Written by: Joana Dockute, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
If you want to grow your business, get more leads, and get more sales, the first thing you should do is to invest your time in developing a solid marketing strategy. I will share a blueprint that I use with my clients to help them achieve their business goals. And the real reason why many businesses are developing their marketing strategies is that they don’t want to be constantly stressing where do I get more clients? Remember, sales is when you go to people. Marketing is when people come to you. It’s worth spending time developing a great marketing strategy for your business that attracts buyers to you. Because once you get it working you can put it on autopilot.
Here are the steps I would take if I had to design my marketing strategy from scratch.
Step 1. Start with the end goal
What’s the reason I am making this Marketing Strategy? Think about your Vision and Your Goals. One of the biggest reasons why businesses design marketing strategies is to get more customers. Your Goal would be a financial goal you want to hit. How much money do you want to generate €30K, €50K, or €100K?
Yes, I want you to put that number on paper. Now reverse engineer it. If you want to make €30K and your package costs €5K you need 6 Clients. If your package costs €2K you need 15 clients. After you have worked out the numbers you can start thinking about how many leads you need to get to achieve this goal. Hopefully, you know your conversion rate. It’s really important to do so before you start developing your content strategy.
This business goal should be exciting to you. Your heart should sing when you think about it.
I still remember one of my first clients, a dental practice owner. When I started working with him, he was generating around €270K per year. He set a goal to make €1 million. My client hit that goal 3 years later. It’s a brick-and-mortar business, so there were more systems and processes to implement and people (medical staff) to hire before his business was able to get to that level.
In the beginning, it seemed like a dream to him. It was a bit like finding a new reason (why) to perform the daily mundane tasks. But boy, my client's eyes were lighting up every time we would talk about it. I only worked with him for 17 months but he did continue on the foundations we set.
And one day I met him on the street, and he said ‘Joana, we did it! We finally hit a million!’ He took me for coffee to tell me all about it. I love hearing about the progress my clients make. I love hearing how they hit their business and personal goals.
Once you have got your financial business goal written down let’s move to your business vision. Your Vision is bigger than your financial goals. It’s your why that gets you out of bed:
What impact do you want to make on people?
Do you want to share your message with a particular group of people?
Do you want to inspire people to achieve their goals? And this marketing strategy will help you reach them?
Your Vision is what your business is based on. It doesn’t waiver because you had a couple of bad days. And it helps you keep going once you had a few tough weeks.
Being clear on your vision and goals will help you implement your strategy. Once you have a clear vision and financial goals set, you can move on to the Next Step.
Step 2. Designing your irresistible offers
It’s time to start crafting your irresistible offer as that is one of the most important things in your marketing strategy. If your offer sucks even though you got thousands of people landing on it you are not going to convert your prospects into buyers. Take Time designing your irresistible offer.
Your Irresistible Offer should cover 3 things:
Why should your prospect consider buying it?
How will you help them achieve their goals or solve their problems?
What does your package consist of?
The Why-How-What equation is how most landing pages that convert prospects into buyers are built on the web. The most important thing is the why...?
Sometimes entrepreneurs work so hard to tell what their program entails and how they will help that they completely forget to talk about the why. But the why is the reason that customers buy from you.
I do remember a conversation I had a while back with one of my clients, who is a solicitor.
I asked him ‘Why did you choose to work with me?’
He said ‘Well you told me that you would help me to grow my business and get more clients. That’s exactly what I wanted. I have seen that you know what you are talking about. When I was deciding to work with you I didn’t care about what I needed to do or how. I knew you would tell me!’
That was my first lesson about positioning given to me by my client…
Why should a customer get your offer and why should they get it from you? Spend time brainstorming this part. Talk to your existing and former clients. And try to write your why in the words of your clients.
I just covered the 2nd step of my ‘7 Steps in Creating Irresistible Offers’ mini course.
If you need more help in crafting your irresistible offers, feel free to check it out here.
Once you crafted your perfect irresistible offer you can move to the next step.
Step 3. Creating your content strategy
How are you going to attract prospects to your offer? It doesn’t matter if you do it organically on your social media if you do it via paid ads or e-mail marketing you need a clear content strategy.
People don’t just jump into paying you €2K or €5K 5 seconds after they meet you. You need to establish trust and credibility. So put yourself into your client's shoes.
What questions do they have when considering getting your high-end offer?
What are they searching for on Google when thinking about getting your service?
