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Industry
Industry, within the scope of an economy, is used to define the production of goods or rendering services in a related sphere.
Several worldwide organizations suggest unified classifications of business and economic activities by the industry. Among them stands ISIC (International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities), sponsored by the UNO Statistics Division. At present, the classification of economic activities by industries, made by ISIC, is considered the most complete and well-arranged.
In email marketing, the term industry means a particular sphere of business activity in which your subscribersare engaged. Referring to each subscriber to a specific sector within your mailing list will allow you to send relevant content within that industry. Conversionrates depend directly on the relevancy of the content subscribers are getting.
Segmentationof subscribers by industry also allows companies to see the industry average rates of openings, click-through rates, and delivery errors(or soft bounces). It is an optimal opportunity for them to compare the results of the email campaigns they are launching with the industry average rates.
Thus, companies will be able to analyze the downsides of their automated marketing campaignsand work on their mistakes. If their automated email campaigns show better results than the average of the industry, it becomes clear that the chosen email marketing strategy is working well for them and so they can stick to it.
Industrial marketing
Industrial marketing is promoting goods and services to other companies rather than to individual customers. It aims to sell raw materials and components for production needs. The simplest format of industrial marketing is B2B marketing.
In the article, we explain why industrial marketing is important, describe its benefits and features, compare industrial and consumer marketing and provide ideas for industrial marketing strategies.
Why is industrial marketing important?
The main distinctive feature of industrial marketing is that customers are not individuals but businesses, and it changes the usual way of promoting goods and developing a marketing strategy. Below we explain why a special attitude to marketing in B2B is so important.
Industrial marketing is aimed at increasing sales of wholesale products and goods for industrial purposes. It helps companies that produce raw materials expand their businesses.
Industrial marketing covers two marketing aspects:
The manufacturing business promotion: creating the image and developing the potential of the company, increasing the investment attractiveness and its boosting in the B2B market.
Product promotion: strategic development of a product offer, building a marketing strategy, and pushing products forward on the market.
A well-defined industrial marketing strategy can help your business stand out from the competitors and grow the company faster. Read more about these and other benefits of industrial marketing in the next section.
Benefits of Industrial Marketing
According to the Hook Agency, 77% of industrial marketers have seen an increase in their conversion rate due to successful digital marketing campaigns. It is only one in the number of benefits of using product promotion. Discover more advantages of industrial marketing below:
it contributes to the development of the whole company and the variety of its business areas;
it provides long-term competitive advantages in the market;
it increases the effectiveness of the work inside the company due to the following common goal.
As you can see, industrial marketing is a great way for companies working on the B2B market to promote their products. Discover more about its distinctive features in the next section.
Industrial Marketing Features
Industrial marketing is rather different from the other marketing branches. It requires a deep understanding of B2B market peculiarities and using special techniques to promote products successfully. Let’s take a look at its main features and differences.
Industrial marketing often involves large orders and long-term relationships between the companies. Goods go from manufacturing industries to consuming ones and finally reach individual customers. Consequently, the process of purchase is often long and complex.
When you are going to promote an industrial brand, take into account a few features.
There are larger purchases volumes and fewer clients needed than in the B2C market.
There is a higher buyer's risk because of the high cost of each purchase. Consequently, the process of making a decision is more complex and requires a longer purchase time.
Products are more technically complex, and buyers are well versed in their features, so you need a deep understanding of the sphere to promote the goods.
There is a closer relationship between the manufacturer and the customer than in B2C marketing. They can influence each other, so the selling company should reflect the demand changes immediately.
Besides the fact that industrial and consumer marketing use some common metrics, such as income, LTV, CAC, etc, they are rather different. Discover their distinctive features and peculiarities in the next section.
Industrial Marketing vs Consumer Marketing
The main peculiarity of industrial marketing is a huge number of products businesses buy in one purchase, while consumers often deal with only one or a few products. Continue reading to discover the distinctive features of each one in this section.
Needs of the customers. Clients in B2B marketing are highly-qualified in the sphere and can have certain technical requirements to the manufacturer. Consequently, businesses should work separately with every potential client and develop an industrial marketing strategy focused on the companies that already exist to cover all their specific needs. On the other hand, consumer marketing works without a niche-specific approach. It is oriented to mass-market needs, not on such specific ones.
