The Most Important Aspect of a Marketing Strategy (Ep 44)

Welcome to the Digital Marketing Made Easy Podcast. Dawn McGruer brings you actionable digital marketing lessons every other week. Whether you are an aspiring or experienced marketer, learn the latest SEO, content marketing, social media, email marketing, and online marketing tactics that are working today.

 
Dawn:

Welcome to Digital Marketing Made Easy, and yet again, we are in the top 100 in marketing in the charts in over 10 countries. And last time I checked it was 15. So our podcast is absolutely smashing it, and I am so, so proud. And I just want to put a huge thank you out to all of the people that have helped me in my journey, me in launching my podcast, because this is what matters. It’s the people that I have created a connection with, the people who are in my tribe, and the people who absolutely want to learn the amazing power of digital marketing. And through this podcast, truly, my mission is to empower everyone who listens to scale and grow their business through the amazing world of social media and digital marketing.

So in this podcast, we’re going to cover the most important thing or aspect of your marketing strategy. Now, what is that? Well, the number one thing, the number one aspect or the number one part of any strategy that I create is about knowing your customers. And what I mean by this is that there are five steps to creating the ideal client profile or avatar. Once you understand who your customer is, their customer persona, then we can start to market in a far better way, a far connected way, a way that our marketing message really resonates with that person. It starts to build a relationship with that person and they can relate to the storytelling that you are using.

If you visualise your client you are marketing to a human being

Now, if you visualize your ideal client, you are not marketing to a niche or an industry. You are marketing to a lovely, amazing human being. And what you have to consider here is that each and every time you create any piece of marketing, be a post, social media, a ad, it could be a blog, an email, it doesn’t matter, you have to be writing with your ideal client in mind. And what you have to do is really nail who that person is, what they look like, and recreate a visual of each person.

Now, across the walls in our offices, we have our ideal clients for the different products and services that we market. And yes, we always have three things. As a business, we’ve always focused on certification. We’ve focused in on qualifications and mentoring, three core activities and different avatars, different clients. And often businesses will struggle to identify how to market to these multiple audiences.

Research what makes us different from our competitors

Now I’ll tell you exactly how we do it. So if we are marketing the certification or signature Fast Track Digital Marketing course, this two-day course is all around people becoming a digital marketing professional, a powerhouse in the world of digital. Someone getting a certificate to say yes, they’ve learned like the eight powerful ways to market the business online. It’s an advanced level. So who are these people? We start to humanize them, build an ideal client, knowing the people we’ve trained in the past, looking at why did they choose us? Doing some research around what was the difference between us and a competitor? What was the compelling event or reason that they came to our study center?

Now with Business Consort Academy, the qualification again is quite different because we have people who are 25 to 55 who are doing our CIM Diploma in Professional Digital Marketing. Now, the motivations around this are different because you imagine getting a degree, some people have never had a degree. This could be the first one in the family. This could be creating history. This could be someone’s second degree. But it’s all around the story. Getting the qualification is great, but getting someone to connect with the graduation ceremony, wearing the cap and gowns, going to Westminster, collecting their scroll, these are magical moments. And then when you are marketing and understanding who your avatar is, it’s important that you really chart out all of the things that are important to them. So instead of thinking about the features, think very much around benefits.

When we talk about our products we talk to the individual

Now the last thing that we do is mentoring. So we do one to one and we do group mentoring. Now, when I launched the Marketing Mentorship Programme, it was categorically for business owners. Now that’s quite different because for the certification qualifications, we train individuals, people who are working in marketing, people who want to get into marketing, people who want a pay rise, a promotion, a new job, people who want to empower their teams to really deliver and get amazing marketing results for the efforts and get this huge return on investment. So how do we transition? Well, each time that we’re talking about each of these products or services, we talk to the individual.

If I’m talking to a business owner, a coach, a consultant, a course creator, a business owner of products or services, doesn’t matter what niche, I will have an understanding of what it is that they want from their business. People generally come to me and say, “Dawn, the biggest game changer will be X, Y, and Z.” And from the business point of view, it’s generating consistent cash months, be it generating £10,000 a month consistently, £10,000 a week consistently, day or even hour. It doesn’t matter. But it’s about the generating income so that they’ve got the business that they wanted, the freedom, the flexibility, the financial certainty to achieve the dreams and goals.

Again, that avatar, that customer profile, is different to someone doing a certification or qualification. They might want to accelerate their career. If it’s a business, they want to scale and grow the business and generate more profits from their digital marketing efforts. They want more clients, they want more conversion, they want scale. So gearing this comes down to five critical things. Now, if you get a piece of paper, you can chart this out. If you’ve got my book, Dynamic Digital Marketing, there is a whole chapter dedicated to creating your customer avatar. And the supporting workbook that goes with it, the fillable pdf, you can type in all of these things and you can recreate it for each audience you have.

