pages, posts and files you have for

  • Website pages
  • Emails campaigns
  • Blog posts
  • Whitepapers
  • Ebooks
  • Presentations
  • Videos
  • Infographics
  • Articles published externally, etc.

Match these assets against your new tactics. What can you repurpose? Where are the gaps?

10. Improve your Ranking on Google

With busy promotional calendars, frontline ad spending on Google Ads and constant customer and operational issues to address, Search Engine Optimisation can be left on the back burner.

Now might be a great time to consider a list of website updates and checks that all contribute to your overall SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position). These could include:

  • Important Page Meta Tags. Checking your top 10 pages Page Titles and Page Descriptions for keyword inclusion and engaging copy.
  • Category and Product Meta Tags. Ensuring product pages are using an automated dynamic manner to pull in Page Titles and Descriptions
  • Video Carousel feature. It’s no surprise that YouTube results feature prominently in Google’s Search results. Apply VideoObject schema markup to your website videos.
Google video schema
Use Video Schema to get listed in Google’s Video carousel
  • Product Carousels & Rich Results. Mark up your product pages so users can see price, availability, and review ratings right on Search results.
  • Data Table Snippet. Tables can be an effective way to share information or demonstrate concepts. Schema.org estimates that under 50,000 domains are currently using the proper markup to tell search engines there is a table on one of their webpages.
  • Reviews Snippet. When Google finds the proper markups for reviews, it may expand your rich result with a review excerpt or an average combined rating score.
  • FAQ Snippet. Again, just by adding the right schema to your FAQs page could add to the real estate you’ll occupy for search results.
faq schema
Use FAQ schema on your website to get further attention from Google Search

11. Focus on Digital Assets

Your website needs to reflect all the glorious value that you’d normally present in person. The product  information backed with enthusiastic flair, the useful tips, the entertaining anecdotes, the relevant case studies.

Now you need to portray that same information that got you the sale in person, but digitally:

  • Case Studies and Testimonials
  • Fact Sheets, Brochures and Whitepapers
  • Video Content (marketing, sales, training and support)
  • Build in the same fun and gusto, you or your team would have used in person

12. Add fresh relevant website content

Google and prospects love good content and it can fuel all aspects of your marketing.

Look for innovative ways to add fresh inspiration content to your website and emails.

Perhaps task not-so-busy staff to write content on nominated topics and/or engage content writers from inexpensive sources to produce content for you; giving them article outlines and references to expand on.

Deliver this content across multiple channels; blog posts, email marketing, lead magnet landing pages, social media posts, video, customer case studies.

13. Run Webinars

Consider setting up informational webinars that tackle the big issues in your industry, led by your team experts.

Thought leadership is one of the reasons why people travel to conferences, and you can replace those cancelled trade shows with a virtual conference that features online executive-level talk tracks.

Host a webinar on GoToWebinar. Livestorm or Zoom.

A webinar represents a great way to engage with prospective customers in a non-salesy way, by providing instruction or advice that is valuable to them.

Meanwhile, you get to capture participant details and develop qualified leads for your sales funnel.

Zoom webinar
Run a webinar on Zoom, integrating with your PowerPoint slides

14. Get your Ecommerce or Digital Lead Generation Live!

Now is the best time to ramp up your e-Commerce program.

  • Engage professionals to build an end-to-end ‘purchase to payment’ system that can scale now, and also when the crisis is over (none of this will be wasted effort)
  • Think about your marketing message, e.g. how easy it is to buy from you even from your lounge chair
  • Focus on the ‘contactless’ order-to-delivery process
  • Display clearly your online purchase, refund and exchange policy 
  • Implement online help systems such as Live Chat or an online FAQ help centre that make purchase issues easier to resolve.
  • Make doing business with you EASY! (Ensure purchase issues are resolved quickly).

15. Build new customer engagement processes

Replace your face-to-face events and sales steps with ‘virtual environments’ and digital tools that will support your essential business tasks such as sales calls and presentations, project development meetings, customer training, and support.

Educate your Sales Teams on digital systems to help them better manage their sales engagement process and sales pipeline (Email Marketing, CRM, Sales Dashboard, Zoom Meetings)

Adopt Digital Transformation for your business by implementing digital tools such as Zoom Meetings, MS Teams or Google Hangouts.

Encourage everyone to turn video on during calls – you should be at that point now that video calls aren’t new and special anymore; they’re the norm. Make those calls as personable as possible by showing your face.

Takeaways

As long as your business approaches the shift to digital marketing strategically, there’s no reason why it should just serve as an emergency fill-in.

Upping your digital transformation now will carry on providing long-term value when the world eventually gets back to “normal”.

And it will make your business more resilient to deal with any future pandemics!

The economy will come back. If you can problem-solve and plan for the future while others give up, your business may be perfectly positioned to come back stronger than ever. 

The Growth Marketing options available to Marketers are endless, so in this post I’m distilling a long playbook list down to 23 practical tactics that any of our small to medium New Zealand clients can deploy today.