The most important part of buying. Research is the most time-consuming part of sales cycles in industrial marketing. According to the Acquity Group State of B2B Procurement Study, 94% of B2B buyers research online before purchasing. There is a lot of money and people involved in each deal, so deep research before a purchase is required. In contrast, consumers in the B2C market make decisions faster and easier. There is no such deep research before a purchase, people can buy based on product positioning, packaging, attractive content, etc.
Relations between businesses and their clients. The consequence of the time-consuming research needed before a purchase is that companies do not want to repeat it again and again. They want to choose one product and buy it for years. Lead nurturing requires building trust with potential customers. If you save this trust, you will have an amazing lifetime value. LTV and brand loyalty are important in consumer marketing too, but their importance is not so significant.
Understanding the difference between industrial and consumer marketing will help you build an industrial marketing strategy to boost your company. Continue reading to discover its main points in the next section.
Industrial Marketing Strategy
A well-defined marketing strategy is a key to success. The process of its development is similar to the development of consumer marketing strategy, but it has a few peculiarities. We provide the most important steps for building a strong industrial marketing strategy.
Market analysis. First of all, you should study potential industrial buyers. Discover their specific needs, pains, and the ways their companies may develop. Determine what product will cover all their requirements. Secondly, study your competitors. Find out their strengths and weaknesses, define possible competitive advantages of your company, and the ways to highlight them in future content marketing.
Product positioning. Clients are highly qualified in the sphere, so correct positioning is the key to success in the competitive B2B market. It is vital to describe all the advantages and provide detailed information about your product in one click. You should care about the customer and do everything to build trusting relations.
Development of individual marketing strategies. It is what differentiates industrial marketing from consumer one. You should determine the main elements of marketing policy with every client separately. Consider product, service, and pricing policies, develop a communications strategy, and describe all the peculiarities of your future work.
Building trust. You should make your relations with clients long and productive. Care about customer satisfaction and focus on the changing needs of the clients. Develop your product to be the best in the market. Focus on long-term cooperation as the way to achieve your goals.
Congrats, now you know why industrial marketing is important, its benefits and features, and the difference between industrial and consumer marketing. Use this knowledge to develop an industrial marketing strategy and succeed in the market.
Impulse buying
Impulse buying is a tendency to purchaseproducts without planning aheadthat happens thanks to a well-developedpromotional message. Impulse buyers purchase items spontaneously because they rely on sensations that urge the necessity to buy.
In this article, we’ll talk aboutthe psychology of impulse buying,go over several ways to increase impulse buying online, and unveil the most popular impulse purchases.
The Psychology of Impulse Buying
Statistics show that the number of spontaneous purchases is increasing every year. Whether it is the influence of online stores, paid advertising, or people’s urge to feel happy and excited, the number of impulse buys just keeps growing. An average American makes around 12unplannedpurchases per month. Moreover, 62% ofbuyersaffirm that they feel happy afterthis kind of shopping, which explains why impulse buying is so widespread.
The psychology of impulse purchases is quite simple— they are often caused by market-related stimuli andexternal triggers. Huge discounts and attractive offers, including the BOGO (buy one, get one free) campaigns, are the most powerful causes of unplanned purchases. Marketing strategies provokethe urge to buy andelicit positive emotions and satisfaction, as customers feel they bought some products at areduced price. This kind of shopping is the easiest way to get dopamine here and now.
Since people don’tresort to rational decision-making during impulse buying, which is typical for planned purchases, discounts appeal to the emotional side of shopping.Impulse buyersare guided by emotions, unique experiences, and sensations that emergewhile shopping.
Now that you know how impulse buying works, it’s time to discoverthe waysto drive impulse purchases online.
7 Ways to Increase Impulse Buying Online
Consider upselling
Implement time-limited offers
Create engaging email campaigns
Conduct a giveaway
Offer free delivery
Leverage social listening tools
Use social media tools
Discounts, upselling, excellent promotional campaigns across different channels, and social media tags are only a few of the tactics you can implement to hook your target audience and expand your reach. You can make your company attractive to impulse buyers in a number of ways. We’ll review different strategies brands use to encourage unplanned purchases.
