Transcript:
Welcome to the vision2success digital marketing workshop. These are free regular workshops that are designed to help you take your vision and realise it into a successful business.
The overall structure of the next hour will be a short introduction of who we are and what vision2success is all about. Then we’ve got an in-depth educational workshop presentation on the second stages of developing your marketing strategy.
We looked at this four weeks ago. And I’m pleased to say we’ve done more work on the app, which is free to use. We’ll go into a little bit more depth. And then there’ll be a chance to ask questions, please drop the questions into the chat.
If you’re on a live stream on YouTube or LinkedIn, please put them into the chat there. And they come through the technological restream which then Rachel will pop into the chat which is in front of me. And we’ll answer those as we go along, so don’t hold things back, you know, because I think it makes it more interesting when you can make the learning more relevant to your own challenges.
Okay, so let’s get going. So I think we’ve got a few new faces in the room today. So my name is Peter Dickinson, I’m a business marketing coach, I’ve been doing it for over 20 years, I’ve been working with technology for 40 years.
So I’ve seen huge and massive amounts of change. And what I’ve seen is that the world has become a lot more complex. And we’re trying to make it easier for people through these workshops and the app to make things a lot easier for people to do their own marketing as much as possible. And then to use agencies or outside help when you run into a brick wall.
So I’m the Founder and Managing Director of KUB. So we’re a coaching and digital marketing agency. And Charleh, my daughter runs the business and she’s been with me now for over seven years, we’ve got a team of people working within our Manchester central offices.
And because I’d been around quite a long time, I’ve got 30,000 connections on LinkedIn, and quite a few on Twitter and Instagram. And we’re currently playing around with TikTok to see how we can utilise that because it’s rapidly becoming a platform that you need to be taking notice of.
So why do we do this? There’s quite a lot of work involved in setting these presentations up.
Well, I very much believe in a world where we’re all successful in a win-win scenario. So it’s here to help you guys compete in a digital world, and to build on your knowledge. I mean, I can’t believe how much knowledge I continue to learn.
And we have continual development programmes for the team so they can develop, so it’s about sharing that knowledge, helping you to solve digital marketing problems, and build a community to support marketing – that’s both of people use marketing people who are marketing professionals and also suppliers of marketing services. Because I believe in very much and it’s a collaboration.
So what is vision2success? We’ve got free Wednesday workshops, from 11 till 12. They will run bi-weekly or fortnightly till the beginning of August. And then we have a break for six weeks and then they go to monthly presentations – I want to continue this we’ll have more a lot more guest speakers in the autumn. And we’ve got a couple more guest speakers before we break.
We’ve got a couple of online courses and we’re building the app which is what’s called the minimum viable product at the moment so doesn’t glossy but it is a useful tool. And then we have a programme for doing strategy for people which is fast and efficient. Again, using the app, we can do it for you as well. Should you wish.
I decided we were going to do a lot of online courses but I decided actually putting it into a book would be a lot more efficient because things go out of date quite quickly and so that’s got 60,000 words that take about six years to pull the structure together, and then all the information’s up to date, but it’s in digital format, so we can keep updating it.
That’s available on Amazon plus about 12 of the stores globally. And I do want to build community, we’ve got a WhatsApp group. But we also are live on this networking relationship management package, which is free to join.
And if you go to myhub.com, you’ll be able to sign in, sign up and register. And then within the group, we have the vision2success group, which is where we share information. And that will grow over the next 12 months. If you go to our website vision2success and look for the vision2success community, you’ll find more information there.
If you want to be part of our WhatsApp group, which we’ll share messages and so forth on there, not much, we don’t bombard you. And it’s a place where you can ask questions and things. So please email, Rachel, and she’ll sort that out for you.
Okay, so this is the second stage of the workshops on marketing strategy implementation. When we start working as an agency with somebody they’ll have some ideas, but won’t really have worked out what their strategy is. And so what we’re looking to do with the free app is give people the tools. Maybe they can’t afford the consultancy or afford for us to do it.
So they’re better prepared when you go to see an agency or when you’re talking to your staff, or you’re talking to your shareholders or stakeholders. We do a lot of working with high growth, and FinTech companies, where they’re putting in quite large amounts of money into marketing things. So it’s important that the investors know where that money is going.