I’ve loosely arranged these example actions into one of three sections. The lines are a little blurred between each section, but you’ll get the picture…

  • Website SEO – preparing your most important digital asset.
  • Lead Generation – growing traffic and capturing leads.
  • Content Marketing – nurturing prospects and closing sales.

A key strength of a Growth Marketing strategy is not hinged on any one campaign, channel, or tactic in particular. The success pivots on each of the channels and actions combining to have an effect that is far greater than the sum of their performance alone.

A strong Growth Marketing plan will take care of short-term wins and develop medium- and long-term successes.

It’s likely to include a mix of our shortlisted tactics: Facebook advertising, Google Ads, display advertising, social media marketing, search engine optimisation, landing page design, conversion rate optimisation, email marketing, content marketing… pretty much anything that will help you achieve your goal.

What’s important with any growth marketing methods, is that you take a fluid approach to budget allocation – adjusting the allocation of your budget each month to the channels where you’re generating the best results. Experiment, test and improve constantly.

Website SEO

I can’t think of many situations where a strong website isn’t the catalyst for better results. So make your website great again.

Firstly, set it up so that it will rank well with Google and get found your prospects.

Then ensure it works hard to convert – changes opinions, captures lead, initiates calls or store visits, or it directly sells something.

Search Engine Optimisation – run a website audit and apply the technical changes for Google’s sake. Apply keyword-researched on-page SEO.

Offsite Link Building – ultimately Google ranks popular sites higher and one of their criteria is the amount of quality backlinks your site has. Here we start by auditing competitor sites to work out what strategies they are using to obtain their ranking for specific keywords and then we’ll look to build a better version of their backlinks.

Website Upgrade – perhaps it’s time for a total upgrade to a state-of-the-art mobile-friendly site that better reflects your brand and its position against your competitors.

Landing Pages – Don’t just send traffic to a general home page; direct it to specific landing pages optimised for certain keyword groups and designed to capture leads or for a specific conversion. Destination URLs from pay-per-click ads should be designed specifically in relation to the keyword or topic which was being advertised. The idea is to make it as easy as possible for the visitor to find the information that is relevant for them. Consider a product like Instapage that also reports on page performance

Conversion Optimisation – construct your landing pages so they encourage a signup or sale. Even subtle changes to button copy can have significant effects. Having the highest conversion rate possible allows you to spend more on marketing than your competitors. Actionable optimisation data could come from Google Analytics, heatmaps, visitor recordings and online surveys.

A/B Split Testing – a fundamental of Growth Marketing is experimentation and testing. Who’s not to say the old clunky page is worse than the new highly-crafted concept page – the only way to find out is to test them side by side at the same time using products like Google Optimise or Optimizely.

Website Trustmarks – An important factor in converting a visitor will always be how much trust they have in your brand or product. If you want a prospect to trust you more, include your clients’ logos, affiliations or employee photos on your website.

Lead Generation

Now that you have new traffic to your website, how can you turn that visitor in to a lead, capture an email address or contact details and then continue to engage and nurture them?

Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting strangers and prospects into someone who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service.

Search Engine Marketing – If you want to attract visitors today then start with paid search advertising (pay-per-click). Our tactics often start with Google Ads for immediate traffic and lead generation.

Facebook Advertising – Conversion focused ads using Remarketing, lookalike Audiences, client website fans and tailored interest groups.

Remarketing – You’ve put effort and money into getting people to your site; now retarget those specific groups of those visitors through Google and Facebook.

Gmail Sponsored Promotions – Here you can even target users receiving emails from your competitors!

YouTube Advertising – Test activity on the next largest search portal after Google search. Consider starting with Veeroll to produce high quality inexpensive video ads.

Pop-ups and Exit Intent – Tastefully styled and intelligently positioned popups can highlight an offer and drive conversion (usually email subscription focused). When all else fails, an Exit Intent popup can catch a visitor before they leave with a special offer or coupon.

Online Chat – Online chat works like text messaging and we all know how popular that is. It’s also inexpensive, so just add it to your site and test out the results.

Email Acquisition – Email can form a valuable core channel for any growth marketing plan but first you need to get those email contacts. Part of the email pool will come from general website lead capture – blog subscribers, quote requests, incomplete signups, purchases or applications and enquiries Valued Content Offers – visitors are only going to give up their email if you offer something valuable to them in return. One way to build your email list is to offer special eBook downloads promoted via Facebook or pay-per-click mediums. Another way could be through competitions; offering a prize to entrants.  

Content Marketing & Promotion

Content is the fuel that attracts prospects to your website. Great content engages prospects, warms them to your brand and ultimately helps you build a relationship with customers.

Unfortunately, it’s often an afterthought for businesses. If Google Ads works, why would we need to write a couple of blog articles a month? Why should we let our competitors in on our secret best practice guide? Because great content drives interest in our brand and positions us as a leader in our industry. It shows expertise and builds trust. And it weaponises our personalised emails, monthly newsletters and automated responses, and creates interest in social media, while our banner ads are being ignored.

