No matter what type of business you have, whether it is brick and mortar, online, or a combination of the two, no business can thrive or even survive without effective marketing and advertising to generate traction.
So why do so many business leaders focus the majority of their time, efforts and capital on the products or services they provide and so little on the marketing and advertising required to enable their prospective customers to know they even exist as an option to serve their needs?
How do you inform and educate your prospective customers to know you are a viable option?
How do you ensure your target market even knows you are an option to provide them with the products and services they need?
How do you attract new clients? How do you grow your business?
When it comes to business success, traction trumps everything. Traction means people are finding and buying your product or service.
The question is, “How do you get traction?”
Let’s look at the options available to you. Which ones are you leveraging? Which traction channels should you be using? How do you know which channels are best for your company?
The fact is, most businesses only use the traction channels they’re most familiar with or think they should be using based on the type of product or service they offer. However, the reality is that it’s hard to predict which channel will work best for any given organization. It’s difficult to tell which channel will work best for your company right now until you start testing.
Let’s look at each one individually and then let’s consider a strategy for getting the best results in the least amount of time.
SEO starts with the process of researching what keywords (typically phrases of 4 – 5 words) that prospective customers search for when looking for your products or services. What SEO providers do is optimize your keyword placements both on your web pages and throughout content distributed across the web in the form of articles, posts, bookmarks, listings, mentions, comments, social bookmarking, any and all content distributed across the web with links pointed back to the pages on your website. Since there is a lot of competition out there for nearly every industry, getting your web pages to show up on the first page of search results does take a significant investment of time (months), effort, and money. The major benefit of SEO is that once you achieve first page search results, your pages tend to stay there as long as your pages are ‘sticky’ (people stay on the page or interact with it.) However, due to the dynamic characteristics of the web and the constant and never-ending effort of competitors to get their pages to show up in first page SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) you have to persist in your SEO efforts to maintain your current standings. You can learn more here https://www.strategicmarketing-consultants.com/tactical-marketing-plan/strategic-implementation/search-engine-optimization/
SEM refers to paid advertising on the various search engines such a Google Adwords. Similar to SEO, the process starts with an even more extensive research of keywords prospects use to find you, your products or services. Something that must be kept in mind is that people use different terms depending on whether they are researching or looking to buy. Where in SEO we typically target 20 – 30 keywords, in SEM the numbers can easily run into the thousands.
SEM is ferociously competitive since its primary benefit is that you can produce results in a matter of weeks. However, depending on the degree of competition for your targeted keywords, you could pay $20 – $100 per click on your ads. And that is just a click on your ad – not a new customer. The person must then interact with your webpage; hopefully provide you with their email address in return for something of value that you give them for free. That enables you to begin the nurturing or educational process of why they should choose you over one of your competitors.
Social Media Marketing is quite enticing to many businesses these days as they see it as a “free” way to market to their target prospects. However, there’s no free lunch. At the very least it requires a significant investment of strategic planning and time to implement. Like the previous channels, SMO starts with keyword research or at least a review of prior keyword analysis. Then considering the number of social platforms on which one could promote their business, you have to determine if members of your target market frequent any given platform more than others. There are of course several very popular platforms which are a safe bet for the majority of business.
To see the platforms we typically target and what we do to promote your business, see https://www.strategicmarketing-consultants.com/seo-sem-smo-packages/
Facebook is a hot platform these days since there are more than a billion users and hundreds of millions of people visit it every day. Many brands have turned to Facebook advertising because of its ability to target potential prospects that precisely match your ideal customer and it typically costs less than Google or Bing ads. Facebook is now overwhelmed with ads disguised as posts that people can’t help but click on them. This could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it. Advertisers connect with targeted prospects, but sometimes people are turned off by the barrage of ads in their stream.
PR is the art and science of getting your company name out there in the marketplace via traditional media outlets such as newspapers, magazines and TV. This can still work for some businesses and certain industries.
Unconventional PR requires you doing something out of the ordinary, something remarkable such as publicity stunts to draw media attention. However, in order to make this channel effective over time, you have to do more outrageous stunts each time – which can be challenging except for the very creative types.
Everyone wants their marketing to go viral. In order for your customer base to grow exponentially, your customers must refer other customers and they usually have to have some type of incentive to do so whether it be genuine excitement about your product, or a financial incentive such as a free add-on or rebate on your product or service offering.
Display ads on popular sites like reddit, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and hundreds of others can be a powerful and scalable way to grow your customer base.
Offline ads include things like radio and TV spots, billboards, infomercials, newspaper and magazine ads as well as flyers and other local advertisements. These ads can be more effective at reaching markets such as seniors, less tech savvy consumers, and demographics that are harder to reach.
The primary and easiest method to get the word out about your company’s products and services is via your blog. The challenge is that most companies don’t effectively utilize their blogs to get traction and attract new customers. If your website is built on a blogging platform such as WordPress, every blog post is automatically sent out to many of the top content distribution sites in the world and your content can spread like wildfire if it’s properly optimized.
Yes, many of us get hundreds of emails per day, but with proper email management strategies, you can make that mountain into a more manageable mole hill. Email is still the best way to educate and nurture your prospects into paying customers. It’s also one of the best ways to monetize your existing clients.