So what I’m hoping for you to come away with is a practical approach to strategy development. Looking at the marketing, identify the marketing resources you should be focusing on. And then we’ll have a quick breeze through the second part of the app, which we looked at four weeks ago.
So a few fundamental things. I’ll show you this chart before. People look and go, why it can’t be that complicated. How hard can it be is the question people ask? Well, all the stuff on that map is what goes around my head, when I’m speaking to a client, you know, which bits of this map do they need.
When you use London Underground, you jump from A to B, and so forth. And you pass through quite a few stations, you may change trains, but you don’t use all of them. And it’s the same in digital marketing. But all the things you can do is quite complex.
And I thank Gartner. This thing has been around, it’s clearly been updated over the years. They just show how complex things can be. Obviously, you don’t use all of it.
Breaking that down now. When we think of your products and services, that’s the input into your marketing, what is it you’re trying to supply to your customer base? We always start with keyword research. Now, you may not want to do SEO, you may just think social media will be fine. But it’s really important to understand the language that your customers use.
For example, we work for a telecoms company who are selling to medical, finance, insurance, and contact centres, and we had to do a series of videos for them. It was the same video. But the language is quite different. And the emphasis was quite different. You can’t use the same words you use with a contact centre that you would use for a law firm. They use different words and who they market to is different as well. So it’s super important.
And there are free tools for you to use to identify what those words are. We have covered these in various workshops. If you go to how to get to the top of Google in our previous workshops, there’s a whole hour’s worth on how to get to Google, which will explain why these keywords are so important.
That then leads to content that could be social media content, video content, it could be articles, it could be case studies, it could be where you put your products. And we always include that in any sort of strategy that we do. And you should always think about these things because they drive your social media, they drive getting found on Google.
That forms the content for your website, it may form part of the language you use with your LinkedIn when you’re doing LinkedIn lead generation, in any videos you do, and in any email in the marketing automation. And then that is all that comes out in the analysis. Now everybody’s business is different. And so we will then look at ways that you can then identify what’s important to you.
The other dimension we mustn’t forget about is Omnichannel or multiple channels of interaction. Again, there’s a workshop on what to do with a website, and how to manage your website.
So I am a kayak instructor. And on our club’s website, I put live chat. You may think, well, why would you put live chat onto a Canoe Club website, that’s crazy. But that gets at least a couple of inquiries a day from that. And we’ve already increased our membership by 50%, just purely by being able to respond rapidly and quickly.
And there’s no real-time, I don’t think you need real-time in any sort of chat. It is very useful if you can offer it. And certainly, as a support side of things, if you’re getting a lot of support calls, it’s essential. But for most people just having a webshop, where you respond within a couple of hours. That’s great.
People trust website chat, they don’t trust a form. And you can link this then into your email campaigns and so forth. Phones are obviously important. Messaging apps, you know, more people are getting WhatsApp for business and so forth. And you’ll see more of that capability. But generally, you try to plug it into a piece of software. And it’s usually the web chat type software that you plug all these other channels into, and then follow it through.
So the canoe club one, the Facebook is plugged into the web chat. So all the messages come into one place. And I’m actually using a free tool. So you don’t think oh my god, this is expensive. You know, it’s free and it’s not because of canoe clubs/ charity. It’s just because it’s free. Obviously, there are limitations on messages. And occasionally each month we run out, but I don’t upgrade it. But you know, commercial site, you’d probably have something that costs six quid a month. So it’s not gonna break the bank.
On that previous slide, where you’ve got all those different channels, I assume that for most businesses, in with small marketing teams is difficult to do all of them. Do you find that for different industries and types of business that the mix is different?
Oh, yeah, absolutely. So you wouldn’t have a shop but for most businesses, if you pick out the typical ones that you need to have a handle on. Obviously, word of mouth, which for a lot of businesses is still the main route. If you’ve got an E-commerce site, you’ll have all the channels to do with E-commerce. You need to be able to handle the messages through social media. But some of these tools that you use, like for live chat, you can plug those into like the face Facebook. So you can funnel all the messages into one place if you want and then there are tools on e-commerce for doing the same.
Obviously, live chat sits on a website and obviously, you can have contact forms, but generally, they just get spam but it does depend on the website.
