Compete for market share, in a way you never thought possible
In today’s digital marketplace, you’re up against big-budget organisations with more resources, greater reach, and popular products and services that dominate the market. Establishing your own market share can feel like a very daunting task.
However, the main obstacle to becoming more competitive and gaining market share is simply a lack of the right technologies, know-how and resources to maximise the performance of your existing marketing and sales campaigns. As a result, financial quarter after financial quarter you may find yourself struggling to hit market share targets, meet organisational KPIs and produce the results demanded of you.
The solution to becoming truly competitive lies in understanding how to increase market visibility and improve supply capability, what constraints are holding back your performance, and to create a method, or system, to overcome the constraints.
The power of systems
Systemising your solution is one of the most effective ways to create leverage. Well-designed systems have the advantage of operating more predictably and allow you to continuously fine-tune them for maximum results.
You can have a marked impact on your performance by taking repetitive manual tasks within the system and automating them to operate in the background. Getting this right means that you can process countless more tasks than is humanly possible. It also means that key tasks are not neglected, as often occurs when the job is done manually.
Automating your system will ensure the system is properly built, can run continuously and can be refined as new opportunities arise.
At Inspired Marketing:
● our aim is to help you increase your competitiveness and gain market share,
● to do this we share our expertise in automated marketing and sales systems to give you a competitive edge,
● we will walk you through a successful marketing and sales process that you can implement immediately.
Ready to get started? Then read on…
The digital landscape
To an ever-greater degree, the communities you want to reach are living within a digital world. And with the fast growth in digital marketing and doing business online, the digital marketing ecosystem has become more complex and highly nuanced.
There seems to be a never-ending stream of new online channels and ways that communities connect and do business. Along with this, the rules of the game have changed, as have the buying habits of customers.
Competitiveness is high, as big brands pump more and more funding into providing exceptional user experiences, raising the bar, and making it very difficult for smaller players to compete for market share. In addition, these experiences that the big players offer create a standard that consumers have come to expect within the digital world. And if they don’t get a similar digital experience from one brand, they tend to move to where they will be offered the standard they prefer.
But SMMEs do have a major factor in their favour…
The advantage that small and medium-sized businesses (SMMEs) have is that they can provide specialised products and services in a way that the big brands can’t.
By segmenting the market you work in and specialising in segments that other competitors and bigger organistions have not identified, you can carve out a specific section of the market and then dominate for market share.
If you find a valuable segment to focus on, it is easier to increase your dominance in that segment. This, in turn, enables you to build market leadership with customers in that segment and then extend that leadership to other segments.
Working from this perspective, our specialty is to focus on helping SMMEs build highly targeted campaigns that offer a unique customer experience, built specifically around the brand and the products and services.
How to grow your business
To grow your business, it is imperative to source more business opportunities, make more sales and thereby achieve your targeted results. The solution to finding prospective business leads (potential customers) who are interested in your products and services lies in generating demand for what you offer and then efficiently delivering on your customers’ expectations.
1. Make your vision visible
It is vital to establish your ‘top of the pyramid’ organisational positioning statements – in other words where does the business see itself positioned within the marketplace – which specific market segment are you aiming for? This could be depicted as the ‘big idea’; the vision that leadership has when looking into the future. It includes the mission, the values and the targeted performance goals. Carefully formulated positioning statements can help to maximse your efforts to achieve success.
The key question to ask yourself at the outset of a marketing campaign is how to align the marketing of your solution with the vision of the business. Your vision will typically include specific KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for marketing and sales.
Some of the KPIs might include:
● growing audience size
● improving audience engagement
● finding new markets
● increasing sales volumes
● attracting more sign-ups.
It may also include other goals such as:
● reducing costs
● increasing market reach
● automating repetitive processes
● improving the online customer experience
● creating a method to keep the vision front and centre, for everyone, every day.
The KPIs usually align directly with achieving the vision. However, we often find that there are bottlenecks (constraints) that limit performance and, as a result, blur the vision.
Constraints slow down performance and thereby shift attention and efforts away from achieving the vision towards trying to resolve the problem.
2. Select a market segment
Before you get started with your growth strategy it is imperative to select your market segment. If possible, this should be a valuable market segment, where you can maximise your market share of that segment.
Once you have people interested in what you offer, the next task is to entice them to buy from you. While the traditional selling process has always been conducted manually and ‘in-person’, the trend today is to build out these processes as automated digital marketing and sales systems.
3. Identify performance limitations
To achieve targeted growth, you will need to identify, measure and solve performance limitations. The purpose of this exercise is to identify the specific constraints and why they exist – so that you can design solutions that overcome those limitations. To identify performance limitations, we rely on Root Cause Analysis.
