Improving Your Digital Marketing Strategy and Creating Value

Building out a digital marketing strategy can be a headache for many businesses. How can you possibly personalize an approach to all of your different customers? To start, it's important to focus on a specific target market first and work to build a strong relationship of trust. Social media and online business platforms can be a hindrance or a massive advantage to your business. People want to work with a business that continually gives them value. Be that business by creating an effective digital marketing strategy that helps build trust with on your online audience.

On this episode The Five Echelon Group's Founder/CMO Eric Dickmann has a conversation with accomplished speaker, entrepreneur, and Easy Coaching Mastery CEO- Jason Osborne about digital marketing strategy and finding the right niche.

Jason Osborne is an accomplished speaker, entrepreneur, and CEO of Easy Coaching Mastery. Coming from a family of entrepreneurs and being an entrepreneurial geek himself, Jason had already started establishing himself in the entrepreneurial world at a young age by selling sweet treats to his schoolmates. Back in 2009, he established himself as a life coach and built his personal development business. Within eighteen months, he was already making a full-time income with clients in over thirteen countries. Following the success, Jason switched gears and became an online marketing consultant. Osborn is now the head coach of ReThink Academy Ltd and is determined to drive his company to become the number one coaching program in the United Kingdom. Jason Osborne uploads videos about digital marketing strategy and sales tips on his Facebook Page to help online viewers generate more leads and scale their businesses.

Finding the Right Niche for Your Digital Marketing Strategy

According to Jason, many marketing offers are too broad. They are targeting too wide a market segment. The business may have a great product or service, but often, companies are too afraid to give up anything, so they try to go after the whole market and end up spreading their resources too thin to be effective. Another challenge is that businesses enter into a commodity market and compete with only price as their main differentiator. This can lead to disastrous results. Customers are willing to pay for a product or service as long as what you offer them is worth the price. 

Businesses should realize that they are not giving up anything when they start to narrow down their market. What they are actually doing is adjusting their focus which allows them to more effectively use their marketing budget. When creating a digital marketing strategy, the tools available allow businesses to effectively go after a very specific market rather casting a wide net and wasting money on the wrong target audience.

Recognizing the differentiators that set you apart from other competitors greatly influences your market standing. Jason Osborn has talked with many clients and asked them this question- "What makes you different from everybody else?" Some are unable to respond clearly to this question because they are uncertain of what makes their company better than the others. Jason helps these companies redefine their goals, rework their digital marketing strategy, and identify the differentiators that make them unique. Once the businesses successfully implement these essential concepts, it can change their overall positioning in the market.

Mr. Osborn advises businesses to position themselves in a way that reaches their ideal prospects. There are many places online where businesses can market their products, but each online platform requires a different digital marketing strategy to make your messaging effective. Jason mentions that LinkedIn is one of the best platforms to market your product or service because many decision-makers actively use that platform. LinkedIn may be challenging, but unlike Facebook or Instagram, buyers are often more engaged there as long as you know how to entice them and drive traffic to your site. If you want to know how to generate leads from LinkedIn, you can check out our interview with Matt Clark about how to "Generate Leads from LinkedIn and become a Rainmaker Now."

Adding Value

It is not enough to have an excellent digital marketing strategy; you also have to build a bond of trust with your clients by giving them a reason to trust you. To do this, you need to add value! Whatever you offer your customers, they need to perceive it's adding value. It should be your goal as a marketer to give articulate clearly the value a potential customer will receiving by buying from your business. When the value proposition is clear, it's much easier to make the sale. If you put your focus on commodity features, it's much harder to sell the value of why your product or service is better than anyone else's. Focus on where you're unique and why that differentiator is of value to the buyer.

Why Up-Sell is Important

When customers respond to your Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn ads, they should be directed back to your site for the details of the offer. When this happens, it is a big win for your business because it shows the success of your digital marketing strategy. Once a prospect is on your site, you should focus their attention and provide them with content that encourages them to stay on the website. When presented with the initial offer, it's a golden opportunity to also present an up-sell promotion. You've got their attention and they are close to buying, provide a compelling offer that when combined with the original offer, provides even great value.