We’ve got a drone company that gets a lot of inquiries through a contact form. Obviously, being able to answer the phone is important. And I think in terms of messaging apps, we’re not quite there yet, people don’t plug those in. But again, you’d put those through a central system, so that everybody can see all the messages coming into one place than being commanded by one person. But you’re right, it very much depends on your business.
I mean, we don’t have a particularly fancy phone system – ours costs 10 quid a month, it redirects to, to either myself or Charlie, because we don’t get any phone calls everybody messages, because we’re an agency. But I know, if you were in construction or trade, then the phone gets used a lot. So it’s very much down to down to your industry.
So you end up with an ecosystem where everything links together. And one of the things we did between four weeks ago, and today is developed the concept of marketing recipes because you realise actually that we can create marketing, one of these things quite quickly, it takes me about 15 to 20 minutes to put one together because I’m using different elements from different things. And I’ve got 20 years of experience doing marketing.
That’s not the case for a lot of people. So we’ll be introducing the concept of marketing recipes, where we can give you what we suggest. And then you can strike out stuff you don’t want to do. Because there’s no point doing stuff that you can’t do, you don’t have time for and so forth. It’s trying to find out what the key elements are.
So we covered the marketing funnel – that was the number three workshop. So we’re not going to go into a huge amount of depth on that. But it’s a reminder that it doesn’t matter what technology, whether it’s in person was via zoom, or whether it’s by email, or whatever, by a video, you’ve got to take people down the know like trust route.
When you get somebody to an e-commerce website, the trick is to get them through that journey. So they buy on the first visit. But quite often, when you’re researching things you might start with a search on Google, you maybe end up on a website, then look at the price, look at the spec and if it’s not quite right, then you’ll start the process again.
So buyers don’t just start at the top of the funnel and work towards the bottom. That means you’ve got to have things that raise awareness at the top of the funnel to build up the getting to know you. You’ve then got to do things in the middle of the funnel to get them to like and trust you. And then they’ll convert – that might be asking for a quote, if you’re a big services company you might be buying on the website. It doesn’t matter which way you’re doing it, you’ve got to take them down that journey.
So what’s the visitor’s behaviour? 75% of your visitors probably even a bit more will be just checking you out. It’s top of funnel stuff. So they might be looking at your social media, from there they might go to your website, and then they’ll go back off again because they’ve got the information they need and go away. And that’s why you have to have educational content on your website, if you don’t have enough information for the buyers to assess whether they want to buy from you or not, you’re probably going to lose business.
There’s a stat – I think it’s 60-70% of people have already made a decision before they really interact with you. And so you need to be seen as a thought-leader in whatever your industry is. If you look at, say, for example, Screwfix. You can think of Screwfix sites as a knowledge base. And the better the filters on the left-hand side of the commerce site, the more chance you’ll keep them on the site, and they’ll get to what they want.
There’s nothing more frustrating than then not having the right filters down that left-hand side. But it’s amazing how many big sites don’t really pay attention to it. They just do some generic stuff. And you think, Oh, I can’t be bothered. If they’re not prepared to help me then I’m not there to do business with them.
So that’s for the middle of the funnel. If you’re an e-commerce site, having those correct filters on the right categories is super important. But it might be that you have educational videos, and video is being used more and more. And if a video isn’t part of your strategy, then they will look at your competitors. And if they’re starting to introduce the video, whether you like it or not, you’re going to have to think of a video strategy, or you’re going to get left behind.
And then at the bottom of the funnel, they should have everything they need to make that buying decision. If you’re selling larger, more complex things or selling consultancy, then obviously, you need to get them onto a zoom call or face to face. So what are the resources then, because you’re saying, well, we’ve got to do all these things, one of them is resources.
So this is why the diagram that I showed you gets quite complex because you’ve got social media. Then in the acquisition stage, depending on what you’re doing, you might have workshops, as we’ve got, you might have an app which we’re developing, you might have white papers, so we’ve got the book, you can download early versions of the book, directly from the website, the one on digital marketing is about 15,000 words, the book itself is 60,000 words. But that’s still available.
We are going to revamp the website where it probably will disappear, then you’ve got to have engagement, you’ve got to have this person being able to talk to you and so forth. So this is where web chat comes in. I say most people don’t need to do live chat. It’s only if you’ve got a bigger system and you’ve got a lot of people where you’ve got live chat, emails that responded to phone calls, and zooms and meetings, then hopefully they drop through into orders and enquiries, follow-ups and so forth.
