Improve Your Marketing in 76 Seconds

1. You must do research to understand why your customers buy.
We recommend that you do only quantitative research. Quantitative research, when well done, eliminates any biases, opinions and inaccuracies. In contrast to qualitative research, which is typically conducted by speaking with a limited number of people, quantitative research is projectable to your entire customer base.

2. Segment your customers because it increases persuasion and conversion.
Segment your customers into groups that reflect purchasing drivers. When you do that, you can surgically reach each group with more appropriate and persuasive messaging. This will improve your conversion ratios and lower your costs of acquisition.

3. Build the right media schedule to reach your customers.
Research will be one of the most important guides as to what is that media schedule. There are dozens of media channels that you need to consider, from organic social all the way to influencers. However, paid media has several advantages over organic: one can schedule and control paid media, for one. More importantly, one can surgically target paid media, something that won’t happen with organic.

4. Create a persuasive message.
Writing persuasive messages stopped being an occult science when “The Science of Persuasion” was published in the early 2000s. What is really hard today is making your message both stand out from the crowd, and address your customers wants.
This is where research and testing come in. If you’ve done your homework, you ought to know what the key are purchasing drivers for each of your segments. If you read the next point, you’ll see the importance of testing everything.

5. Test & analyze everything you do.
Without going into too much detail regarding testing, there are three main areas to test:

• Audiences – test the different segments you have defined to see which ones are really returning the most sales. Also, test new segments every so often in order to expand the reach of your message and generate new sales.
• Media channels – it is imperative that you test the different media channels you are using. From social media to influencers, you should test all of them to one standard: what is the cost of acquisition for each of them.
• Messaging – given the use of dynamic creative optimization, which is like A/B testing on steroids, there might not be as many opportunities to test creative, as the software does it. However, in the creative that you control, you should be constantly evaluating results

6. Create a strategy to put all of these elements together
People confuse goals, strategy and tactics all the time. It’s simple:

• Goals are what the company wants. This could be sales, share, margin… any number of things.
• Strategy is what you think will get you to achieve those goals. Ideally, it should be short, concrete and measurable
• Tactics are the many different actions you will take to move the strategy forward and try to achieve your goals.

For example, if your goal is to sell 15% more widgets this year vs. last year, you might choose to (1) expand your distribution at least 15% in comparable markets, or (2) Reach at least 15% more customers, or (3) get 15% of your current customers to buy one more widget, or (4) buy a competitor who makes the same widgets to join both companies and achieve market dominance. Those are the strategies, then you would create tactics to move the strategy forward.