Blog Articles – Much of our work here will be stimulated through valuable content sort out and searched for by your prospects. We’ll use social media and emails and SEO tactics to attract visitors to your blogs. Even for larger clients, blogging is often a hard tactic to commit to but by using affordable content writers anyone can have a strong blogging presence – which will become a strong foundation for much of our Growth Marketing. Mix your topics up a little; think case studies, reviews, in-depth articles, lists, aggregating other sites’ content.

Blog Optimisation – Your blog pages need to be optimised for lead capture – think popups and inline forms and download offers. Don’t forget to AB Test these as well.  

Reviews & Ratings – Use a system to gather reviews and ratings from customers; display them on your site and ensure they are added to Google My Business or aggregated by a 3rd party so that they appear in search and Google Ads results – that way prospects are more likely to click on you.

Email Marketing – Email remains one of the most effective means of delivering personalised messages to prospects and customers. We use it at all stages of the sales funnel, segmenting lists and delivering emails to welcome new subscribers, send requested content, to make special offers, send out periodic product news or bring back a lapsed customer.

Marketing Automation – not so much a strategy as a tool, but one that helps us do more, automating many processes through the funnel; from lead generation, segmenting and tagging users, personalising website pages, controlling email marketing and assisting with CRM. 

Loyalty Programme – it seems that Retention Marketing often gets left off the list. Marketing to current or previous customers can take a lot less effort and deliver better returns than finding new ones. A loyalty rewards programme could be just the edge your customers need to come back to you for more. Reviews and ratings – People trust reviews to inform them about their decisions, and reviews play a huge role in people’s purchasing decisions. So set up a system where you ask for them, display them schematically correctly on your website and have them pushed to Google My Business and beyond. 

Growing a business isn’t easy. The fortunate thing is that there’s plenty of tactics you can experiment with. In this post, I overview Growth Marketing and cover 7 growth ideas any business could be boosting profits with.

Growth Marketing vs Normal Marketing

You guessed it; Growth Marketing is all about growing your business. But surely so is normal marketing, right?

It’s easy to get caught up in the buzzwords and it doesn’t help when there is no accredited definition of either of those terms. Like the fashion industry, this year’s flares are next year’s retro.

To me, if there is such a thing as “normal” marketing, it’s about establishing a product that people want (vs traditional marketing, where we made people want the product).

It’s about defining your ideal customers and clarifying a value proposition that’s true to your product and culture while providing a unique and compelling reason for those ideal customers to purchase.

Then its implementing tactics that guide your prospects and customers on the journey they want to take.

Long term growth only comes about when you have built a strong marketing foundation and strategy first.

Growth Marketing versus Normal Marketing

The growth methodology however takes over from here.

Growth marketing is the process of discovering which channels allow you to attract and convert the greater number of customers at the highest amount of profit.

It’s about constant experimentation and optimisation, even when you think you have the formula right. You’re using the process to find, test and analyse better ways to profitably attract and retain additional clients.

But you can’t have growth without the normal marketing – you need to build and continually upgrade your marketing foundation while optimising your growth system on top of an ever-expanding business.

Growth Hacking Grown Up

Growth marketing is often described as “growth hacking grown up”, in which marketers use data and agility to scale revenue through reasoned and scalable tactics.

It’s like the best of all worlds; an amalgamation of growth hacking strategies and traditional marketing methods.

The growth marketing principles work equally well for start-ups as they do corporates.

In our growth marketing services page we cover how it’s a process of constant experimentation, refinement and agility.

The true challenge is ensuring that growth is always trending in the right direction — meaning optimal profitability — and that we’re not running experiments for the sack of it.

Before we cover just a few growth marketing ideas to try, let’s look at some key Growth Pillars…

Build strong Growth Pillars

Growth marketing isn’t about jumping in the deep end and trying every radical marketing idea that comes along – that’s growth hacking.

Sustainable results will only be achieved if our growth pillars are strong and on point.

Seth Godin amplifies the message that the journey has to start with an amazing product and that’s why one first pillar is product development.

You can maintain your brand the old way (pushing it on people with advertising), but the only route to healthy growth is a remarkable product.

Understanding what makes your product desirable, of course is equally important.

We need to be able to communicate the brand’s value proposition – your product or service might be great but if it can’t be understood then it will remain invisible.

Another vital pillar is identifying your market through buyer personas.

Knowing about a prospect’s problems and what started them on the journey for a particular solution, can shape the type of message you deliver at each stage of your sales funnel.

Don’t try and make a product for everybody, because that is a product for nobody. As we repeatedly say at Grand, “Narrow the focus to build the brand.”

The way you break through to the mainstream is to target a niche instead of an entire market.

Fitting in can only lead to average results or failure. Standing out is your only option.

This doesn’t mean you have to be radical necessarily – but it does mean standing for something unique and desirable within your market. If we push for the edges we may end up somewhere unique and profitable.