Consider upselling. You canencourageyour prospectsand existing customers to make an unplanned purchase. During the checkout, recommend relevant products that might be useful. Apart from that, offer the “Frequently bought together”discounts for product bundles. This way, you’ll be able to upsell some additional items and evoke the fear of missing out.
Implement time-limited offers.Time-limited discounts, special deals, gifts, rewards, and free delivery work like a charm on users who purchase online. You need to provide customers with a reason to buy right now and drive urgency. Whena discount or special deal is bound by time, you can trigger the fear of missing out. This way, your prospects or loyal clients will definitely make a purchase.
Create engaging email campaigns. Email marketing is an effective marketing channel that helps communicateyour message to subscribers. To encourage consumers to make impulse purchases, make an attractive offer. Users oftenlook for promo codes andspecial offers before making anypurchases online, which is why you need to interest your target audience with a good discount. Send an email campaign to your subscribers,tell them aboutyour sale, and mention a promo code that will reduce the price of their order. LIKE.TG’s bulk email serviceallows you to do it for free.
Conduct a giveaway. A giveaway is a wonderfulstrategy for two brandsthat share similar audiences. With your giveaway partner, you’ll be able to encourage purchases not only from people who land on your site but also leadsfrom the other brand’s following. By running a giveaway and providing special offers, you can expand your reach fastand get new customers as a result.
Offer free delivery. According to statistics, 94% of people are more willing to buy if the delivery is free. One in four respondents expects online brands to have free delivery, so it’s a great wayto increase impulse purchases online. You can providefree delivery if a customerspends a certain amount of money on their order. This way, people will gladly add more items to their carts to avoid paying an additional fee.
Leverage social listening tools. With social listening tools and social mediasearch, you can easily find potential customers whose needs aren’t met yet. Consider using social listening platforms like Sprout Social, Hootsuite, or BuzzSumoto do it.
Use social media tools.Word-of-mouth promotionworks smoothly when we talk about impulse buys. Once people hear about discounts, limited-time offers, BOGO (Buy one, get one free), and specials from bloggers, they instantlylook up the site and the products it offers. So, it’s also a great idea to use social media and its tools. You can ask an opinion leader to promote your sale andgive the link to your company website. Consider influencer marketingto make sure that more people know about your brand and discountsand make more impulse purchases.
Now that you know these marketing techniques, it’s time to delve into the most popular impulse buys.
5 Most Popular Impulse Purchases
Since the logic of impulse purchases thrivesonemotional decision-making and sensations, this is an effective way to sell huge quantities of products. Tryour approaches to reach out toyour target audience and hook them, expanding yoursales volume. We’ve prepared thefive most popular unplanned purchases people make— they will help you decideon the products you can promote.
Apparel
Clothes are at the top of our list of impulse buys— they constitute more than half of all impulse purchases. When people make unplanned visits to stores or search for specific items online, they can encounter discounts. What can be more tempting than a sweater with a 40% discount, a new pair of jeans and a T-shirt for free, or free delivery? Customers often can’t resist even when these products are noton their shopping lists.
Below you can see an example from Motel Rocks. Anyone who lands on the brand’s website would surely like to explore items with an 80% discount.
Food Groceries
Food is essential for our living. Customers visit grocery stores every day and make many unplanned supermarket purchases, which makes food another top-selling impulse buy. The desire to buy increases when a hungry customer sees discounts and red price tags. They drive the urge to buy and satisfy customers’ needs in food or sensations.
Shoes
Even if customers already have shoes for all seasons, they won’t miss a chance to grab an additional pair of Nikesat a good price. That’s why shoes are among ourfive most popular impulse purchases. Sporty, elegant, comfy, and original shoeshelp people lookbetter and are often expensive, motivating consumers to look out fordiscounts.
For example, Puma entices customers with Black Friday deals.
Beauty Personal Care Products
Beauty products are also in high demand, which is why you can encounter personal care items in impulse shoppers’ carts.Customers might be attracted by products’miraculous benefits, price, advertising, or beautiful packaging, making these purchases often.
Below you can see attractive offers and discounts fromSephora, a famous retailer of beauty products.