What do you need them to know before they become your client?
Write down the first 10-20 questions that come to your mind. Don’t go to chatGPT yet.
If you want to do it later to help you with the mechanical part of your content creation process you can do it. But don’t delegate the creative part.
Your goals and your content strategy should come from your mind, not AI. Come up with questions yourself based on interactions with your past clients.
Here are a few questions we came up with for a tiles shop that sold their 5K Bathroom Makeovers:
What showerhead should I choose?
What shower doors suit my space?
What type of toilet should I get?
(Side Note… At that stage in my life, I discovered that there are 3 different types of toilets. I am curious, do you know which type are you using?)
Remember, people buy from you not because they understand you. But because they feel understood.
Once you map out your questions/topics for content strategy you can move to the next step:
Step 4. Content creation
It’s up to you how are you going to create content: videos, posts, case studies.
For a tiles shop, we chose a video marketing format we filmed different types of videos in their showroom.
A Solicitor generated customers with case studies.
A Garden Centre chose a very specific weekly video marketing strategy.
A Dentist used an educational e–mail and booklet creation process that was used on autopilot later.
Choose the type of content you feel most comfortable with. Just make sure to use the basic 3 Steps:
Hook (usually a headline) It can just be your customer's question.
Story (your answer, or a more in-depth real-life example)
CTA (call to action)
A call to action doesn’t have to be sales oriented, it can be as simple as following for more, or signing up for my e-mail list. At this stage, you are not trying to sell anything. You are providing value, building authority, and positioning yourself as an expert.
Once you finished with content creation it’s time to do the last step of your marketing strategy.
Step 5. Content distribution and lead generation
It’s time to choose the platform you are going to use to distribute your content and generate leads.
Where should you be? Choose a social media platform where your ideal client is, and where you are feeling comfortable being on if you are doing it yourself. If you are going to choose a platform where you spend a lot of time, it’s going to be easier for you as you know exactly how it works.
If you are a local business owner you can run FB Ads. You do have an advantage in this matter as you have more credibility locally and your ads will be cheaper especially if you do engagement Ads. You can spend under €1000 on FB Ads and still make 10-30K with this strategy. Of course, it depends on how good your salesperson is. So, make sure you have worked out your plan step by step from what happens when you get a lead until that lead becomes a customer. Many local businesses think they need to get more leads but in reality, they do have enough leads coming in but their sales process is off. As they don’t understand the metrics they need to track.
If you are selling something online like coaching you can run Ads to funnel people into your free or paid challenges, and workshops. Where you will sell your Irresistible Offer. Where it gets expensive is that you have to get a LOT of people to attend and if you do it with FB Ads it might cost you €3K-5K or more…
Haven’t said that it’s worth it. And if you keep building your brand organically you will end up getting clients without Ads in the long run. Just remember you do need at least a few thousand views on your content to be able to ditch Ads altogether. Some entrepreneurs give up on their Content Creation Process way too soon. They have shared Content for a few weeks with a very limited group of people and they think social media is too hard.
What happens in reality:
Marketing takes time. Your prospect needs to see your message around 10 times before they become your client.
Your Message isn’t reaching enough people.
Conclusion
Remember Marketing is a numbers game. Where many entrepreneurs go wrong is they go googling ‘what to post’ and then run ads without working out their goals and not spending enough time creating their offers or content strategy. But that is very generic. If you do that you will end up competing on price as you sound the same as your competition.
So here you have it, 5 steps in creating your marketing strategy. If you spend time on each step and tweak it as you go you will be attracting buyers to you in no time. And then you can just set it on autopilot. If you do need help with any of these steps feel free to reach out to me for a consultation via my website. Alternatively, if you liked this article you can follow me for more tips on Linked In or rewatch My marketing strategy playlist on YouTube here. Thank you for reading this article on 5 Steps in designing your marketing strategy for high-end offers.
Joana Dockute, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Joana Dockute is a business development specialist and a business coach with a background in running her own direct sales and marketing company for 7 years. When it comes to helping her clients go to the next level Joana perfectly understands their problems, as she had to go through most business development stages herself before she became a business coach. She loves helping business owners 'find their voice', design, and implement customized business systems and processes. Each business is different, so there is no one-size-fits-all. Joana's mission is to help entrepreneurs succeed without having 'to sell their soul'. Meaning, if the strategy doesn't align with your values you shouldn't even consider it.