And this is typically what a journey might start to look like if we’re starting to put the jigsaw together. The website is the thing that you own, it’s your space. Even on Amazon, you can get kicked off, Amazon will quite happily close down a million pound a year business, if they feel that some piece of paper is not right. And we’ve had it done to us and so have clients.
You may use Search Engine Optimization. But if your industry is heavily competitive, you won’t. You may do more stuff on mobile. So we’ll be doing a deeper dive into how you would use these.
The whole point of the process is, and this came from the 1920s, by the way, from the film industry that needs to hear the message. Now in those days, they only had a few tools. But now we’ve got a lot of tools. And I don’t know if any of you follow Neil Patel, but he’s for me, he’s the most generous guy in sort of digital marketing because he gives out loads and loads and loads and loads of useful, actionable things.
And as an agency, we follow him, because generally, he’s putting out accurate educational material all the time. And, I’m sure he’s helped the world improve its digital marketing. And hopefully, we’re playing our part in that.
So the power seven, the rule is that things need to be heard of seven times, I would actually say seven to 11 times because I have heard other people say, well, it needs to be 11 times before you really hear something, but it’s quite a few times. So that’s why you have social media and a website. Hopefully, you can get found on Google.
What we find is that if you’ve got a recognisable brand, your website will be found for that first. So if you’re on social media, and you’re the Acme widget company, and that’s a stick to name. Once you get that name out there, people then type that into Google. They’ll not type it maybe accurately, but they’ll type it in. If you’ve got a unique name, you will come up.
Obviously, if your name describes what you do, like pipe fitting limited, then you’re going to struggle for your own brand. But it’s horses for courses because obviously, your name will be pipe fitting your website URL will be pipe fitting, there’s a good chance actually that you’ll come up on Google but it’s very competed. So that used to be okay 10 years ago, 15 years ago, but I wouldn’t guarantee that now.
You might put some advertising up and might have landing pages where you’ve driven people to it. Landing pages are specific pages designed for an email or a video to point to which you then take them through the buyers’ journey. So you take them down the know like trust.
You’re all familiar with AIDA, hopefully – it used to be used in letters and things, but it’s still highly applicable today. So it’s attention, develop their interest, develop their desire, and a call to action. So that’s, that’s effectively what a landing page does.
Then you might be approaching on LinkedIn or Instagram, or maybe even on TikTok. Now, although that’s probably a bit harder. Or you may have developed LinkedIn groups and Facebook groups.
So in reality, this is what the customer journey kind of looks like, probably more squiggly than this. But we needed to make it look pretty. But you know, they may have listened to you on a podcast – we’re getting more people doing podcasts because it’s all about setting yourself as the thought leader in your industry. And it doesn’t matter what it is whether it’s a service or a product and so forth. You want people to come to you because they see you as people that can they can trust.
And you want to be the Heinz of your industry if you like, you know, selling on quality, and being seen as somebody who you can trust. So you can see all these different activities going on, and then hopefully, they convert to being a customer. And then hopefully, you can retain them so they can give you good testimonials and so forth.
So as an example company, this one sells services. We used it four weeks ago. So the assumptions, it’s not easy to develop new products and services. So there might be an accountancy law firm or something like that. They may be focused, they’ve got a lot of business through referrals in the past, but now they want to be more ambitious, and they want to be in control of their marketing. But they’ve got a limited budget, and they’ve limited knowledge. In terms of strategy, they want to sell more accountancy type services or law firm type services.
And, and so it’s about focusing on if you think of the Boston matrix – the things that generate cash, the stars are those that are growing in a growing market, and you’re growing, growing the share of that market. A question mark is where the market is growing, but your share isn’t growing. And obviously, that’s negative on your cash flow, because you’re investing money into marketing, but you’re not getting that return.
So it’s those areas that we’re going to be focusing on, we have covered this, the stars and the question marks in the strategy, which is workshop number one or two can’t remember, which is on the previous recordings.
So if you’re selling services, for me, it’s all about being professional, can you be a thought leader? How can you cost-effectively educate your audience to demonstrate that you are that so you can build trust? And sometimes when you’re educating people, they don’t know they’ve got a problem until you start talking to them. And then they see they’ve got a problem? And then well, how can I fix that?