Home Decor
People buy posters, pillows, bedspreads, rugs, and beautiful dishes to make their homes feel comfortable. This eagerness pushes them towards impulse purchases during big saleslikeBlack Friday, Christmas, Cyber Monday, Mother’s Day, etc. Customers can’twalk by a wonderfulsoap dish that matches their bathroom or a cup with a cute reindeer without buying it.
You can see amazing offers from HM Home at affordable prices.
To sum it up, impulse buys can significantly increase your customer base and revenue. If you implement these tactics right, you’ll build an effective marketing strategy that sells, making your business thrive and grow. Hope our examples inspired you to develop your own impulse buying strategy.
Indirect competition
Indirect competition is the situation when two businesses target the same market and audience and aim to satisfy the same needs, but offer different products. Usually, indirect competitors take away a huge number of companies’ potential clients, because they provide different solutions to the same buyers’ pains.
In the article, we compare direct and indirect competition and provide examples for you to understand the peculiarities of each one.
Direct Competition vs Indirect Competition
Some junior marketers may focus only on the direct competitors and develop brands’ strategies without paying attention to the indirect ones. However, it is vital to consider various products and services to get a holistic image of the market situation. We compare direct and indirect competition and describe their differences below.
Direct competition means that two companies offer the same products to satisfy the needs of the same audience. The companies’ branding, promotion, values, and strategies may vary, but their goods are similar. Also, direct competitors work in the same market, e.g., coffee-to-go points in one city or premium car brands that sell their developments mainly in Europe.
Indirect competition means that businesses produce different goods but target the same market and customer segments. For example, chocolate and cookies are both sweets and can substitute each other, so they are indirect competitors. This concept is larger, because of the huge number of such substitutions, e.g., watching various films and cartoons, going to the cafe or theater, shopping in the department store, and even traveling are all ways to spend free time, which means that they can compete with each other.
It may be challenging to take into account all substitutions, but you can discover the most obvious ones by conducting keyword research and studying related topics. Also, we describe some indirect competition examples in different markets to help you understand this concept better.
Examples of Indirect Competition
Identifying and analyzing the indirect competitors of your company can help you develop a well-defined strategy and find strong competitive advantages. To make your analysis easier, study some examples of indirect competition below.
McDonald’s vs Domino’s Pizza. These companies sell fast food and target consumers who want to eat quickly. They work worldwide and have almost similar pricing policies. Their branding and marketing are also alike. However, McDonald’s sells burgers and fries, while Domino’s serves pizza, so we can say that they are indirect competitors.
Marvel comics vs Netflix movies. These two companies compete in the field of teenager and adult entertainment. Both of them work all over the world and have many fans. Marvel comics can substitute Netflix movies and vice versa, though they aren’t direct competitors because these brands create different products.
Targeting vs collaborating with influencers. We can say that these two advertising mechanisms also compete with each other. You can reach the same markets and audiences either by using targeted ads or influencer promotions. The goal is also the same: to sell products of the advertised brand. However, these methods aren’t similar and have their peculiarities. We suggest combining them to reach better results for your promotional campaigns.
Congrats, now you know what indirect competition is and its difference from direct competition. Also, you have studied its examples and can find indirect competitors of your company.
Inbound marketing
Inbound marketing is the promotion ofa company in blogs, podcasts, videos, e-books, SEO, social media, and other forms of content marketing.
In this video, Adam Erhart considers the difference between inbound and outbound marketing strategies and emphasizes the advantages of each approach.
One of the main features of inbound marketing is the absence of pressure on the consumer. The main thing is to provide the target audience with information that will be attractive to them. Interesting news, useful video, the right information attract visitors and make them loyal to the product. If the company provides useful content for free, this stimulates the potential buyer to "thank the company" with a good attitude and by buying something.
Components of Successful Inbound Marketing Strategy
Content
SEO
Social media
Content. Content creation is the basis of any inbound marketing campaign. This is information or tool that attracts prospects to your website or business;
SEO. Search engine optimization allows potential customers to find your content more easily. In practice, it means the ability to structure your site and create incoming links for it to maximize the ranking in the search engines in which most of your customers begin the buying process;
Social media.It enhances the impact of your content. When the content is distributed and discussed in the networks of personal contacts, it becomes more authentic, acquires various shades, and is more likely to attract qualified customers to your site.