After a sale has been made, it's also a great opportunity to acknowledge the purchase and offer a follow-up promotion with additional products or services. It's common to offer a coupon "Save 25% on your next purchase" or "Upgrade to the Pro Plan for a special price" as an incentive for additional business. Again, you've gained the trust of the customer enough for them to have made a purchase and so often, these offers are well received if they are perceived as adding additional value.

Nurturing the Relationship

It's easy to get overly focused on selling goods and services without considering how to nurture relationships with the customers. Jason Osborn suggests that business need to consider the decision-making process of our clients. Many factors such as price, quality, and longevity will be considered in the customer's buying process. That's why it's important to anticipate and satisfy any concerns customers may have as they consider a purchase. Remember, clients prefer to work with businesses that continuously provide value.

Knowing Your Numbers

Aside from nurturing your customers, it's important to know your numbers. Osborn believes that this aspect is where many businesses fall short in their understanding of they effectiveness of their digital marketing strategy. Marketing teams often do not know their conversion rates. How many people come to their landing page? How many new or existing customers purchased upsells or upgrades? If you don't know these numbers, you can't effectively monitor the success of your digital marketing strategy or sales approach. Observe your metrics carefully and look at where incremental changes can be found because small improvement can lead to incremental growth. Jason tells us that these small increases can make a massive difference to your business. That's why nurturing your customers and knowing your numbers are keys to a successful digital marketing strategy and sales methodology.

How to Effectively Use LinkedIn

Like other social and business platforms, LinkedIn gives people more tools to connect in different ways. It's a platform that solopreneurs and business owners alike should be using. LinkedIn is growing massively with about two new people creating an account every two seconds, and has seen an increase of over 2,300% in traffic because of the pandemic. When used effectively, there's a massive opportunity for businesses to expand their reach through LinkedIn.

According to Jason, you have to be smart about how you use the service because bad approaches can turn people off. A common mistake people often make on LinkedIn is connecting with people just to sell their products or services. It's not a good strategy to start your conversation with a long sales message because people rarely feel comfortable when strangers offer them a random deal. People like to use LinkedIn to connect with other people and build their network of peers. This requires that you first establish trust before engaging in selling to one of your connections. No matter how good your product or service is, it will not sell if you don't focus first on building a relationship with your connections.

It's important too that your profile and company page are compelling. When people research connection requests, you want to make sure that you provide details that will entice the user to accept the request. They should clearly see how you might be a valuable connection and good addition to their network.

HootSuite lists seven tips to create a compelling company page:

1. Update your profile image and banner
2. Write a compelling “About us” section and include relevant keywords
3. Fill out all other key field
4. Create showcase pages
5. Build a Career Page
6. Consider employee perspectives
7. Collect and give endorsements

It's important to understand that LinkedIn is a networking platform, unlike Facebook and Twitter, which are social media platforms. Osborn informs us that communication with professionals on LinkedIn is an art that you have to appreciate and learn. You have to balance yourself being between being professional and casual. Your goal should be building strong connections not accumulating connections as you would followers on other platforms.

Live Stream Replay

FAQ

• Recognizing the differentiators that set you apart from the other competitors greatly influences your market standing.
• Clients prefer to work with businesses that continuously provide value.
• LinkedIn is a platform that solopreneurs and business owners alike should be using.
• You have to focus in building a strong relationship with your target customers before you start selling.

Episode and Guest Links

Eric Dickmann - Founder/CMO of the Five Echelon Group, can be found online on Twitter or his personal website.

• To learn more about Virtual CMO, strategic marketing consulting services, or anything else discussed here, please contact The Five Echelon Group.
• The Five Echelon Group's  Resources to Restart Your Business
• If you have feedback, questions, or are interested in being a guest on the show, please contact us here.

Jason Osborn  - Accomplished speaker, entrepreneur, and CEO of Easy Coaching Mastery can be found online on LinkedIn.

• Maximize your leads and scale your business with Easy Coaching Mastery!
• Learn more about Left Click Right Click
• Drop your name and email address here to get the first four chapters of Paul O'O' Mahony's book- ReThink Social Media about using social media to market and profit.