Everybody’s in that box of you don’t know what you don’t know, especially with marketing. And so our job is to help you understand what you don’t know. And then you’re better informed to actually decide well, what do I need to do?
So what are the symptoms of somebody who needs to do some of the marketing? So currently I’m talking to all my LinkedIn and having one to one with my LinkedIn network to try and identify where people are struggling. You know, a lot of people are still getting work through referrals and word of mouth, which is great. But the problem with that is you can’t control it. You can’t use that as a strategy to grow the business.
We’ve not come across a mechanism other than social proof and testimonials, that will do that systematically. So you might want to screw up a company, but you’re not sure how, or maybe your marketing isn’t working. And you don’t know what approach to take. And you like the time and marketing knowledge.
One of the biggest issues I see is creativity. Most of our team are creatives. I’m a technical Strategy and Finance sort of person, consultant, you know, that kind of stuff, thing. Whereas a lot of the team are very much creatives. And that’s kind of if you like, whereas an agency, we can add value.
And we find also technical skills. And quite often I’m used as a project manager. So once a month we’ll have a marketing meeting. I had two yesterday, quite a long one’s couple of hours over zoom each. And that was purely to sort of work through all the things they need to do, they did all the work, but I acted as that project manager. And then for growth companies, it’s what budget to allocate.
So back to the marketing template again. So here we’ve got branding guidelines, very, super important if you are spending money on social media, websites, etc. And it’s surprising how many people don’t have branding guidelines. And all they are are, you know, what font do you use? What colours do you use? What’s your primary colour? What secondary colour? What are your highlight colours? What’s the tone of voice? You know, are you being authoritative and corporate or are you being fun, and so forth.
That needs to be gathered together. And we’ve got people who we work with who I can refer you to, should you get stuck in that area. We do some branding ourselves. But if you want to complete an overhaul, then we’ve got a couple of people, depending on the size of the business, who can help you out there.
That’s super important, we always ask for it when we start working with a client because the branding has to be consistent. We have two brands, we have vision2success and KUB. And I refer to it in our team as we’ve got splotchiness, which is the vision2success. And then we have the splashy paint, which is KUB. So even though the branding colours are the same and the fonts are the same, you can actually still differentiate between the two, and tell which is vision2success and which is KUB, which is the agency.
We talked about keywords, talked about the content plan. You may or may not have an SEO strategy – and I know lots of SEO people will try and sell you SEO, even though it’s a complete waste of time for you. I have no problem telling people well, no, actually SEO is a complete waste of money. Your money is best spent on X, Y and Z rather than that.
It used to be the Nirvana. 15 years ago, everybody was going to do content marketing, everybody was gonna get found, but of course, as the noise and the volume goes up, and you’ve only got, you know, 10 slots, and if you think about when you talk to the machines, like Alexa and so forth, and they can only give you one answer. And there are maybe 100 200 companies supplying whatever it is that answer is or even more, you get millions of results on some searches, don’t you. So, you know, getting number one or even position 10 on page one can be a challenge.
And then there’s website maintenance, getting social proof. For our webpage designs, we’re always asking clients to get social proof – it’s not a nice thing to ask for, but you do have to ask for it from your best clients, and the best clients will be happy to give it to you as well. So it’s not usually an issue. We talked about web chat. I think that’s now key to pretty much most businesses, except the very small.
We use LinkedIn lead generation as a powerful tool. We use it for research like I’m doing it at the moment or use it for lead gen which Charlie and Rachel do. Got the online events which we’ve seen here. We’re using live.
So I think we had about 20 Plus on the live and we’ve got 13 in the room at the moment. So we had about 24 booked into the room, 50% drop off which is normal. So 13 people turned up and then we because we’re recording it, and because we’ll transcript and we’ll put the download for the slides. That’s another opportunity then for Google to go right, some useful information there like I’ve been doing referring to previous workshops. So that if there are things you’ve missed, you can go back to them, and you can fill the gap in your knowledge.
So coming to the app. So why did we create the app? Well, as I said, in the beginning, we have to do strategy on the fly. So we want to try and formalise that but obviously, people don’t want to pay for consultants sometimes so here’s a tool. And literally, it’s called a minimum viable product. Because we’re building it in stages, as we get more feedback, as we work on things, it’s the most cost-effective way to build an app.