Benefits of Inbound Marketing
Economic efficiency
Opportunity to work with narrow target audiences
Increased targeting
Long-term results
Raising brand recognition
Economic efficiency. Lower cost of use compared with traditional methods of advertising.
Opportunity to work with narrow target audiences. You can take into account the detailed characteristics of your target audience and create more attractive materials for it.
Increased targeting. Using inbound marketing, you only apply to those who independently confirm compliance with your criteria. If people show interest in your content, then they are more likely to be interested in your products.
Long-term results. If you invest in creating quality content, then it will work for attracting visitors enough, regardless of the current costs of advertising.
Raising brand recognition. Using brand constants in the design of content, you increase the recognition of your corporate style.
So, the main secret of the success of inbound marketing is valuable materials for the customers.
Indirect sales
Indirect sales are performed with the help of intermediaries. There is no personal contact between the seller and the buyer. This type of sales is a widespread practice in email marketing. Afterregisteringwith LIKE.TG, you can make use of this method absolutely for free.
In this video, Hans Peter Bech provides a comparison of direct and indirect sales approaches and explains how to make the latter work in your favor.
Types of Indirect Sales
Distribution. Transferof rights by aproducer to sell their products to small wholesale and retail organizations.
Merchandising. A competent arrangement of the goods at the shop-windows. Therefore, chewing gum, sweets, chocolates are laid out next to the cash desks: while adults waitin line, sweets lure children to ask for a product. The same is with the essential goods — they are above eye level, because, first of all, the buyer will pay attention to the goods located below. The type of product and how it is presented to the consumer depends on the sales ratio.
Franchising. This is a "lease" of a well-known trademark. Buying a franchise and paying interest to the brand owner, thefranchiseereduces the number ofproblems: they haveparticular tactics of doing business andtheir clients. Bright examples of franchising are Subway, McDonald's, Lukoil.
Dealership. In this case, the intermediaries of the company are special agents — dealers. Buying goods at wholesale prices, they resell it with an extra charge at retail to other firms. This differs from the distribution in smaller volumes of purchases.
There is no personal contact between the seller and the buyer. Sales are carried out by third parties.
Advantages of Indirect Sales
Increase in the sales network (up to global);
Raising the level of products distribution;
The efficiency of the current work;
Knowledge of the state and prospects of the markets;
Expansion of the target audience;
Minimum costs for the organization of jobs.
Disadvantages of indirect sales
Break of personal connection between the seller and the buyer;
Inability to monitor and track the goods independently;
Dependence of the company's reputation on the behavior of the intermediary.
Indirect Sales in Email Marketing
Marketers do both direct selling and indirect via email campaigns. In this article, we told how to sell directly.
To sell indirectly, there should be a medium between an email and a recipient. It can be your sales representative — for example, a user-specified their birth date during the subscription. Then, call them with some warm wishes and send a birthday email with a special offer afterward. This way, if they buy from this email, the sale will be indirect.
If you are a small business owner, use our free pricing plan. Send up to 15,000 emails every month to 500 or fewer subscribers. Personalize, segment, and A/B test your campaigns for better engagement.
Send an email campaign.
Ideal customer profile
An ideal customer profile (ICP) is a comprehensive description of a business for which your product will become a perfect solution. It helps you identify the right clients, align your product with customers’ needs, and personalize your offer.
In this article, we’ll discuss why you need an ideal customer profile and compare an ICP and a buyer persona. We’ll also unveil how to build this profile and use it in marketing.
Why do you need an ideal customer profile?
If your company focuses on sales, developing an ideal customer profile is crucial since it helps identify quality leads. This is the key reason to create a profile of an ideal customer that will be a great fit for your solution. Besides quality prospects, you can reap even more benefits.
After creating an ideal customer profile, you can prevent your company from using extra resources and teams from spending their effort on unqualified leads. With the lead qualification, you can easily identify customers with a high willingness to purchase from you. You can start nurturing relationships with these prospects and turn them into long-term partnerships.