Understand your audience’s goals and values

Now, the first thing is you have to understand your ideal audience’s goals and values and what they stand for and really connecting with this person. So if I understand what someone’s goal is from achieving a diploma, there’s a certain amount which is around their own professional development, their own ego and success. And this is something that’s very personal to them. Maybe the whole thought of standing with their friends and family and achieving the degree in a fast track way. So I have to really connect with what it is their goal is. What do they stand for? What are their values?

Understand their sources of information

Number two, I have to understand the sources of information. So what do they read? What websites do they go to? What social channels do they use? Where do my audience hang out? Where do they connect with people? Where do they ask questions? All of these things.

Think about the demographics

And I start to then build this profile where, number three, I can start to think about the demographics. Are they men? Are they women? What are the age profiles? Which countries are they in? Are they in particular regions? Do they have particular job titles? Am I marketing to HR people? Am I marketing to individuals? For me, customer profiles are really understanding the people in that decision-making process.

So it could be that somebody sees the diploma on social media and they go to the boss and say, “Can I do this course? And will you pay for it?” Then it goes to maybe HR. So we need to be thinking about the different marketing messages. So even in our marketing material, if someone comes to us, we’ve created a business case so that that individual can go as the specifier to say, “Right, okay, I would like you to pay for this course, and this is what the business will get for their money.” So think about the people involved. For us, if we were getting an apprentice, we would have to make sure that if the apprentice wanted to do a course, that their family backed it, their parents. So we would have to create the material to tell them why this would be a benefit or a huge success for their son, daughter, whatever, to do.

Align to your client’s pain points

So think about, number four, really aligning to the pain, the challenges of this person. Why is it that they need your solution, your product or service? What is the challenge it will solve? How will it help them achieve their objectives that they’re not right now? How will it save them time, money, effort, all of these things? And really looking into what people are saying to you. Look at your customer case studies, your testimonials, reviews, things that people have said that are big selling points, and can be the differentiator when you are marketing and really getting your message to be sharp so that it’s really clear to that person what it is and why they need to do it and why they need to do it, of course, now, rather than waiting and delaying.

Sales objections

Now that takes me onto number five, last but not least, sales objections. Understanding someone’s aspirations. A sales objection could be in the business, “Oh, it’s going to cost us too much money. Oh, we don’t have the talent, we don’t have the resource. Oh, it’s going to be just too much for us to take on.” And the list goes on. Chart out every sales objection you’ve ever had, any frequently asked question you have on your website, or comes through to your teams, and start to understand how you could overcome them, and head them off at the pass. Really market quite strongly through creating desire around what you do, but also managing these sales objections.

Now the last one is part of this. When we look at sales objections and aspirations, imagine that you’re marketing, let’s say, to a corporate, and you go into the team and you’ve got one person who’s really backing you, and this is the person who’s going to really help kind of sell it into the team. Now, if you really align the proposition around their aspirations, if they want a pay rise, a promotion, a new job, et cetera, if your product or solution is going to save the business this epic amount of money, that’s definitely going to put them in a high standing, a definite good position to get an acceleration in their career.

So once you understand these five key areas, you start to get this amazing profile. And every time you look at it, every time you go to post, you’re posting with purpose and really connecting with that audience. And then this is when you start to really attract your own ideal client. You start pulling in the right people, the people that you love working with, the people that love working with you, and it starts to flow in a far easier manner. And you start to see that you are moving from a position of obviously broadcasting and marketing to this immersive and also interactive way of talking with your clients because they start to comment, they start to like, they start to share because you are relating with them. And in time, this relationship builds through your marketing, your nurturing, to ultimately get them to be a lead and then becoming a paying client.

So I hope this helped, and I hope you enjoy this podcast. Don’t forget to come over to Business Consort. Just type in Business Consort into Google, and it comes up top of the tree, digitalandsocialmediaacademy.com. There are loads of free resources on there, master classes, workshops, guides, videos, things that you can really accelerate your digital marketing to scale and grow your business and get better results from your marketing. So I shall see you on the next episode. And remember, you can come and connect with me, Dawn McGruer, on all the normal channels. So have an amazing week. And don’t forget, we are running lots and lots of master classes over the time, so you’ll find them all on the website as well as some amazing offers for our courses, qualification and mentoring. Take care.

Don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast. Take a screenshot and share on social media and we will send you a special gift to say thanks. Just remember to tag Business Consort in your post. Oh, and don’t forget, you can access more free resources to help you develop your digital skills on our website, digitalandsocialmediaacademy.com.