If your proposition is right, early adopters will ‘sneeze’ and larger audiences may follow. 

Optimise the channels your audience frequents

When you truly know your audience, you can narrow down those preferred communication platforms and social channels.

You can also determine the best day and time to interact with them. 

Study your website analytics, run an inexpensive SurveyMonkey survey, call even a handful of regular or first-time customers – do what you can to more fully understand your audience, their motivations and their channel habits.

That way you’ll know how to reach new customers and retain the existing ones.

Even when budgets aren’t limited, you want to ensure you have the resources to properly manage those best channels. If you don’t, your audience may think you aren’t paying attention.

Focus on Quantifiable results

You’ll never know how much you really grew from your marketing initiatives, if you don’t set measurements and track them.

Focus on targets that matter.

Maintaining a high conversion rate at the sake of all else is likely to be a fool’s goal if a certain channel provides a great deal of traffic at a far lower conversion but at an incredible cost per acquisition.

There are certain metrics that really matter:

  • Profit: For most of us the ultimate goal is absolute profit
  • Revenue: How much hard money does a particular marketing channel generate?
  • ROI: How much do you make for what you spend?
  • Conversions: How many website or store visitors from a specific channel actually make a purchase? Or check out softer conversions, like ‘viewed more than 3 pages on your site’ – at least you know they showed some interest in what you have.
  • Average spend: What is the average sale per customer?

Just 4-6 top-level Key Performance Indicators can help make all your activity data understandable, relevant and useful.

Regularly Switch up Your Growth Marketing methods

If you do what you’ve always done, you get what you’ve always got.

The real potency of growth marketing is the willingness to experiment and optimise.

Aim to try a few new growth marketing initiatives each quarter. Consider giving one or two a few quarters to establish themselves, and switch others out so you can try new types of mediums or digital tools, such as:

  • Experimenting with Exit intent pop ups for lead generation
  • Live chat with chatbots helping with frequently asked questions
  • Explainer videos as centrepieces on landing pages 
  • Change-up your abandoned cart emails ending with a stronger offer
  • Schedule a radio promotion to draw in leads
  • Show personalised content via geo-fencing
  • Display advertising on highly targeted industry websites

Use A/B testing to continually trial new ideas or fine adjustments.

A/B testing (or split testing) is essentially an experiment where two or more variants of a tactic are used at random, and statistical analysis is used to determine which variation performs better for a given conversion goal.

Try Google Optimize for free. Optimize is natively integrated with Google Analytics, so you can quickly understand how your website can be improved.

Tools like Crazy Egg not only offer A/B tests but also other website optimisation tools like heat maps.

Enough about the setup let’s take a look at some Growth Marketing ideas you could put in motion this week…

Idea #1: Use FoMo to Create a Sense of Urgency

Sales funnel stage: CONVERSION

FoMo, the Fear of Missing out, is a very real phenomenon that affects the desirability of a product or person.

It’s characterised as feeling anxious that something exciting or interesting is happening elsewhere.

If a product is being used and loved by everyone (especially your friends), you feel drawn towards it, in case you “miss out”.

What might not have been appealing before all of a sudden is a must have – life cannot go on without it!

Use this psychological principle to your advantage by limiting access to your product or by raising anxiety by the fact that others are already experiencing your incredible offer.

Idea #2. Offer a trial so users can test your product

Sales funnel stage: CONVERSION

We all know how a product sample, test drive or a free trial of an app for 2 weeks can push us across the line.

It removes all barriers and lets us test something out in a real-life situation.

It could be the difference from buying a competitor’s product or yours.

Think how you might be able to use a “free trial” method with your product or service even if the application is not immediately obvious. Here’s some examples:

  • Practice what you preach, right: Grand offers $1000 cash back as a way to get new qualifying customers to trial us.
  • Hot Spring Spas provide a free private test soak.
  • Vehicle companies practice “de-horsing” their customers – if they can get you out of your current car, you going to have to buy a new one.
  • An accounting company could offer a free consultation.
  • A personal loan company could offer free insurance for a limited time on a financed vehicle.

Remove all barriers – avoid asking for a credit card or even “login details”.

If a free-trial fails to convert, extend its length and inform the user via email.

Follow up with guides on how to get the most out of the product or service.

Idea #3: Set up a Welcome Series of emails

Sales funnel stage: RETENTION, REFERRAL

When a new user signs up, the next few weeks are crucial for to retain their loyalty.

Plenty of users will sign-up for your product and forgot about it in a week – how many forgotten apps do you have sitting on phone?

Your job at this stage is to remind the users that you exist, and that you can add ongoing value – particularly if they have just completed their first purchase from you.

