SBM 059 : Implement Results Marketing in Your Business with Oli Billson

Today’s Guest

Oliver Billson  joins the 59th session of Smart Brand Marketing.

I noticed that Oliver is speaking at a conference I’m heading to next month so had my team reach out to him. He runs a results oriented marketing agency. We find out what that means in the podcast along with…

 

TOPICS DISCUSSED

  • Direct vs brand awareness marketing
  • Dynamic marketing
  • Why most agencies push customers to wrong offers?
  • How to profile your visitors?
  • Solving the problem of not having much traffic and people not wanting to tell you what they want
  • Filling gaps in your funnel
  • How to use a diagnostic quiz
  • Abusing automation
  • Biggest win a typical company can have through implementing proper automation

Enjoy!

 

Results Based Marketing and How to Implement it In Your Business

Marketing is perhaps the lifeblood of all types of business. However, it can get quite “trendy” at times to the point that you can question whether or not the strategies you will use have some long-term sustainability in them.

If you have started wondering about the practicality of the strategies that you are employing, then it is time for you to consider a more consistent philosophy which is results based marketing. The concept has actually been around in the market for a while and has steadily been gaining attention in recent years.

But the question is “will it work?” followed by “how can I implement this in my own business model?” Answering these questions will require us to learn about a few things first.

What is Results Based Marketing?

This is simply a style of marketing that takes full advantage of every possible marketing tool and channel out there but consolidating all efforts to meet one clear goal: drive sales for the business. Results Based Marketing understands that sales is the ultimate expression of brand engagement and all types of marketing to be used by a company should allow for that goal to be reached.

To make this analogy simpler on your, take this scene for example. Supposed that you own a used car dealership and your marketing team presents to you all the results that their marketing campaign has produced for your business. This might include the number of shares per published content on Facebook, the number of Tweets your Twitter profile made and its re-tweets, the videos created in YouTube and the many times it was shared in other sites, or even your page’s rankings in search engines like Google and Yahoo.

But the question is this: did all of those marketing campaigns translate to actual sales for the business? In the scenario, did your used car dealership experience an increase in sales once the strategies were implemented?

You might be the most popular brand on social media right now with the most number of shares per content and engagement with online audiences but if none of those strategies resulted in a considerable increase in sales for the business, then it was all for nothing.

This is what results based marketing simply does: ensuring that every marketing strategy your business will come up actually translates to changes in your sales performance in the real world. It’s about ensuring that engagement does not stop in sites like Facebook and Twitter only but actually extends to the real world where results need to be as tangible as possible.

Profiling Site Visitors

A major mistake a lot of marketing teams make when offering products is that they go for the generic route i.e. providing the core offer with little to no variation across first-time clients. The problem with this is that you don’t know that much about these people to determine whether or not you have what it takes to help them.

You can remedy this by employing a profiling system for your webpages. There are steps that you have to go through to properly profile your potential clients and they are as follows:

  1. 1. Identifying Your Demographics

    What does your target market look like? After all, you are in the business of providing for certain needs so it makes senses that you find out which demographics would those needs pop up the most.The term demographics is a broad one as it covers many qualifiers like age, gender, marital status, income, educational background, and income, amongst several others. To make this easier on your part, you must find out the two major criteria for your business and then base your range on that. Once this is done, see if any other qualifiers will fit within that range
  2. 2. Research

    Once you have established your demographics, you must then identify their purchasing behavior. How much would they spend every month for certain services? To which brands are they most loyal to? What are they looking for in certain products? These are some of several questions that can tell you how your target market behaves.As for outside references, don’t worry. There are quite a number of tools readily available on the internet which includes market reports, surveys, news items, polls, and customer-generated reviews, amongst several others.

    You can even use the feedbacks of past clients to understand what your target market is looking for in your brand. They might even provide a more accurate critique of your business as far as how they relate to it.

  3. 3. Assembling Your Profiles

    Once you have all the data you need, you can start on piecing together profiles by mixing and matching consumer behaviors within the demographic range you have set.Slowly, you can start seeing certain “personas” forming which would provide the most accurate representation of the people that usually come to your business. In some cases, you might even discover new demographics and customer profiles that you have yet to tap into.

    So, what are you going to do with these profiles? Basically, they are there to give you an idea as to what your target audience wants, what they expect from your products, and how they will react to any changes you might implement on your offerings.

    Just remember that these profiles do not represent your target market 100%. However, they do give you an idea as just how certain people might behave when they encounter your business in the market.