So it’s out there and can be used for free. And there will be a paid-for version in September. And that will include the financial monitoring, elements plus some things that marketing consultants would use. But they’ll always be a base first and that’s free, which is useful.
So I’m happy to say that we’ve now got it on our own domain, it was on the developer’s domain, and it’s now on ours. And you can log in with your email, you can use Microsoft, Google or Facebook to authenticate, that should all now be working. And you can register. So that’s app.vision2success.co.
So we looked at this in detail last time. So on the homepage, you put your strategy, and your vision, and we have a detailed set of questions to help you fill those things in. So if anybody’s interested, just drop me a line or Rachel a line and we will send you the questions. So they’re the typical questions a marketing strategy consultant would ask you.
We looked at the buyer profile. So if you go back to the workshop that is part one, that takes you to the buyer profile, because you got to understand the customers. If you don’t understand who your customers are, you’re wasting your time, you’re wasting your money.
We had an exercise we used to do before technology. And we had all these phrases, where I’d say, put your customer in a chair opposite and describe him to me, what is it they want? What, motivates them to buy? What are their problems? What jobs are they trying to do? And that’s the back profile, this tab will do that. But today, we’re going to look at, right okay, well, how does all this stuff translate into a strategy. And this is where we ended up coming up with the idea of a marketing recipe.
Because it’s easier to put an ant Sally, you know, something that people can criticise and comment on and go, well, it, I don’t want that, it’s easier to do that than to build it up from the start. So that’s kind of what we’ve got. It’s not live on the programme yet. But I’d expect in the next two to three weeks, the marketing recipes to become live. And so you can just pick a recipe, and it will populate this.
So essentially, for all the things in your ecosystem, we’ll be looking at some examples in a minute. You might have keyword management, might have a website, webinars, and so forth. So you can pick these.
And at the moment, it doesn’t grow a chart, but it does give you the whole thing as a report, which you can then give to either your team or your agency that you’re working with or consultant and so forth. Or you can ask your consultant how you fill it out. But the end result is you will end up with a document with everything listed that you’re going to do. Because it’s auto-generated, you can then if you make changes, it’s fine, just change it, regenerate. And you’ve got a new report and so forth.
We actually take those and put those into a calendar document, which forms a presentation which we give to the clients to make it look pretty, but the data is the same. So it’s funny, I was starting to build marketing recipes to go into the programme. And I’ve added even more things because the developers say well, you’ve got about 30 things here now.
These are the generally used ones. So if you think of the Gartner app that’s got even more stuff in it, but that’s for corporates, where they’ve got to really work at what they do to make sure and they’ve got the volume there. Or they’ll have hundreds of 1000s of visitors going to the website, as opposed to, you know, maybe 1000, or maybe a couple of 1000, which a typical small business website will have.
And although I’ve been putting in all things that typically I would expect to have in my little head of menu of all the things that people might be considering, for using, and as Tim pointed out, you know, you’re not using all of them, you’re very much picking out the things that will work for your business.
I’m a huge believer in 90-day programmes, and 90-day targets. You know, when you set your target for the year, or you set your target for three years, and then work back to 12 months, right? Okay, towards the 12-month objectives, you’ll find that everything gets done in October, November, and December, for example.
So by having 90 Day objectives and breaking those bigger objectives down even further, you can make progress. So after March, you know, you’ll have done certain things which will form the base for sort of quarter two, then you do quarters. By the time you get to 12 months, you’ve done all the things you said you’re going to do. And it does work.
It’s the Vern Harnish and the gazelles, he’s a great promoter of it, and that’s from the Rockefeller habits, and Rockefeller did alright. So, you know, if you haven’t got 90 Day objectives in your business, then doesn’t matter what size business you are, whether you’re a one-man band, or 100 billion pound business, it’s a fantastic tool.
And so we built that in here. And so the idea of the app is that you’ll come back to this maybe every quarter, or maybe even every month, and go right, okay, what other things do we need to do? What do we say? What did we say we were going to do? Have we done it? Okay, what do we need to do going forward? And that’s part of the apps, part of the process it’s not only that I put plans together it’s there to help you stay on track, and make sure you do what you say you’re going to do.
So as I alluded to earlier, you need a model that’s consistent for your business. So for example, this is one for an E-commerce business. So again, branding, guide, hashtags, keywords, etc. You have to then have social media, then you have the E-commerce shop itself, and you may have a MailChimp system that you may have connected up for abandoned carts. Now that increases sales by up to around 6%.
