The 3 building blocks of a successful online marketing strategy

November 29, 2017

Today we’re going to talk about marketing, and it’s such a juicy topic! I know that’s where a lot of you just want to give up. You love creating your products, but marketing? Not so much. 

The point is that marketing is what makes or breaks your business, so it’s important to talk about it. That’s why today I want to show you what a marketing strategy is and share with you building blocks of a successful online marketing strategy. 

There will be no hacks and tricks how to go from 0 to 1000 sales in one day, but I’d like to share with you a framework you can use and not be overwhelmed.
You can watch the video or read the written version below.
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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 cold audience is a group of people that never even heard of you. It’s like meeting someone on the street – you’re probably not going to immediately sell them your product or they’ll think you’re crazy.
  • The warm audience is a group of people that have been exposed to your business and our products and they have shown interest in it. These can be your followers, email list subscribers and websites visitors.
  • The hot audience is a group of people that have bought something from you already.
 

The question is: what should your marketing message for each of those audiences be?

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Cold audience

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.

 

Warm audience

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.

 

Hot audience

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:

  • “Do I have the 3 blocks in place?”
  • “What is my strategy for each?”
  • “What are my channels for each?”
 

Want to come back to this article later? Love to pin pretty graphics to pinterest?

We’ve got you covered! You should totally pin those:

A few examples:

  • You start with a cold audience and use Pinterest to provide value, to get them to your blog and from there to your email list. Once they sign up they automatically move to the warm bucket. Then you can use email marketing to nurture that relationship and turn them into your customers. Once they buy from you, you can later use paid ads to get them to buy again. The cost of those ads would be really low because it’s a very small, targeted group.
  • The other example would be to start with paid ads. This will cost you a lot to do that and I wouldn’t recommend this if you don’t have a big budget and are not experienced. By using ads you take people to sign up for your email list and remarket them later on with ads until they buy from you and become customers. From there, you can just use email marketing to get them to buy from you again.
  • The last example is to start with Instagram, tell them to click in bio to subscribe to your channel on Youtube and get them to buy from there. Once they buy, they fall into a hot bucket, where you use email marketing to get them to buy from you again.

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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