One way to do this is with a welcome series of emails setup within your marketing automation software like SharpSpring or HubSpot. Use that series of emails sent over a two or three-week period to:

  • Introduce new product features
  • Provide details about warranties or after-sales services
  • Share tips so users can get the most out of your product
  • Introduce a special member of your team
  • Cross-sell or upsell to related products
  • Include a special offer to get the new customer back for their second purchase
  • Ask for a Google review and rating
  • Include a friend-get-friend promotion; where the customer and a friend both get rewarded following the friend’s purchase

Idea #4: Use Gamification to make things interesting

Sales funnel stage: ENGAGEMENT

Gamification refers to the process of making the user experience feel more game like.

It could be as simple as animating the display of 4 stages of an online application or as complex as an actual online engage to engage and interact with customers.

Here’s a good example we developed for MyFinance – as a user moves a slider to change the amount they are looking to borrow, the car image changes to reflect a model in that price range.

website-gamification-example

Gamification could take many forms and influence promotions, onboarding new customers, improving checkouts or providing rewards.

Idea #5: Turn your written content into images for social media

Sales funnel stage: ATTRACTION

Fact: images do better than text in social media.

Repurpose your strong written content into shareable images on your website and also share those images on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest.

From a business view point, turn the 7-point product setup checklist into an infographic.

Turn your research findings into statistical graphics

Find an appropriate image to go with a company quote and create a shareable image with Canva

Narrow-the-focus
Engage’s growth mantra created with Canva.

Idea #6. Update your CTAs

Sales funnel stage: ATTRACTION

Your landing pages live or die based on the success of your Calls-to-Action.

It determines if people take your content and bounce out never to return, or if they take your valuable bait and engage further into your sales funnel.

Such a simple thing that could produce big results – check the copy you use on Call-to-Action buttons including social share CTAs.

  • Use it to describe explicit instructions that you’d like your visitor to do next.
  • Avoid vague and negative words like the overused default copy for buttons; “SUBMIT”
  • Include simple verbs in your CTA to highlight the design action like “Go”, “Get”, “Start”, “Click”.
  • Instead of the words ”share” or “Facebook” for a social media call-to-action, how about “Share this story” to tell readers exactly what the button does.
  • A/B test options because a 1-5% (or much more) increase in conversions is worth it.

TIP: usually the best text comes from completing this sentence; “I want to ___________”.

For example, “I want to Send this Message”, “I want to Add to Cart”.

how-to-write-a-call-to-action
Check out CoSchedule’s take on how to write a Call to Action

Idea #7: Offer users a No option in opt in forms

It seems counter-intuitive but the adding of an opt-in step has shown to increase conversions in some cases as much as 5-times!

Rather than abandon the call-to-action or pop up message, to signup or download your lead magnet, Yes/No opt-in forms actually increase conversion rates by making the opt-in choice more meaningful.

It supports the resolve to take up the offer while underscoring the result of a negative path.

When we’re bombarded with so many options to join, subscribe or download, it could create a positive tipping point that we respond with “oh why not, this time I will sign up”.

yes-no-options-opt-in-forms

The result is more opt-ins. 

Takeaways

With your growth pillars covered and a technology stack in place it’s time to get on with your strategies and tactics.

Under a growth marketing approach that means implementing a core of activity and then experimenting and testing tactics that look to optimise revenue and profits.

As the short list of ideas covered here suggest that’s about implementing a rolling sequence of tactics drawn from an idea backlog and selected because of their relevance, cost and business impact.

The methodology suggests that it’s not one thing that will win the battle but a continuous introduction of improvements on a weekly fortnightly or monthly basis.

If it was just for informing your new website visitors of what past customers think of your quality products, how easy the website was to use, or how wonderfully you resolved problems, then displaying reviews and ratings on your website would be worth it.

Shopping online; assuming the flowers will be delivered, hoping that the shirt fits, praying the headphones will meet your expectations, takes a leap of trust from your customers – the more they see you, engage with you or read positive reviews about you, the more they will trust your brand and your ability to deliver.

CXL research showed that review stars in search engine results significantly improve click-through rates, by as much as 35%.

Reviews provide that level of trust and confidence – in fact, 63% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from a site which has user reviews. They may not take your word that you have outstanding service or that your product does what no one else’s does, but they will be believe happy (or disgruntled) customers.   

So, while Customer Reviews are great for business in general they’re also very influential with Google. If your site shows on a Google results page with a 4 or 5-star rating, all other things being equal, it’s going to get more clicks than sites with no stars at all. Visitors will be heading your way with a positive impression of what you offer before they even click.

Some businesses see an increase in click through rate as much as 20-35% after implementing star ratings in their search results.

Many SEO experts also believe that good star ratings and reviews will also help improve your search position, if only because people are more likely to click a result showing a star rating and therefore a higher click through rate and traffic volume will rank you higher with Google anyway. 

Product Reviews vs Seller Reviews

Product review stars are different than seller ratings. Product review stars pertain to the products themselves while the seller review stars reflect a business’ standing. 

A product review typically reads something like “I loved the solid craftsmanship of this product” while a seller review is more likely “Awesome company to deal with – great customer service.”

The stars that display in Google Organic search results are almost always product reviews.  

