The countdown to an all-new calendar year is dwindling, and the time to act is (always) now. In order to ensure the marketing plan for your business is in tip-top shape for the new year just ahead, consider these surefire suggestions for phenomenal marketing to bring with you into 2022 and beyond. Grab the keys. Fuel up. We’re going on a road trip. As the temporal golden hues fade, it’s about to get evergreen.
Start With Who: Know Your Audience
The first main intention of every successful marketing plan is to capture the customer’s attention effectively. Before you can, a few key elements include understanding exactly who your audience is, and why you deserve their time and attention. What is the purpose of the intended attention once achieved? How can you captivate your audience in a way that establishes trust and encourages them to return for more insight from you instead of your business’s healthy competitors?
The clear answers to these core questions will help you grow into the depth of understanding required to really get to know your target audience. This encapsulates a true understanding of the customer’s problems, goals, hobbies, lifestyle, personal choices, and preferences.
From there, find a way to help your customer close in on the solution to their problem, and you’re gold. Think: How can your product or service help the target customer get closer to their goal or to solving their problem? The closer you get, the better your bond with the target audience for your business.
How is your brand responsible for helping your customer seek something better than their current situation? If you don’t know how you offer improvement with your product or service yet, start there. When your aim is to help your audience improve, grow, move forward, elevate, accelerate, and win, then they will be more willing to hear you out as doing so helps them.
As a result, upon getting to really know who your audience is and what makes them tick, the intention of capturing your customer’s attention will be far more effective than any surface-level attempt. Fleeting efforts are a dime a dozen. They are so easy to spot, and they are even easier to forget. In order to avoid surface-level attempts that inevitably fall flat, it’s best to get respectfully personal. Greater depth leads to greater discovery in just about every sense, including getting to know your audience.
Fuel Your Focus: Customer Experience
While it may seem a bit frustrating to hear repeated advice emphasizing focus on the customer experience, consider this food for thought. Marketing that does not connect with customers is more than just a lot of your money wasted. It’s also valuable time, good energy, and quality effort wasted.
For these reasons - your money, time, energy, and effort - it is in your best interest to focus on the customer experience. After all, when you really think about it, how does a business operate and continue to grow without paralleled growth in and of customers? Who can your business serve without clients? Who can you pitch to without prospects? How can you suggest solutions if you don’t know the problems your prospects are currently faced with? You might see where this is headed now.
The customer experience is the roadmap to successful business. Focus on the direction that best serves your target audience. Navigate the roadmap, allowing your customers’ needs to serve as the compass.
Think in terms of a modern GPS system. In order to get from point A to point B, you follow necessary steps, trusting the guided turns and twists along the way. The same is true for the roadmap that is the customer experience. Point A is meeting your customer right where they are in the present moment.
The more granular you get, the more powerful your messaging will be. Powerful messaging is the key to unlock the door to the vehicle that drives along the roadmap of your customer’s journey. This same key that unlocks the door will also ignite new messaging that makes or breaks your marketing strategy.
When you think about your customers’ needs in 2022, ask questions that will reveal the problems and goals you can help your customer solve and achieve. Position your business as a solution-based entity that can assist your target audience in the areas they seek to excel and move forward with in 2022 as they align with your business. The customer experience is vital because their growth fuels yours. They fill the gas tank for the vehicle in order to turn the key and ignite the messaging, your GPS, along the way.
Customize Messaging: From rest stops to coffee breaks and the final stretch...
*...with CTAs specific to each point of the buyer’s journey!
That was a bit of a mouthful, so let’s take a step back to chew through thoroughly. Every time there’s a “dot dot dot” moment, it’s an opportunity. Let these opportunities breed the CTAs specific to each point of your buyer’s personal journey. This is where the customization takes your hot leads and drops them, low-hanging fruit falling right into your basket.
There’s a term for these moments - the rest stop, the coffee break, the final stretch - they’re called micro-moments. Micro-moments present prime opportunities for problem-solving. Better yet, this is your chance to get in front of your customer and truly shine in their undivided attention, touting your best features as reasons to buy your product or service. These moments come with knowing your customer beyond the basic, surface-level attempts mentioned earlier. This is also where the previously suggested effort into depth is rewarded with a breath of fresh air. Because you now know your customer, you can meet them there.
