Get Back to Business Marketing Basics.

Trouble with Resolutions? Lets Get Back to Business Marketing Basics!

We are officially three full weeks into the New Year of 2019. How’s everyone’s progress on those personal and professional resolutions?

Hopefully, it’s going well and you feel you’ve made significant (even if small) adjustments in order to meet those goals. The majority of us, about 77% research has shown, fall short of resolutions within a few weeks of making them. (Reuters) That’s quite a high percentage and the reason is we tend to make utopian goals, which can be exciting, but not always attainable if not rooted in some common sense reality for our current circumstances.

We can do this in all areas, but for our business, we have to stay inspired for greatness while maintaining and staying focused on our business.

Good Ol’ Teddy.

This reminds me of a well-known quote, Theodore Roosevelt said, “Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.”

Truly some words of wisdom when it comes to staying focused on becoming great while paying attention to who you are in the journey. I read somewhere that high aspirations should be combined with a practical spirit to achieve greatness. I love that! We can absolutely use a practical spirit, a humble spirit with the drive to do our best and be successful in obtaining our goals, especially the goals that can be seen as lofty by others.

The goals can’t be utopian, but they can be challenging and seem impossible to some. It just depends on where we start and the steps we take to get there. Small adjustments are the most important part of the journey; one step combined with hundreds of others complete the journey. I’ve run a couple of marathons and believe me when I say I KNOW this to be true! Anyone else out there about hit “the wall” in mile 23?

We Can Fail So Quickly…

to follow through with New Year’s resolutions (three weeks for most). It’s because we don’t stay focused on who we are and where we started. We tend to bite off more than we can chew, like supersizing our fries when all we need is a handful and then we fall short.

What do we do when we fall short in our business goals?

We get back to the basics! The most basic, fundamental part of your business is paying attention to your customers. This is where marketing starts; you have to have laser focus on your customers. Online marketing starts with this basic principle as well, you have to know your customers inside and out.

This means understanding why your customers came to you in the first place.

How Do I Get Back to the Basics?

The best way to understand your clients is to start segmenting them so you can target those segments with specific marketing strategies. Here’s some ways to segment your customers:

  • Demographics
    • Age
    • Job Titles
    • Industries
    • Education
    • Location
  • Professional attributes
    • Job responsibilities, highest level
    • Problems you helped solve
    • Any self diagnosed barriers they shared regarding those problems
    • Any actions they’ve taken to try and solve their problems
    • Years spent in current job role
  • Paths to Sales
    • Source of how client found you
    • Initial questions that clients asked about you
    • Is there a common decision making process and the length of that process
    • Is there a common reason a sale didn’t occur

Then What?

After you have segmented your list, you can start reviewing your sales funnel or conversion funnel to understand what client segments you can really help or which ones get clogged up.

If you can understand your current customers and connect their characteristics and traits within your sales funnel, you can identify where you can focus for success. Your online marketing strategy for new clients will be focused on a particular type of client to increase that sales flow.

You will also identify the types of clients you don’t want to create an online marketing strategy for either because they just don’t take action or because your sales funnel isn’t the right one for them. If you find a common reason sales didn’t occur, you can identify if there’s a problem within your process for conversion and focus on fixing that.

Be Basic. It’s a Good Thing.

If you find yourself not so successful with those resolutions for your business right now, then go back to the basics:

  1. Get laser focused on your customers to understand what they want and need.
  2. Segment your customer base to understand the journey to the sale, understand your sales funnel.
  3. Don’t just start marketing campaigns to “test” what works, do # 1 and #2 above and then diligently make a marketing plan from your results.

And while you are doing all 3 of those, keep your aspirations high, your spirit humble and ready for meaningful results for your customers and your business.

Written By

Calisa Fitzpatrick – Vice President

Contact BT Web Group for all your Digital Marketing and Web Design needs. We’re located in Lexington, KY

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