How to Get Star Ratings in Google Organic Search Results

To get star ratings on your Google Search results listing you need to use “schema.org markup” or structured data. This is the code that google will read and interpret when indexing your website. It clearly labels your content and tells Google that your business name or phone number or review copy is exactly that and not just random words on a page. Adding review markup code to a product page will allow that product to show stars in search results.

Note that there are two types of review schema markups available:

  • Single review with a single rating. When you use schema markups for individual reviews, things are straightforward. You have several items available to add into your code – the product reviewed, the review body, the author, the date published, the review rating, and the publisher.
  • Aggregate ratings. If you have multiple reviews available and an average rating calculated, you can use the aggregate ratings markup which adds rating and review count options.
  • Check your work for errors with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.
  • To ensure that Google indexes your changes, resubmit your XML sitemap in Google Search Console.
  • Check your results within a few weeks through an organic keyword search.

Writing Review Schema Markups

You’ll need to add markup code to a product page that will look something like this:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
<img itemprop="image" src="product-image.jpg" alt="Product Name"/>
<span itemprop="name">Product Name</span>
<div itemprop="aggregateRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">
<span itemprop="ratingValue">4.5</span>
out of <span itemprop="bestrating">5</span>
based on <span itemprop="ratingCount">32</span>user ratings.
</div>

Check out the full list of schema types here. Google gives their own rundown of how to use Review rich snippets here, plus look up other Content Types in their sidebar menu. 

Structured-Data-Markup-Helper

There are several ways to write the review schema markup and get it on to your website:

After you have that code on a product page, you should:

  1. Check your work for errors with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.
  2. To ensure that Google indexes your changes, resubmit your XML sitemap in Google Search Console.
  3. Check your results within a few weeks through an organic keyword search.

Strangely, given it’s reputation for authenticity, Google is not requesting proof of accuracy of these review statements at present. It’s likely that Google will change this stance eventually so we don’t recommend falsifying review information. And don’t use review rich snippets on your home page – google deems this as an “unnatural” place to find a product review.

How to Get Seller Ratings Stars on Adwords

Seller ratings are an automated extension type that showcases advertisers with high ratings. While we can get Product Rating stars in organic search results for “free”, bar the time and resources required for review collection and schema markup, until 2017 we had to subscribe to an aggregation service for Seller Rating stars to appear with Adwords. However, Google now bases seller ratings on several sources, including:

  • Google Customer Reviews, a free program that collects post-purchase comments on behalf of advertisers.
  • Aggregated performance metrics from Google-led shopping research.
  • Shopping reviews and ratings from google-approved independent review websites including:

Before signing up to a service, make sure to check if the plan includes both Seller Ratings for Adwords, Google Shopping (PLAs) ratings and Product Reviews – and only pay for what you need.

Seller ratings will only show when a business has at least 150 unique reviews and a average rating of 3.5 stars or higher.

Google Customer Reviews for Free

Once installed in to your Checkout process, Google Customer Reviews will offer a survey opt-in that allows your customers to provide feedback about their shopping experience on your site. You stipulate a time allowance for shipping and Google automatically sends a survey email after the expected delivery.

You can also add a Google Customer Reviews badge to your site helps which identifies your site with the Google brand and increases customer trust.

Check whether your ecommerce platform like Magento, Shopify and BigCommerce has a preconfigured app to take care of the cart integration.

Once enough ratings and feedback have been collected:

  • Seller Ratings are displayed under your Google Shopping (Merchant Center) Dashboard
  • Seller Ratings will qualify to appear on your Google Shopping Ads and Adwords ads
  • An aggregate rating can be displayed on your website within the Google Customer Reviews badge

Google Customer Reviews vs Paid Aggregators

The plus for Google’s own Customer Review process is that its free and relatively easier to pin to your ecommerce checkout but you have little control over the message copy and design of their independent approach.

The advantages of the subscription-based review aggregators are that they provide convenient and well-designed onsite review callouts and badges, with automated email review request systems, plus the reputation and trust of their relevant businesses. Services can also cover Product reviews for organic search results. A paid Google-approved provider gives you more opportunity for automation and customisation and integration into your website with review and ratings callout display. Plus, the paid systems can work across multiple channels including Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Facebook, Bing and Twitter. They can be set to collect Seller Reviews, Product reviews and Local Reviews.

product reviews shopper approved

Product Reviews for Service-based Websites

Note, if you have a service based business you can get product reviews for free since you’re not going to syndicate anything into Google Shopping. For example, finance companies can create service pages like “personal loans,” “car finance,” and “home mortgages”. Each of these service pages would act as their “product” reviews.

Check if you have a Seller Rating

  1. Go to the following URL:  https://www.google.com/shoppin…
  2. Replace “address.co.nz” with your domain (do not put http or www in front).

