When we’re talking about marketing strategy, we’re really talking about a customer journey. It’s how you take someone who has never heard from you and turn that person into paying customers, then into a repeat customer, and eventually into a fan when they talk about your shop to other people. It’s not about picking Pinterest over Instagram or between paying for ads or not paying for ads. It’s all about groundwork and structure of your marketing strategy.
I have a graphic for you to illustrate that customer journey:
This journey starts with a cold audience, then it goes to warm and eventually into hot category. These are very different audiences that need very different treatment.
The question is: what should your marketing message for each of those audiences be?
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You want to introduce your brand and products without trying to sell. People that don’t know you won’t buy anything from you, so you need to meet them halfway and deliver value. To do that, you really need to know your ideal customer profile, their pain points etc. I hope you know that already, but if you don’t, you can look at my course inside of HQ about this topic or see the free resources. Once you introduce your brand, make them go to the “warm” bucket – get them onto your email list, “pixel” them (it’s a code on Facebook), turn them into followers etc. The goal is that you can market to them later on.
The goal here is turning them into customers and that’s what we’re going to focus on. You can do this by using email marketing, social media etc.
The goal here is to turn them from customers to repeat customers and finally into fans that tell their families and friends about you. You can do that by e.g. sending them birthday coupons or gift cards, special offers, VIP treatment etc.
Now that you know about those buckets, ask yourself:
The examples may not be relevant to you, it’s just to show how it could look like. Don’t get stuck on them. Think for yourself what would work for you and your audience instead.
I hope this was useful. One thing I want you to remember is to not get caught up in the tools at first. Start with the strategy and one channel for each bucket. When you start, that’s when you can get into more detail, tools etc. It’s going to help you with overwhelm and to keep it simple. Once you feel confident in one customer path, you can start adding a level of complexity to it.
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