Generate Demand with the Ultimate 9-Step Marketing Plan
Generate Demand with the Ultimate 9-Step Marketing Plan
Not all of us are marketing gurus.
Are you a solopreneur trying to pave your way in building your brand?
As an entrepreneur, generating demand can be both challenging and rewarding. Demand is an essential aspect of any business. For a business to thrive and generate demand, we can use marketing strategies to share how to use our products or services and to whom we should sell them.
When you start formulating your strategy, the first thing to consider is to ask yourself: Is my marketing plan making me money or draining my resources?
To learn more about how to generate demand for your business through the right marketing strategies, read on.
Understanding your market
What if I tell you that marketing is not just about the amount of money you spend on ads but instead how you are streamlining your efforts to reach consumers who are most likely to avail of your services? This marketing strategy is possible once you can understand who your market is and the needs that can be addressed. A clear definition of your target market allows you to identify the features they want and manage their expectations.
Once you have the exact persona of your target market, you can now work and curate brand stories that can persuade them. You can make this possible through well-thought-out Content Marketing.
Stories Sell
Did you know that most people have to hear about your brand and your services 5-6 times before they’ll purchase?
Managing how your brand is perceived is the key to content marketing. This strategy is used to attract, engage, and retain an audience by creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and consistent content such as videos, blogs, and social media posts.
This type of marketing does not explicitly promote the sales of your services; it’s about creating free value for your target audience to build trust and familiarity. Through this, you will be able to connect with your audience, and in turn, they will see the value of your brand.
You might wonder, how do we get more clients if we’re not selling our services?
Through the right method of content marketing, you will attract leads, continue building your audience, and eventually increase profit in a sustainable way.
Building Your Email List
Once you have that striking brand story that everyone loves to be part of or participate in, you are now ready to share your content with people who are most likely to respond well to your marketing campaigns.
One crucial and effective way to further build a relationship with your current and potential audience is through building an email list.
This is a direct and intimate way to connect and communicate with your audience. They can receive and read your email privately, giving them confidence in you and what you offer, which continues to build trust and connection.
And as much as we love to scroll on social media, building our business solely on someone else’s platform is a risk we can’t afford to take. If you build your own email list, it is entirely your own. You don’t have to worry about other platforms in the long term or being influenced by other businesses.
Brand
Now it’s time for you to take control and generate demand for your services through this ultimate marketing plan:
#1: Identify your target audience.
Establishing “everybody” as your target market is one of entrepreneurs’ many mistakes. This is because we don’t have all the time or resources to reach everyone. And, it’s just not entirely possible for all people to like our services or products.
And this is why we need to identify the target market and consider who is the right audience. This is an important factor for your business to thrive and grow.
Here are some of the things you should take note of when understanding your audience:
- Research what their pain points are. What specific or recurring problems and inconveniences do they encounter?
- Find out what social media platforms they hang out on. What types of social media platforms do you mainly use to reach them?
- Learn the words that they use to search for the services you offer. Having effective keyword research allows you to have valuable insight into their queries.
- Determine what it’s costing them not to solve their problems.
- Create a one-liner that resonates with your ideal clients. This can be a simple but impactful message that will remain in their memory.
#2: Create a social media content strategy.
The strategy that you come up with can guide you to take the actions to success. Here’s a tip: The more specific your plan is, the more effective it will be.
You can start creating a following on social media by:
- Educating your target audience
- Focusing on the Biggest Pain Point with your messaging
- Offering Free Content
- Conducting polls or Q&As. You can also make use of your audience’s responses for future content.
- Identifying influencers that you could partner with
- Demonstrating empathy and understanding of what your customers are going through
- Leveraging feedback from existing and past clients
- Varying the type of content you create
- Establishing a strategy that involves consistency
- Highlighting your branding
- Use a social media content strategy to drive traffic to your platforms and capture email addresses
- Avoiding selling on social media
#3 - Establish lead generators your clients will want.
This next step in a blossoming relationship can really be beneficial.
Lead generation is a way of attracting prospects and turning them into an audience who will be interested in your products and services.
This is an efficient way of capturing your client’s attention and email address - inviting them to opt into a lead generator.
Lead generators offer your clients resources in exchange for their email addresses or contact information. This resource should provide immense value to position you as an authority in your industry.
Some samples of lead generators are:
- a downloadable PDF Guide
- a free online course
- a checklist
- an eBook
Tips when creating a lead generator:
- Make sure you give your lead generator a good title.
- Ensure that it solves a problem, educates, or inspires in some way.
- Highlight your Call-To-Action buttons.
- Use the right tools when tracking your leads.
#4: Utilize emails.
Only 3% of your overall audience is ready to buy at any one time. So staying in touch via email means you’ll be in front of your customer’s minds when they’re ready to do so.
Marketing through emails allows you to reach your customers easier and at an affordable cost.
Here are some tips when sending emails:
- Offer more value in your emails.
