Imagine if you could put in one place, the best possible response to every enquiry you get, and the best possible targeted marketing copy you could write to attract your best customers. This carefully crafted and smartly written material would be your marketing hub.
What you’ll get is peace of mind that all your bases are covered, and feel assured that your marketing strategies are moving in the right direction. By creating your marketing hub, you’ll be taking the first step to building a coherent internet marketing strategy and developing a professional website designed with a purpose.
What’s more, you’ll find out how to build a powerful portfolio of marketing material that targets each prospect type and the respective decision maker with the best possible benefit oriented copy. With a powerful marketing hub, you’ll benefit by being able to identify and categorise your prospects and build clear paths to funnel each type into your business.
So here’s how to create your marketing hub…
The first phase of marketing analysis is to understand your current marketing activities. Categorise each marketing channel you are using into either visibility focused or promotion focused.
A visibility focused marketing channel is one that is attracting the prospect that knows exactly what they want. Your objective is to become as visible as possible and demonstrate to the prospect that you are the best choice.
A promotion focused marketing channel is one that is suggesting the idea of using your products or services to your target customer type when they are not immediately aware that they need your services. The intention is that once they discover your services they will be persuaded to find out more.
By splitting your prospect funnel in half, you’ll see an effective way of creating two different marketing styles:
- Those seeking you (visibility focused):
those that know that they need your kind of product or service, but haven’t found you yet
- You seeking them (promotion focused):
those that don’t realize they need your product or service, but may be interested once they see the benefits.
The prospects that have found you will be from places such as search engines, business directories, any advertising in newspapers or magazines, and referrals from existing customers.
The prospects that you are seeking will be from places such as up-sell and cross-sell campaigns, distributors or dealers, leaflets, flyers, telemarketing, mass mailing and direct response style advertising.
How to Explore and Capitalise on Your Marketing Channels
Use the columns in the table below to outline your relationships with each marketing channel.
| Relationship | Marketing Channel | Method | Tools |
|---|---|---|---|
- Relationship
Indicate the strength of relationship from one extreme to the other: 'them seeking you/never heard of you' to 'them seeking you/existing customer' and 'you seeking them/existing customer' to 'you seeking them/never heard of you'.
- Marketing Channel
Indicate the market you are involved in.
- Method
Indicate the specific instance of how you intend to approach the market.
- Tools
Indicate the tools and resources you intend to use to approach the market.
By examining each marketing strategy, you’ll get a comprehensive list of all your prospect funnels. You’ll be able to see at a glance where your current strategies are working and where some need further focus.
For each marketing channel, the challenge is to measure as best you can to determine its success. The idea is that you find ways to improve the successful campaigns, and drop the bad ones. If you can harmonise your marketing strategies by integrating them into your website, you can use the website to measure the success.
By analysing your existing customer base, you’ll increase the efficiency of your marketing by tailoring it towards your top 5 customer types. Not only that, but by analysing the decision making process of your customers, you’ll be writing your copy for the people who actually make the buying decision.
Unless you constantly review and improve your strategies, your competition will corner the market with smarter and more responsive marketing. If you’re not in control of all your marketing strategies, you’ll not only be wasting your marketing budget on the wrong strategies, but also failing to maximise your potential using the right strategies.