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Welcome back to another edition of ‘Your Digital Marketing Journey’. In this season, I am talking about the marketing mistakes that first time entrepreneurs may make. The next mistake that entrepreneurs make is not having a 360 degree approach towards digital marketing. A 360 degree approach means that you're marketing on multiple marketing channels and not just relying on one.
Why do you need a 360 degree approach to marketing?
Marketing on each channel is very different. Some channels are very slow to give results, and some channels are faster than that. As an example, social media is usually a very slow channel. People who follow you on social media or check out your profile are still at the stage where they’re trying to make up their mind whether they want to do business with you or not. They may look at your profile, they may follow you for a little while, they may interact with your posts, but they're not necessarily going to buy from you quickly enough, even if you sell something that is considered as an impulse buy. Social media would be a slow channel, and it requires a lot of effort and a lot of time. It takes a lot of time to start converting your followers into a buyer.
On the other hand, an e-commerce ad on a platform like Facebook or Instagram may give you much faster results, especially if you're selling something that a lot of people understand and is easy to purchase. If you run an e-commerce ad on the Facebook platform, you may get more sales than you were getting if you were just posting on social media organically.
Another example of a fast channel from the service industry could be that you might be able to convince more people to try out your service if you meet them face to face in a networking event or meet them in person. That’s because in person meetings do generate a lot of trust. While they can't see your product, if they have spoken to you and if they've understood what you are doing and how you can benefit them, then they may be willing to try it out. On the other hand, if you were trying to get customers through cold calling - picking up the phone and calling someone who doesn't know about you - that may be much harder to do when you're trying to sell a service.
As you can see, how your customers respond does depend on the channel that you're using to market your business. And the reason I wanted to share these examples with you was that it is important to have a marketing mix to help your business grow. You cannot rely on one marketing channel alone because each channel will give you a predicted amount of results in a predicted amount of time. Whereas when you work on multiple channels, you will have a good mix of which channel is working to generate more brand awareness, which channel is working to generate more sales, which channel is working to help build your reputation up among the customers that you're trying to target.
How to create a marketing channel mix for your business
Identifying a marketing mix for your business is extremely crucial for you. You can create this marketing mix based on your personal experience as a founder. You may see that certain channels work better to convert people, so you definitely want to include those channels into your marketing mix.
You can also do some research to see what works better for your industry. A simple example is that for B2B company, LinkedIn is actually a very good platform to generate leads and convert to customers. Whereas for a B2C company Facebook or Instagram would work better. Now, even if you haven't tried this yourself to start with, at least you can start posting on these particular social media platforms, to see what kind of response you get. I do urge you to invest time and effort to identify the channels that work for your business.
Another important thing to remember when generating a marketing mix for your business is to have a mix of channels that work at different speeds. If you have all channels that get you quick sales, obviously that's great for your business, but you're not generating any long term loyalty within your customers. Do put an effort to identify the channels that help you build that brand awareness and the credibility among your customers . Also invest some time and effort into marketing on those particular channels. Social media actually is a classic example of this because when people follow you on social media for a little while, they would have a better understanding of what your business is and how it can benefit them to do business with you and what do you stand for. While social media is a slower channel over time, it helps you to bring in a higher quality customer.
So, do identify a multi-channel marketing mix for your business and let me know how that works out for you. I'll be back in the next episode with another marketing mistake that entrepreneurs make.
If you liked this post and would like more tips on other tools, then read more articles like this here or you can listen to the podcast.
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