TargetPersonaandEmailMarketing
If you don’t consider who your email audience is, you will quickly fail to engage with them. You won’t be able to communicate to them the way they understand and as a result, won’t be able to funnel them to conversion.
So it is vital that you have a solid grasp of who your audience or target market is before you commit to any email marketing. Knowing who you are dealing with should be part of the foundations of any marketing plan, especially when it comes to email.
In this section of our ultimate guide to email marketing, you will learn:
The biggest marketing mistakes business owners make when starting out
What a marketing persona or a customer avatar is
How you can use a marketing persona or a customer avatar for email marketing
Biggest Marketing Mistakes Business Owners Make When Starting out
Having a great product or service doesn’t guarantee success. It takes so much more to create a thriving business. A lot of what makes a business successful comes down to marketing.
Here are five mistakes that business owners make when it comes to marketing and what you can do to do better:
1. Not having a marketing plan
Marketing can be one of your biggest expenses. Creating a marketing plan will help you make sure that your time, money, and resources are well spent.
A marketing plan outlines your marketing strategy.
Generally, a marketing plan will include:
A list of your marketing goals, what you want to achieve from your marketing strategy
A timeline for your strategy, including when you want to achieve specific goals and when you will run different campaigns
A description of who your target market is Having a strong marketing plan will benefit your business in many different ways.
You will have a clear understanding of your target market
Your target market is who you are trying to sell to. Understanding the people you are marketing to is extremely important when it comes to creating a marketing plan.
For example, Converse is a brand that has a young target market, they have a very active social media presence because they know that is where their customers are.
They often partner with young and cool celebrities that their customers are fans of, like Millie Bobby Brown.
Here’s a post from Converse on their Instagram page marketing their collaboration with Millie Bobby Brown.
You will have a clear outline of your goals
You likely have many goals for your business, but having them written down clearly will help you develop a plan to achieve each one.
You will know where to market your business
In the past, the only way you could market your business was through physical advertising such as flyers, billboards, or ads in newspapers or magazines. Traditionally this kind of marketing is expensive, and sometimes ineffective.
Thanks to social media and the internet, things have changed and you have so many more options for marketing your business. You can be where your customers are on social media and you can communicate directly with them which was never possible before.
Marketing is an expensive venture and without a plan, you’re not going to know the best places to spend your time, money, and resources.
2. Not benchmarking
Benchmarking is when you compare your business to your competitors and/or to the industry that you’re in so that you can see where you fit in the market.
For example, McDonald’s and KFC are both in the fast-food industry, they can use benchmarking to compare their businesses to each other. While they are two distinct brands with their own ways of doing things, they are still competitors in the overall fast-food industry and can learn a lot from what the other one is doing, where they stand out, and where they can improve.
Via benchmarking competitors can learn about:
Social media presence
Which social media platforms your competitors are using and what their strategies are
Customer service
How they respond to customer queries and complaints, how they set up their customer experience
Sales
Whether or not they are meeting their sales goals if their sales have increased or decreased over time
Marketing
How they market their business and the ways that they go about marketing
Employee management
How they treat their employees, how much their employees are paid, how they deal with employee grievances
Size of the business
How big their business is and if they have a growth strategy
Location of the business
If they have physical stores or they operate online, or both
Tone of voice
How they sound to their customers, what their brand voice is on social media and on their website
Having this information gives their businesses many opportunities for improvement and growth:
It can help you improve your products
Comparing your products to those of your competitors can help you get some perspective on them. You can use this perspective to assess the quality of your product, see the areas for improvement, and work on those areas.
It can show you where your business needs to improve
You can compare your business practices to industry practices and see what you can change to make your business more efficient.
Maybe you’ll notice that you can change something about your management style, or you’ll find a better way to package your products, there’s a lot you can learn from doing this.
It can help you set goals for your business
Once you see what the industry is doing differently, you can decide where you feel your business is succeeding, and where it is falling short. With this information, you can set goals.
Without benchmarking, you’ll miss out on the opportunity to identify where your business fits into the industry. Benchmarking will help you build a foundation for your marketing plan.
3. Not understanding what makes your business stand out
There are so many businesses out there that are trying to do the same thing as you, this is why having a point of difference will make you stand out and can make a huge difference.
The idea behind having a point of difference is that you want to give your customers a reason to choose your business over your competitors. There are a few ways you can distinguish yourself:
You could have a really unique product or service
Having a product or service that stands out from what your competitors are offering is one of the best ways to boost sales.
Coca-Cola is one of the most recognizable brands in the world, with more than 1.9 billion of their drinks being served every day. They have been able to build their entire company around their flagship product: the original Coca-Cola.
Here are some ways they built their business through marketing Coke:
Coke for a Nickel
According to Planet Money, Coke was sold at the same price from 1886-1940. This strategy gave their customers consistency in knowing how much they had to pay for every bottle.
Creating a free sample coupon
They offered potential customers a free sample coupon, this gave them a huge boost in first-time customers. (CM Commerce, 2020)
Launch of the ‘Contour’ Bottle
In 1915, Coca-Cola created its iconic ‘contour’ bottle. By doing this, customers were able to recognize a Coke product only by the shape of the bottle. (Coca Cola, Great Britain)
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