Webinars are without a doubt one of the most powerful strategies to convert lookers into buyers if you structure them the right way. With webinars you want to give away your best material. Face it, most people are strapped for time and others just don’t have the skills necessary to do what you do. They want someone else to do the work for them. So, invite all your contacts and potential prospects to your webinars and watch your bottom line grow like gangbusters.
Targeting blogs is similar to content marketing except in that rather than posting on your own blog, you offer to guest post on other’s blogs – particularly those whose target market is similar to yours, but is not a direct competitor. Posting on well-established blogs with a large existing readership can do wonders for your company as your message will not only be valuable to those readers, but they will see you as an expert in your niche.
Everyone knows what sales is all about. It’s about the process of directly exchanging dollars for goods or services. This is old school selling.
Business development or BD is the process of creating strategic relationships that benefits both parties. Find companies in your industry who are complementary to what you do and you can both benefit targeting the same clients.
Affiliate marketing has enabled many companies to grow their customer base by reaching thousands of in a cost-effective way. These programs offer a revenue sharing model whereby affiliates are paid for bringing new customers to the company sponsoring the program. It’s a win-win agreement for both parties.
Focusing on existing platforms means you’re putting your energy into elevating your business on large mega-platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, the AppStore, or Google Play to get some of their hundreds of millions of users to latch on board with your product or service.
Utilizing engineering as marketing to acquire new customers is an under leveraged way to get traction. Companies who have been successful in this channel have done things such as building a simple tool that demonstrates to potential customers that they do in fact have the problem that your product or service solves. Or they have built micro-sites or developed widgets or plugins that can be used to harness more power on CMS platforms such as WordPress.
Many companies such as Zappos and Wikipedia have grown by forming passionate communities around their products. Give customers something they REALLY want such as Nordstrom-like service where you accept returns at any time for any reason.
If you’re up to it, if you’ve been a Toastmaster for any length of time, you may want to offer to present a speech or workshop on what are the benefits your product or service provides. Many company’s CEO or other leader have stepped up to the platform and effectively convinced listeners that their company’s product or service will solve the problem they are experiencing.
Sponsoring or running an offline event such as a conference or meetup can be an effective way of getting traction. As the sponsor or event management company, you can target prospects in many ways. You can be seen as the leading provider of the product or service for which the event is about.
Trade shows are events that enable companies in specific industries to show off their latest products or services. Even in the age of the Internet and all the online marketing going on, trade shows are still going strong as they enable prospects and vendors to meet face to face and get the lowdown on company’s solutions in a way they just can’t get online.
With so many channels to consider, learning which one to focus on first is tough.
Following is a simple framework that will help you decide which channel will get you the traction you desire.
As PayPal founder Peter Thiel puts it: “[You] probably won’t have a bunch of equally good distribution strategies. Engineers frequently fall victim to this because they do not understand distribution. Since they don’t know what works, and haven’t thought about it, they try some sales, BD, advertising, and viral marketing – everything but the kitchen sink.
That is a really bad idea. It is very likely that one channel is optimal. Most businesses actually get zero distribution channels to work. Poor distribution – not product – is the number one cause of failure. If you can get even a single distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.
So it’s worth thinking really hard about finding the single best distribution channel.”
The goal here is to come up with at least one reasonable way you could use each of the 21 traction channels. If you were to use unconventional PR, what could you do that would shock the marketing norm? Drive a tank down Main Street? Put a sign of your competitor inside a frozen block of ice in the lobby at a trade show?
As I mentioned at the beginning, everyone has bias for and against certain traction channels. The idea here is to get you to think about how every traction channel has some possibility. Don’t discount any channel.
Items to consider as you brainstorm ideas for each channel:
Next, rank your channels in one of three columns; most promising right now, could possibly work, and which channels seem like long shots?
Now prioritize your ‘Most Promising’ column. The rule of thumb is to work with no more than three channels at any given time. If you have more than three items in column A, you need to rearrange the channels so that you have no more than three. I want you to have three channels in column A because you can work each of those channels in parallel and find your best channel faster.
You can run multiple experiments at the same time since tests take time to run. Yet doing too many at once leads to errors and a lack of focus.
This step is where you put your ideas into the real world. The purpose of this step is to find out which channel is worth focusing on. You make that decision based on the results of relatively small and inexpensive tests. These tests are designed to answer the following questions.
Keep in mind that when testing you are not trying to get a lot of customers right now. Rather you are just trying to see if this channel could work for you. The primary consideration at this point is speed, to get answers to your assumptions.
You want to run small scale tests just to see if your channel strategy will work. For example, run four Facebook ads for a week or two and see what kind of results you get.
If all goes well, one of the traction channels you tested produced promising results. If that’s the case, you’ll want to start focusing all your resources on that one channel.
If no channel seems promising after testing, the whole process should be repeated. The good news is you now have data from all those tests you just ran, that will provide insight into what types of things are, and are not resonating with prospects. Look at the messaging you’ve been using and dig deeper to see at what point each channel failed to deliver. Then repeat the process with your next three most promising channels.
If you need help with your marketing, we’re here to help.
Shea Ellison
Founder and CEO of Strategic Internet
Strategic Marketing Consultants
Internet Marketing Strategies
Digital Marketing Strategies
This post was inspired by Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares and some of the content was drawn from the book. For an in-depth study of the topic I suggest you pick up a copy from Amazon.