Improving Site Traffic

One of the most effective ways to get customer information from is from your customers themselves. This means that if you have a considerable volume of traffic going through your websites regularly, you have a lot of sources to draw your information from.

The only problem is this: what if you don’t have that enough of a traffic to get info from for your customer profiling?

As such, you must improve your site traffic first in order to better gauge your customer’s behavior. Here’s how:

  • Identify Your AssetFirst and foremost, you have to determine what you have in your disposal as of now. If you have done your marketing properly, then you have a mailing list of sorts. Also, your traffic can be separated into two groups, the first one being your existing customer base and the other your potential customers. Basically, you have a list of people that you can retarget.
  • Find Out Where They Hang Out

    Next, you will have to determine where your target market gather the most. This includes the social media sites they are logged into frequently as well as the communities in they gather in.More often than not, your target market will have their own Facebook accounts so that will be your first destination. The site has algorithms that will allow you to locate the people in your mailing list as well, making it easier on your part.

    After this, you can head on to other social media sites like LinkedIn and Twitter and see if your target market frequently go there as well. While doing so, take notes as to how people usually interact there as well as the content they consume regularly. This will actually help you in the future once you start formulating new marketing strategies for your brand.

  • Expand Your Reach

    Once you have reconnected with your past customers, you will find out that there are other people in these sites that have the same preferences as they do. Now is the time for you to other potential audiences. Fortunately, Facebook does have the tools to help you gauge your interactions with your existing and new customer base and can even recommend other profiles to your business based on what these people say they like in their profiles.

Getting the Right Answers: How to Create the Best Online Survey

One other hurdle you will have to face with getting information is whether or not these data are true. You should consider that not a lot of people would answer questions honestly online out of fear of giving away too much information. In most cases, they would just answer anything that could pass as the truth in the hopes that this gets you off their back.

However, there is a way for you to make these people responsive to your questions. Here’s how:

  1. 1. Keep it Short

    Here’s a little secret: People hate filling out anything longer than a page. In most cases, your participants do not want to spend more than 10 minutes asking every question in your survey. Keep your questions to no more than 10 items and the selection no more than 8 choices. The lesser they have to spend in your survey, the more honest their answers will be.
  2. 2. Be Categorical if PossibleThe starting questions in your survey should be ones that can be answered by either yes or no or with multiple choices. Avoid open-ended questions as not a lot of survey takers would want to answer this. Also, be careful not to suggest the answer by how the question was asked.
  3. 3. Place the Sensitive Questions in the EndAlways place the simpler questions at the first and the more personal, sensitive ones right at the end of the survey.By now, you should have gained the trust of the person to the point that they would answer the more personal items in your survey. And even if you don’t get the right answers at this part, you should have more than enough data from the first questions for yo0r research.
  4. 4. No Irrelevant Questions

    Always remember this: those who take your survey don’t want to spend more time in your questions. As such, don’t waste their time with quirky questions that do not provide valuable data for your research. You’re here to gather data, not impress people with your wit.
  5. 5. Always Give the Assurance that the Data is SecureEither at the start or the end of your survey, you should give the person an assurance of sorts that whatever information they will provide will not be shared to anybody else. This might look useless but assurances of security are known to increase survey response rates to a considerable degree as well as inspiring trust in your brand.

There is no certainty that any of these tips will result in more truthful answers from your target market. However, they tend to make people more responsive to your brand. Plan your data sheets and questionnaires right and, if properly executed, you might just get the information you need to improve your marketing efforts.

The Bottom Line

At a glance, it can look like results based marketing is one of the more tedious strategies out there. Not only will you have to keep track of metrics within each of your marketing campaigns but also have to compare them to actual sales performance for your business.

But think of it this way: marketing is going through some growing pains right now. Being popular online is no longer a determinant of success these days. Every marketing campaign you employ should not only lead traffic to your sites but also results in conversion from your audience.

What is the point of all this? Why should start employing results based marketing strategies right now? The answer is simple. Results based marketing right now is putting us one step closer to gauging that one factor that has eluded marketers in the past: intent.

The days of long-standing marketing excuses like inability to properly gauge click-through rates and customers failing to complete the stages of conversion are about are about to end. In these days, if you really want to increase the level of engagements customers have with your brand which should lead to better profits for your business, there are ways to do it without going over the budget.

Have you tried results based marketing before? What other methods have you used to gauge customer engagement with your brand? The comments section below is open for all sorts of discussions

 

RESOURCES

 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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