You might be thinking, okay… meet them where? This is when the strategy for each calculated rest stop and coffee break comes into play. Specific, customized messaging is required for every single micro-moment, as many as you can distinguish in the pipeline. Start with the top-of-funnel prospects. Move forward to the middle-of-funnel active shoppers. Bring it home with your bottom-of-funnel buyers who are already in line waiting to make the purchase. As you can see, each part of the pipeline process for your audience will include searching for something new in their various micro-moments as they collect information in different areas, all adding up to purchase your product or service.
When you have a deep understanding of when, where, and why those micro-moments happen and how they come into play, you can position your messaging effectively to align with each customer’s journey. What you say to someone who is at the bottom of your funnel, ready and waiting eagerly at the front of your checkout line, will be very different from the conversation with a window shopper. Knowing who is who and where they are in their unique buyer journey is prime insight for customized messaging.
Simplify Your Messaging
When it comes to messaging, simplicity is the golden ticket. Simplicity breeds clarity. Clarity wins the customer experience every step of the way, every single time. Think about how you feel when you have a problem you are trying to solve. Do you want to figure it out in a way that feels complicated and messy? Of course not. No one wants more mess when they are trying to clean one up.
Simplicity brings a lightness that offers clarity, which is exactly what your customer seeks. Give your customer what they want, and you get what you want as a result: their business. This can be as easy as it sounds with the professional help of a marketing expert who knows how to take your messaging and simplify it specifically to the liking of your target audience. Without having professional marketing help, the uniquely strategic recipe for simplicity can seem more complicated and complex than the energy and time you may wish to put forth.
To strategically simplify your messaging requires honed editorial skills and the agility of a solid, dynamic marketing strategy. This is the stuff that backs the roadmap that leads your potential new clients to buy.
Converting potential clients into return buyers may sound like a daunting task of lofty ambition, but it really boils down to the simplicity of your messaging tailored to those micro-moments mentioned earlier. Make your marketing strategy as crystal clear as possible, and watch as your competitors’ clients gravitate toward your business. People like easy, simple, and fast - especially in today’s world powered by immediacy. Now is right on time, and now is the time to consider your 2022 marketing plan. The only way to prevent business from falling behind is to stay ahead of the game with proper preparation.
Stay Real Always in All Ways
Arguably saving the best for last, the most important item to address is your ability to stay real, especially in your marketing plan. This may sound silly, but it’s staggeringly serious with the rapid influx of artificial intelligence fueling automated campaigns potentially clogging your various sales funnels unbeknownst to you. Staying real is profoundly integral to the success of your 2022 marketing plan.
If your strategy fails to include elements of humanness, your human clients will not connect, resulting in dead efforts discussed at the start of this article. If you present messaging that is articulated to include natural emotional intelligence that captivates your target audience, you will find that often touted old-fashioned realness is still incredibly worthwhile.
You don’t need to pull out the crayons or Polaroid cameras just yet, but consider the messaging that most resonates with you as a starting point. How do you want your messaging to make your customers feel? Whether or not you realize it, the message you put out will contribute to the success of your business because of how your customers feel upon receipt. For this reason, it’s in your best interest to stay real in your 2022 marketing plan as best as you can.
Let authenticity shine through your products or services to share the human element with your target audience. From simply swapping stock photos for real, candid images to more dedicated, meaningful efforts, the more real you can remain, the better your opportunity to connect with customers in a way that encourages them to return to your business with loyalty. Another way to stay real is in expressing authentic appreciation for customers, new and old, as gratitude can also help fuel your growth in 2022. Sharing is caring and kind, and kindness can really help out your ROI when it comes to marketing efforts. Let your customers know you care about them, and remind them regularly with your messaging.
Wondering what’s next and where to go from here? Simple: Start now. Put the car back in drive; let’s rev the engine. Give the horn a good honk and wave hello to your neighbor. When you’re ready, we’re here, where you are invited to learn more about how to best align your 2022 marketing plan with messaging that meets your customers right where they are, wherever they may be, the right way - the real way.
Ready to rise above the tide of ever-steady change? Stay in the know, aligned with every ebb and flow. Let us help with your guide to grand branding at Pivotal In-site 365+, creative compass included. Email brittneyschering@gmail.com for far more insight.