Key Takeaways…

  • Seller Reviews and star ratings for your business, displayed by Google in paid and organic search results and Maps, provide valuable information to customers and help them make purchasing decisions. They can help your business stand out more prominently than your competitors. Businesses must accumulate at least 150 reviews in the past 12 months from approved sources for Seller Reviews to show.
  • Product Reviews show star ratings in Google Shopping ads and Product Listing Ads (from approved reviews) and organic search results (from website schema). You must have a minimum of 50 reviews across all your products. A product must have at least 3 reviews for star ratings to show on Shopping Ads, though products with fewer than 3 reviews are eligible to show star ratings on the Shopping property.
  • If you sell products on your website make sure you take advantage of Product Schema & Review Schema. And for that matter other schemas like Organisation, Person, Local Business and Restaurant.
  • Actively request reviews and ratings from customers – automate this process within your website, request reviews within the website and via email, filter out consumer complaints where practical and spread reviews over Google+, Google Customer Reviews and approved review aggregators.
  • Check your Product Review schema work for errors with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.
  • Create a link for customers to write reviews from Google Places
  • Pursuing Google+ reviews could still be the easiest way to at least ensure that you have star ratings for branded searches.
  • Star Ratings on Google Adwords requires a little more authenticated work but can be produced for free by requesting customers to write reviews via Google Places and by using Google’s automated Customer Reviews within a shopping checkout.
  • Google Approved review aggregators offer other features including automated campaigning of customers, website banners and review displays plus their independent trust status but their subscription services can be expensive.
google customer reviews
Posted in SEO

A marketing plan shouldn’t be written and put on the shelf – that’s why we treat a client’s plan like a guidebook that continually focuses our actions and reminds us of the strategies we’re deploying to achieve your KPIs.

Our marketing process covers 11 crucial steps:

  1. Brand Mission
  2. Value Proposition
  3. Buyer Personas
  4. SWOT Analysis
  5. Competitor Analysis
  6. Marketing Budget
  7. Optimised Website
  8. Marketing Tools
  9. Strategy Grid
  10. Activity Calendar
  11. Goals & KPIs

We’ll guide a client through these steps and summarise the information utilising our planning templates. It’s a 2-way process where the client imparts valuable information to us and in turn we provide workshops and tools to facilitate the planning and ongoing activity: 

#1. Describe Your Brand Mission

The first step in creating a strong marketing plan is to highlight the mission statement of your company. All of your marketing efforts will revolve around fulfilling that statement for your customers.

  • What purpose does your company serve?
  • What problems are you solving?
  • Why are you in business?
  • Summarise that mission in one or two sentences.

#2. Define the Value Proposition

There are many ways to go about developing a Value Proposition, but we think the following formula cuts to the chase. It’s also great for presenting the ideas to your team or visualising how the website page might convey this:

  • Headline. What is the benefit you’re offering to customers, in 1 short sentence? Might mention the product and/or the customer. Does it grab attention – why should I care? What’s unique or desirable about it.
  • Sub-headline or a 2-3 sentence paragraph. A specific explanation of what you do/offer, for whom and why is it useful. Why should I choose you rather than a competitor’s product.
  • Bullet points. List 3-4 key benefits or features. Make sure the support the headline and your overall claim.
  • Visual. Images communicate much faster than words. Show a hero shot or an image that reinforces your main message.

Evaluate your current value proposition by checking whether it answers these questions:

  • What product or service is your company selling?
  • What is the end-benefit of using it?
  • Who is your target customer for this product or service?
  • What makes your offering unique and different?
  • Why would I purchase your product/service over the competitions?

Go beyond what you sell and focus on why it matters
to your customer

#3. Build Buyer Personas

Buyer Personas are semi-fictional profiles of your ideal customers derived from research and sales data from your existing customers. They define groups of our most important customers and consider demographics, behaviours, interests, and especially, goals and pain points; so that can align content and strategies with them throughout the buyer’s journey.

Match specific Persona’s to selected traffic sources and promotional hooks/lead-magnets and to certain stages within the Buyer’s Journey to personalise your messaging.

Write up your key Personas by downloading our Buyer Persona MS Word template.

#4. Conduct a SWOT Analysis

Identify Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

This bullet point table will focus us on the issues that need to be addressed for the coming year.

Use this information to address your marketing strategies.

To find your strengths answer questions like:

  • What does our organisation do well?
  • What are the things that other people say you do well?
  • Why did we win our last pitch or why does Distributor X deal with us?
  • What processes do we have in place that have made us effective?
  • What do we currently do that is a unique strength to our business?

To find your weaknesses answer questions like:

  • What could we improve in our organisation?
  • What is causing a constant barrier to our success?
  • What are we currently doing in our marketing process that could be improved?
  • What are the things you need to avoid?
  • What does our competitor do well that we don’t?

To analyse opportunities outside your business, answer the following:

  • What external trends could bring opportunities?
  • What are the current ongoing trends?
  • What is the market missing? What disruptive thinking could you benefit from?
  • What is changing in our industry that we could take advantage of right now?