- Tell stories of challenges and successes you or your clients have experienced.
- Make what you offer exclusive so that it’s not all shared on social media.
- Make it more interesting than signing up for a “boring old newsletter.”
- Keep the paragraphs short.
- Vary the content between long-form, and short-form, including videos and audio.
- Always add a PS.
- Use emails to keep giving value to existing clients and as a way to warm up potential clients.
#5: Organize and highlight your online presence through your website.
Here are some of the tips when creating your website:
- Ensure clarity on what you offer from your website header.
- Help your clients visualise success from the images you’ve shared in your content.
- Offer a lead generator on your website or landing page that shares snippets of what your services are all about (do not scrimp on what you share).
- Share case studies that demonstrate transformations previous clients have experienced.
- Make it easy for people to purchase from you or contact you.
- As human beings, we like to know what to expect. So share on your website a plan that will tell prospective clients what they can expect if they sign up with you.
#6: Create captivating and impactful blog posts.
Here are some of the tips when publishing your blog posts:
- Using blog posts on your website is a great way to drive more traffic to your site.
- You can also have lead generators pop up on your blog posts (just like the one that showed up here!)
- Create blog posts about things your audience will want to learn more about.
- From your knowledge of your target audience, consider the things that excite, intrigue, or captivate them or they are passionate about.
- Come up with a catchy headline.
- Share information in a conversational style.
- Use a storytelling framework to convey your message.
#7: Remain consistent with your brand strategy.
Your brand has a personality, a tone of voice, and a style. Be sure to stay consistent across each touchpoint you have with clients.
Keep these in mind when using content based on your brand strategy:
- Use consistent colours, which can increase recognition of your brand by as much as 80%. This is a way for people to become more familiar with your brand faster.
- Your brand should have a style of telling stories, conversational, formal, funny, etc. Identify which kind you’ll use and adhere to it to help you stand out.
- Use the same fonts across each touchpoint.
- If you’re using images or video, keep the style the same.
- Be mindful of clutter in your background and use appropriate images for the message you’re conveying.
- Your brand should have an overall narrative or message that it consistently speaks to, so the underlying message should be the same no matter which topic you’re talking about or where.
#8: Create efficiencies and automation in your marketing strategy.
This is another way of maintaining consistency in delivering the right content during the appropriate times to your target audience. This strategy can also give you more time and increase your productivity.
These are some steps that can help you:
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Outsource the bits that you’re not good at.
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Use experts for time-consuming marketing tasks. Some examples are the following:
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Graphic designer to create your logo
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A copywriter to wireframe your website
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Web designer to update your website
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Brand strategist to help you craft your brand story
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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) expert to help you maximise your site.
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Use scheduling tools to get your content out regularly and frequently.
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Use design tools like Canva to help you craft graphics.
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Recruit a brand photographer to capture images of you that tie in with your brand story that you can use repeatedly across your touchpoints.
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Use frameworks like the StoryBrand 7-part framework to help you write compelling messages, emails, and stories.
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Draft a standard operating procedure (SOP) for how you do each of the above so that if you do outsource anything, you’ll be able to hand over your SOPs.
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Use an email marketing system such as Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign.
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Use tools like Ubersuggest, Answer The Public, and Hubspot to develop ideas for content.
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You can even use AI to create content with tools like peppertype.ai.
#9: Plan out the experience you will create and the systems you will use to create it.
This is a great way to ensure customer satisfaction and boost more leads and sales. It is vital that you come up with a system that can prioritise your customer’s journey and lead to a positive experience, which can keep them loyal to your brand.
You can:
- Craft a customer journey.
- Consider which systems your customers will come through on the journey.
- Determine what you can automate without losing the personal touch.
- Identify where you could add in little surprises to celebrate milestones.
- Ask yourself what you will do to create and deliver a world-class experience.
- Work out where or how you can increase sales from existing clients to optimise your customer lifetime value.
- Orchestrate into your journey how you will stimulate referrals and generate more demand for your services from existing clients.
Conclusion
Generating demands for your products or services is not an easy feat. It can be challenging and may cost a lot of your time. For you to generate sales, you must build the trust of your audience.
Fortunately, there are multiple strategies that you can follow to help you reach your goals.
Remember that the heart of your branding and customer experience is always about your target customer. When you truly understand them, you can create a content strategy that is valuable and in demand.
Creating a quality content strategy will help you establish your relationship with prospective clients because you’re producing content they actually want.
Now that you’re aware of the 9-step marketing plan, you can build your brand and business organically because you’ll be climbing the SEO ladder. Best of all, you will generate the leads you need with these strategies to get more clients and make money in your business.
Want to get some help in implementing this framework? Schedule a call now!
Deirdre Martin is a business mentor that specialises in brand, marketing and customer experience. She is a keynote speaker, business award winner and bestselling business author. For a FREE business breakthrough call, go to Deirdre’s calendar and find a time that works for you. Follow on LinkedIn!