And you’ve got to think about Google search, you may have a Facebook shop, you may be running Facebook ads, and then you might have retargeting ads. You may have Google Shopping, which, which is Google’s advertising platform.
If you’ve got an E-commerce shop, and you’re not advertising, not using Google Shopping, or views, or Facebook ads, and so forth, you will not have a business. The days of just using and relying on search engines, they’re long gone. It’s all about how to cost-effectively keep the cost of acquisition down.
Cost of acquisition is, you know, you spend 10 pounds and you get a sale and 50 pounds. So your acquisition cost is 20%. And ideally, that’s where your acquisition cost needs to sit. Because out of selling that product, you’ve got maybe 15 to 20% as your overhead. Then you may be selling on a 50% margin. So you can see how quickly your margins can get depleted. So you’ve got to really understand the advertising side of things.
And just a few more things that you do. I’ve got one to do this afternoon, which will be more complex than this. But you get the idea. And these will be built into the programmes, they’re not live yet. I’d expect me to go live in the next while hopefully soon, but over the next two to three weeks.
We work with trade companies, people providing heating, electrical security, cleaning, etc. And their strategy will be different, obviously, on an e-commerce site, you definitely need to have a web chat. You might even have answers to common questions in web chat. Because people will ask questions, you know what answers the questions after five o’clock? Well, you know, you don’t need longer hours, you just need to make sure that you put all the questions in.
We worked with a metal enclosures business, and they spent a lot of time putting all the answers to commonly asked questions and, and, you know, it saves them a fortune in staff time. So staff can then handle orders, rather than answering questions. So that’s where you’re going to see this more interactivity built into the websites, what can the website do, that humans could do. But the website can do better because it can do it 24/7.
The big thing about digital, about anything technological, is well, you can measure stuff. So measure it, and look at the results, what do the results mean? Especially if you’re using things like advertising, and so forth, but you can see here if you’re selling business to business, you know,
LinkedIn can be a great tool, we do a lot of lead generation for, you know, plumbing companies, heating companies, and so forth. Whether that some commercially, obviously doesn’t work, to domestic, if you use domestic, then you’re more into Facebook.
And then this is a software as a service, we do quite a lot for who have people have built apps, and we’ve then had to launch them. And so this is a recipe for that. And as we work with more companies, we will do more recipes. And so if you start using the app and go, and it hasn’t got my recipe, once the apps are launched in two to three weeks’ time, if it hasn’t got your recipe in it, please email me and I will do your recipe. And we’ll build it into the system.
I want as many recipes in there as possible so that people can go okay, yeah, I can see how that works. And you may not do everything, you know, or you may do things in stage development. You may decide that reviews and social proof aren’t that important at the start. So you may put those off, but you know, in your mind that that’s something you need to do. You may bind data, you may just do it through social media and so forth. We might do to YouTube or might do to Google or Bing, or whatever.
I personally like, especially if we’re on a new product with a new company that’s new to a market, rather than going gung ho, I’m always keen on soft launches, like we’re doing ourselves. We’ve had quite a few conversations, people use them for quite a few clients. And to get their feedback, and to get as the developer calls it, real use cases through it. And you need to do that.
For me. That’s how to do marketing. It’s all about having that conversation with the audience. I’m pleased that the face to face networking has come back. Not because I’m a great face to face networker, I now live in the depths of Shropshire. So there’s not much networking down here.
But when I was up in the northwest, there were lots of events, and especially in Manchester, you can go out, you can network every day. But it’s a great way to test your message, to ask questions to get that feedback. You know, because it’s, it’s about getting that language, we’re working with a Critical Thinking language expert, helping them with the marketing, and everything about what he’s doing is all about the language. And unless you’ve got those real-life conversations going on, you’re not going to know, you can be the greatest wordsmith in the world. But if you’re not using the right words, in the right context, you’re not going to work. It’s not going to work.
So have a play app.vision2success.co. If you’ve got any queries, questions, and so forth, give us an email.
So bringing it together, if you have not watched part one, please watch part one. If you do get into the system, and you’d like this list of questions that we ask clients before we start work with them, then I’ll very happily send those to you. And hopefully, this is also a method you know, especially the marketing recipes, you can look at your business model. What does your business marketing funnel look like?
