Issue 1 - Volume 1 | January 2017
1. What are the upcoming marketing trends for 2017?
Marketing has moved to ‘digital’, thanks to social media and search engines. This trend is likely to experience northward in 2017 as well. But with a bit more towards ‘people based marketing’. There is a strong need for personalized content, personalized attention, from people and this personalized communication will not just help win more customers but also retain them more effectively.
Effective Social media engagement is required for marketers to better leverage their brand presence.
Small businesses and startups should leverage SMAC – Social, Mobility, Analytics, and Cloud. A good balance of these strategies will certainly help companies to grow.
Digital marketing has got transformed over the past 5 years in a number of ways. From a simple ‘link building technique’ that was used for getting high search results, today it is more about the ‘relevancy’. Staying relevant and providing relevant content for the consumers are the top reasons for a site to stay on top, consistently. If Startup Xperts site ranks on top for consistently long periods of time over years - on business consulting services for startups, or digital marketing for startups, it is about the relevancy of content and the engagement of the readers who appreciate the content, are the reasons for Google ranking us on top. It is algorithm based and not any black hat technique that can work any longer. If they do it is at their own risk of losing all credentials in toto.
Second, social media marketing has evolved much better; so whether anyone needs to look at B2B, or B2C, or B2B2C, the relevant social media channels can be used to build your brand, expand reach, and build revenues.
Likewise, many startups have understood the need of good content as without having a proper content strategy it will be difficult to stand out from the crowd.
Email marketing has also transformed from being a simple ‘sales mailer strategy’ to a far more ‘inclusive-strategy’ for a brand to thrive better. It’s power is just being realized and very few number of small enterprises are able to leverage this power of email marketing. But those who have the right know how and resources, have been able to grow their brand exponentially.
It all starts with a proper unified strategy. Marketing does not stand alone. It exists because of its customers. So having a strong customer focus is the first step in defining a good marketing strategy, in alignment with sales.
Marketing strategy should outline the purpose of who, why, what, and when?
Who is this strategy meant for? Who will be my customers/target segment?
Why will they look at us? Why are we different?
What is in it for them? What benefits will they appreciate for them to be with us for long? Simply put, what problems are you solving for your customers?
When should we do it – timing? Frequency?
Finally the how aspect – how should this be executed that can deliver results?
Once the basic aspects are drilled down, a solid plan can be arrived based on the tactic (and budget) that we decide to go with.
First important insight - small business owners, startup founders, predominantly lack critical business skills. While some are able to build their startup to a particular point, their lack skills to scale up from that point forward; in those situations they will need to bring in right business advisors, business mentors, who can help steer the company to the next higher level.
Second, the small business owners and startups are so very internal focused they fail to pick the pulse of the customer and customer focused strategies. The focus has been more on product building than providing experience to customers.
Third, they either raise funds too late, or too early. When that happens the spends are not prioritized in terms of what is critical, essential, and nice to have. Focusing their energies on things that are not critical to business improvement pulls down the company over a period of time.
What worked 3-4 years ago may not work today. One needs to keep this mind in providing the right solutions that can give the right result.
Most of the startups, small businesses who we have been mentoring, providing business consulting services, have also leveraged our smart digital marketing support system (execution). They were not just able to build a brand promise, but have been expanding their reach - getting leads and turning them as customers.
Acting as their Virtual-CMO in many cases has helped them buckle the trend, and build momentum from flat growth that they have faced for years before.
It is about providing great user experience (customer experience) that has helped them to tide the storm and making their brand/product felt in the midst of the noise. Delivering unique value proposition that strikes a chord with their customers has been one of our focus area as we look at building marketing strategies and execute along with them, with a sole purpose of building a stable, fast growth, and sustainable enterprises.
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