Inspired Marketing uses a hybrid 8-part framework based on a number of recognised models to interrogate the items that adversely affect competitiveness:
PART 1: 4 factors that increase the visibility of your business in the marketplace
Value proposition:
Everything to do with what you offer and sell – products, services and information, including:
● product, service, information
● environment
● mandatory matters
Positioning strategy:
How the organisation is positioned in the marketplace, including:
● the positioning statement
● goals
● strategy
Prospective buyers:
● ideal buyer profile
● market segmentation
● marketing communications
Competing options:
● competing markets (markets that have better pricing or quality)
● competing solutions (other ways people solve a problem)
● competing brands and products (other direct competitors)
PART 2: 4 factors that help you build capability and better fulfil customer expectations
Financial system:
Financial value, accounting and money matters, including:
● income streams
● cost structures
● financial performance
Customer system:
Everything to do with attracting, engaging and maintaining customers, including:
● customer segmentation
● customer channels
● customer relationships
Production system:
How goods and services are produced and delivered, including:
● tools and materials
● operating processes
● operating structure
Talent system:
Everything to do with human resources, including:
● skills and abilities
● learning and growth
● management
4. Realise the power of systems
In order to grow with certainty and consistently it is vital to systemise the process of growth.
How to systemise and automate your sales funnel
The process and flow of inbound business opportunities are best described in terms of a funnel.
At the top of the funnel, new leads (prospective customers) find you – and you find them – using media channels such as your website, social media, referrals, direct email marketing, content marketing, such as blogs and videos, and many other sources.
In the middle of the funnel, these new leads are nurtured as they engage with your brand, moving them along their journey to becoming a customer. This is where campaign landing pages, forms, follow-up email marketing and other activations occur.
At the bottom of the funnel, hot leads are steered towards making the decision to buy. Using product specials, upsells, cross-sells and other sales techniques, hot leads are converted to become your customers.
After the funnel, or as we call it, expansion of the funnel, the focus is placed on after-sales service and encouraging your customers to become advocates for your brand and to recommend and refer more business to you.
The funnel represents the stages of the customer journey – the steps a customer takes as they go through the process of finding and buying what you have to offer.
How do I track the customer journey?
Inspired Marketing uses a marketing automation platform that is designed and built to manage the entire customer journey – seamlessly and automatically. It also enables complete visibility of a lead’s unique journey through the marketing and sales funnel.
As you design your business growth system, keep the automation of the process in mind. It is important to picture the business landscape and all the players and components that must, one way or another, participate, communicate, and transfer data between each other in order to function – and how to link those players and components to each other to create a seamless experience.
A simple example of how external and internal components can ‘talk’ to each other, is when a customer places an online order and the right salesperson automatically gets notified to follow up with the customer.
A further benefit is the platform’s ability to build and segment your community into separate dynamic lists. These lists are automatically kept up to date in real time, based on user behaviours, demographics and interests. When a lead meets certain predetermined criteria, they are automatically segmented into a specific list, and added to workflows that send them information that is relevant to their needs.
For example, you can set up a workflow around a particular piece of content, like a white paper. An initial email is sent, containing a link to a landing page with the content, along with some compelling reasons for them to download it. If a prospect downloads it on the first send, they are automatically added to a campaign that will follow up with other similar content and relevant offers.
If the prospect doesn’t download right away, they’ll receive a follow-up email reminding them to do so. Those who download it at that point are also added to the aforementioned list (or a similar one), and those who don’t are assigned to a less aggressive, long-term nurturing campaign. This gives sales teams the insights they need to reach out to leads with exactly the right information at exactly the right time. Real-time behavioral tracking allows sales teams to keep track of leads’ activities and interactions, so they can contact them at the optimal moments.
When a process has been automated, it can be repeated exactly the same way 1000s of times with nothing falling through the cracks.
5. Invest in an end-to-end solution
To make developing and automating systems easier, we have created pre-built, tried and tested campaigns. The programs behind these campaigns include instructions, illustrations and checklists that help get your campaigns up and running in the shortest time possible.
To give you an example, you can approach marketing from the following ‘end-to-end’ system-thinking perspective:
● start by identifying the objectives, i.e. creating awareness of your products,
● identify the results you are targeting, i.e. how much demand you are aiming for, and how many prospective customers you need to reach,
● research target audiences in line with the results you are aiming for,
● reach out to the target audience (via promotions, adverts and posts) and invite them to find out more about your products via specific campaign webpages and, in the process, capture their details into a CRM database,
● automatically engage them using email and other media campaigns to move them along the buying journey,
● track their online engagement with your brand and their interest in your products – to better understand their buying preferences,
● use the tracked results to measure interest in specific products and services and to push them through the buying cycle,
● automatically follow up with interested prospective customers who have not yet bought,
● automatically notify your team when specific people show interest in your products – enabling your team to follow up in person, if required, to close a sale,
● track abandoned shopping carts and automatically follow up to re-engage the prospective buyer,
● report on online activity, giving you the opportunity to modify and improve campaigns, and
● end by measuring performance and comparing actual results to the targeted results you set at the beginning of the project.
To optimise the above steps, we implement powerful Marketing Automation technologies.
Get started on your competitive journey today
It’s time to stop launching countless new marketing campaigns and rather focus on using the right technologies, know-how and resources to maximise the performance of your existing marketing and sales campaigns. A fully automated marketing platform can identify your constraints, overcome them and automate processes that generate true growth and market share for your business.
Book a meeting with us today to claim your share of the market.
