Behind every outbreaking cover story that takes the world for its creativity or even that eyeball-grabbing hoarding, there is a humble plan that defines and secures that marketing campaign a timeline.
What seems like pure creativity is actually the product of hard work and strategic planning, keeping the efforts and numbers aligned on a single page. Dynamic as it is, marketing campaigns should be flexible enough to change with time but also strong in their execution to last for years without losing effectiveness or momentum.
A Poet & A Killer
As David Ogilvy, the epitome of marketing and business, puts it, a great marketer is both a poet and a killer; that is, they have a deep understanding of their craft as well as a creative vision.
Following the same steps, our crowdfunding ninja, Jeff Wenzel, plans and helps startups raise money and grow their businesses with the help of his experience and expertise in the domain. He has created and managed over 140 fundraising campaigns on multiple portals and continues supporting startups to achieve their dreams with his “no excuses” attitude.
While he keeps busy with his goal to help as many startups as possible achieve their dreams and do whatever it takes to make that happen, he has spared some time to spill some secrets on marketing in our Startup 808 Series: The Entrepreneur Workshop.Click here to watch the entire video sessions
The entrepreneur workshops are a great way to get helpful tips and tricks on how best to navigate your startup’s obstacles. These events also allow you to network with other like-minded entrepreneurs!
Jeff begins by addressing the elephant in the room; with so many ads already out there, you only have 3 seconds to grab your customer’s attention. That is why it’s important for an ad campaign to not only speak with them but also come across as witty and interesting to gain further clicks!
Marketing Budget: Know How Much You Need To Get Started
First things first, as goes with any strategy, viable forecasting from the pattern of events is a must. Therefore, a deep analysis of the historical sales and marketing data is a prerequisite to any activity planning.
QUICK MATH
You must be wondering what math has to do with marketing, but when it comes to business, you can not afford not to do your math.
If we talk about Ads based on a pattern of clicks, conversion rates, and open rates, you can easily determine your marketing budget.
For example: If your target is to raise $50,000 and the price per unit is $99, you may require almost 55 people to buy your product.
To convert these 55 people into customers, you must target people according to the general open rate and conversation rate trend. And voila, you can then estimate the cost for people watching and have a budget for your campaigns.
A plan in action gives direction to your efforts. It saves you from spending on something that is unnecessary and keeps track of what is working for the company and what is not.
It keeps everyone on the same page- from the creative ad agency to the social media intern to the sales reps.
“Your marketing strategy should be a living document you regularly review and adjust as needed. Life moves fast, and your plans must move with it.” – Jeff Wenzel.
Marketing is a journey, not a destination. From your buyers to your campaigns, they all have a journey to make with a common goal to achieve. Hence, it becomes essential to understand your customers’ journey and discover how you can be a part of it. You have to handhold your customer into taking this leap of faith and make them reach their destination.
BUYER’s JOURNEY
-Unaware
Find your market and dig deep into it. The first and foremost stage is to make noise, and create awareness for your brand and company about why you do it, how you help, and lastly, what you do.
For a B2C market, Jeff suggests viral giveaways have proven to be very rewarding as these giveaways make way for direct leads, which could also lead to referred leads.
-Lead
Once they know you and people are talking about you, it’s time you check whether they are a good fit for your business.
He suggests using the Dollar Strategy to validate the interest of the leads. Asking the people to put a dollar into the campaign to reserve a spot shows intent. It shows that these people are genuinely interested in your product or service rather than just being here to win something for free.
-Prospect
Once you validate the lead, it is time to turn that lead into a paying customer or a prospect. A great way to do this is by using softwares like Mailchimp or LeadPages, which can help you nurture these leads with drip e-mail campaigns and content upgrades. Once they are in your ecosystem, they can be marketed directly.Ads are the easiest way to get data points from your potential customers. Generally, Google and Facebook have pre-populated user data that can help get important details like e-mail addresses, etc.
-Customer
The journey comes to the ultimate fulfillment only with this step. You have kept in touch with the prospect, nurtured the leads, and now the prospective lead trusts you enough to invest in your product or service. They become the CUSTOMER everyone is looking for.
-Fan
While the goal could have met, the journey has yet to end. For a business to run well, you need not only to think about the immediate results but focus on the long-term ones.
To further your organic sales through referrals or recommendations, you need to build that extraordinary personal relationship with your customer. This effort will make them fans of your brand, enticing them to buy themselves and get others to buy repeatedly.
Jeff implores on this basic buyer’s journey to becoming the marketing funnel behind all his crowdfunding and marketing campaigns. Further ahead, he shares some key highlights from a compelling career in this dynamic field called marketing. Let’s dive right into what goes into the head of this crowdfunding ninja:
Marketing is an ongoing mission with continuous interventions based on results. Adopt whatever works for you, leave what doesn’t, and most importantly, be ready to switch from one strategy to other.
For example:
For a B2C market, Ads run on Facebook are a great way to generate leads as it provides a frictionless way to gather data points through pre-populated automated information. It costs the lead nothing and saves them time.
These data points then serve as your entry point for email marketing.
Talking to a customer is the best way to understand what a person wants. In the current marketing world, having one-on-one conversations at scale has become easier.
This feature is made possible by incorporating Chatbots can be a great way to further your conversational marketing and keep up with attending to every query. They help qualify the leads for you in real-time so you can focus on what matters- sales.
People don’t interact with brands; they interact with people.
Real people generate connections, are built well, and can last a lifetime. Personal, tailor-made content targeting the right audience makes a lot of impact and is advantageous for building a strong customer base. You are good to go even if you focus on 2-3 relevant channels to post your content.
If you want to extend this personal connection, you can also give your chatbot a personality to make the connection more humane.
Marketing & Tech is a holy grail combo.
Marketing, like any other profession, has its own set of tools. Using the relevant ones for your business is important as it can make all the difference. In this fast-paced world, if you continue doing every manually, you are not only inclining towards ineffectiveness but also driving you to irrelevance.
Especially for a B2B market, tools help navigate a starting point for your marketing strategy. They can help gather targeted data and save ample time for brewing creativity.
If you continue doing what others have already done or are doing, there is little to no chance of standing out in this cutthroat market. Explore your options of targeting the right audience through different community-based channels like:
QuoraExplore to know what people really want to know about your services and products. If you can, answer the ones which have the most interactions, provide people the solutions to their problems and drop your website links.
Product Hunt
Go ahead and interact with the community of people that you most relate to.
Once you get a hang of things, you will realize that most marketing efforts do not even cost, like building a community on Quora or Product Hunt, but they go a long way in making a name for your brand.
We know that not every time you have the luxury of focusing on these details, and it’s hard for everyone to devote themselves entirely to such an intriguing concept as marketing. However, we’re here with experts like Jeff himself to help create a market for your business and also provide some best practices about what works when building a market for your product or service.