Analyse the threats that may impede your success:

  • What obstacles are you facing on your current mission?
  • What are the negative aspects in the current market?
  • What are our competitors doing better than us?
  • Are there changes in our industry that could threaten our efforts?
  • What political, economic, or social aspects could hinder our marketing efforts?

#5. Competitor Analysis

You don’t have to be the best business in the world – you just have to outperform your competitors.

  • List key direct competitors in your market.
  • Include global operators that you’d nominate as hero’s or as a source of inspiration.
  • What are your competitor’s strengths and how can we negate or take advantage of them?
  • Determine competitor vulnerabilities, and capitalise upon those weaknesses.
  • What are they doing right and how could we improve on that?

Track your progress against your competitors based on industry reported sales, research, website rank tracking etc.

#6. Set a Marketing Budget

There are four ways you can set a marketing budget for the year:

  1. Percent of Revenue. This is where the revenue that your business brings in determines what your budget will be.
  2. Top-Down. This is where the GM or Marketing Manager decides what your marketing team will spend.
  3. Competition Matching. This type of budget is based on trying to reverse engineer what your competitors are doing.
  4. Goal Driven. This type of budget is based on the goals that you have set for the year. The amount you spend on each project will depend on the kind of goal you need to reach.

#7. Optimise Your Website

The website and the content within becomes the hub for all our marketing activity. And it’s crucial that your website gets the brand positioning, design and coding attention it deserves…

  • It’s the place to deliver a clear and unique value proposition so your prospects and customers get what’s in it for them and why they should purchase from you. That proposition is usually delivered distinctly and quickly within key landing pages through copy and images but is also disseminated in overall website design, appealing to your Buyer Personas. 
  • An optimised website usually makes the development of landing pages, blog posts and lead capture forms a breeze. No doubt it will be built around a user-friendly Content Management System (CMS).
  • An optimised website will be search engine optimised (SEO) to ensure keyword ranking on google and easily found by your targets. Intelligent use of keyword research will help optimise meta titles, meta descriptions, page headlines, copy and content and overall strategic direction of your site.

Your website is the centre for content distribution, lead capture, conversion and deal closure. And it’s a key starting point for attracting traffic and nurturing leads through our conversion processes. Don’t skimp on the investment required!

#8. Setup Marketing Tools

Whether you’re using a spreadsheet or something fancier, there is a plethora of tools and apps to help us plan, optimise, execute and track our research, activity and results.

A solid marketing strategy, backed by the right technology stack for your business, will help you stay on track to achieving your goals and may include:

The tools are there to help us do a job your competition probably haven’t even begun to think about. We’re going far beyond a monthly email newsletter – we’re strategically moving your traffic, leads and customers through an intelligent sales funnel – all within a level that matches your budget and resources, of course. 

#9. Build out a Strategy Grid

Build out a Strategy Grid for your business defining your business/product strategies and tactics by buying stage; Attraction, Engagement, Conversion and Retention.

strategy-and-tactics-by-buyer-stage

This is perhaps the most important element of your marketing plan because it assesses and details exactly what you’ll do with the resources that you have.

#10. Detail an Activity Planner

While the overall tools and strategies might be in place or documented, we still need to lay out what will happen next week or next month.

Dependent on your appropriate promotional cycle (weekly, monthly etc), you need to set up a planner to detail what email campaign will be delivered on the 15th or what promotion will run in June.

It could include a Content Publishing calendar or detail about what automation flow you’ll introduce in two month’s time.

While you should lay out a full 12 months of activity, it’s important to concentrate on the detail for the immediate rolling 3-4 months.

The activity planner can also include a list of strategic things-to-do with ideal delivery dates.

Optimised-Marketing

 #11. Set Goals & KPIs

The last element in our marketing process is to set goals and key performance indicators. Our marketing goals should be S.M.A.R.T. This means they should be:   

  • Specific. You should know exactly what you’d like to accomplish.
  • Measurable. If you can’t measure it, it’s not useful.
  • Attainable. Stretch yourself, but avoid setting yourself up for failure.
  • Relevant. Your marketing goals should be connected to clear business outcomes.
  • Time-based. Give yourself a deadline by which you’ll achieve your goal.

Set up a spreadsheet for these goals and combine those results with reporting from sources like Google Analytics. Track them by your most appropriate promotional cycle (weekly, monthly etc). Common KPIs include:

  • Revenue
  • Gross profit %
  • No. of online transactions
  • Active Customers
  • Website visitors
  • Leads generated
  • Conversion rates
  • New Customers

Takeaways

While a strong marketing plan must cover at least these 11 elements, we’ve found that the more concise you can write this up, the better. It’s not that detailed reports and analysis are unimportant but when we’re summarising your plans and activity the shorter you keep it, the more understanding and buy-in you’ll have from key stakeholders.

If your first Marketing Plan draft covered these elements over 2-3 pages, you have already made a significant start to a strong plan and more than likely achieved significantly more well-contemplated planning than your competitors. 

Want more sales? We’ll help you find more traffic, generate 
more leads and get more business for your business.

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