Using your profile, historical sales data, and predictive learning, you can increase the speed of lead conversions. Improving the way you approach your customers enables you to encourage trust and build loyalty.
If you succeed in developing a perfect ICP, you’ll be able to align your product with customers’ needs. You’ll provide personalized offers and content to your clients by ensuring collaboration between sales and marketing teams.
Since your profile covers specific characteristics and patterns, consider using them to your advantage. Build a framework for outreach activities to reach your potential customers.
Now that you know the reasons, it’s time to make the difference between an ideal customer profile and buyer persona clear.
Ideal Customer Profile vs Buyer Persona
Sometimes people use these two concepts interchangeably, yet they help attain different goals. Let’s uncover these two terms for you to consider.
An ideal customer profile is a detailed description of a company for your solution. It enables you to choose the right businesses, adjust your marketing strategy, and provide personalized offers. If your company focuses on working with businesses rather than individuals, then you need to create an ICP to improve the work of your sales and marketing departments.
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional reflection of your ideal customer that covers demographics, objectives, motivators, and problems. It helps your team map out the strategy and allocate resources and time. Buyer persona brings structure to your company and helps find and reach the right prospects.
Now that you know the difference, it’s time to find out how to create an ICP.
How to create an ideal customer profile?
This section will uncover how to develop an ideal customer profile for your business. Let’s dive in.
Consider applying templates. You can use the existing templates to speed up the process of creating an ICP. Find the right platforms to download and use the templates for free. This way, you’ll save time on building the profile from scratch. The only thing you’ll need to do is to fill in the blanks. Conduct short research on your future clients to insert the necessary data.
Select the right software. Creating an accurate profile requires collecting all available information from your current customers. It will help you find a highly personalized approach to your prospects. Consider using your software to get data. If you use a CRM, look through customer profiles and deals to identify common patterns. If you don’t use a CRM, consider using the built-inCRM from LIKE.TG. With its help, you can store all your customer information, track all your deals within one platform, and automate your sales and communication with clients. After choosing a CRM, you also need a tool for conducting surveys. It will help you collect customer feedback about your product. You can use SurveyMonkey, GetFeedback, Zoho Survey, etc.
Analyze demographics. The next step involves analyzing the external demographics of your potential clients. During this step, you should identify the market your product suits the best, the verticals your prospects operate in, annual revenue, the number of employees, and the location of these businesses. These points will help you get a better picture of your future customers.
Gather feedback from your clients. Using the general information you have in your CRM isn’t enough to win deals. To establish connections with prospects, you need to research your current clients. For this purpose, you need to conduct surveys and communicate with consumers. You can do it in written or oral form with surveys or interviews. To speed up the process, consider using survey tools. They will enable you to design forms fast, send them to customers’ emails, and record their answers. Make sure to include questions about your product, things that make it stand out from the competition, and things that make it difficult to work with. Ask for comments and recommendations. With customer interviews, your company reps can talk with clients in real-time by phone or during a meeting. This way, you can directly see their reaction to your questions and read what they really like from their facial expressions.
Focus on the problem. Think of the challenges your product can help solve. Identify the characteristics of businesses that need this product. Analyze your existing customers and their problems. Dive deeper into your clients’ behavior and discover how and why they use your product. Think of their pain points.
Develop profiles. When developing ideal customer profiles, remember that you try to reach actual companies with their problems and needs. After finishing with the attributes for your ICPs, you need to focus on the individuals you want to reach to win the deal. Often, these are company representatives. To establish good communication and trust, you need to research companies’ decision-makers. Make sure you know their titles, age, income, reasons they need your product, role, and responsibilities.
Track and evaluate. Once done with the profiles, you need to monitor your progress to identify successes and failures. It’s necessary to make improvements. Assessment is essential for obtaining new customers and taking your business to the next level.
Now that you know how to build an ideal customer profile, let’s proceed to the next section to figure out how to use it in marketing.
How to use an ideal customer profile in marketing?
Besides creating an ICP, you also need to know how to apply the knowledge provided. This section will help you find it out.
Every company needs an ideal customer profile. It empowers sales and marketing teams to define their ideal customer and target the right people. Everything starts with the development of a profile and then moves to the process of reaching prospects.
A well-defined ideal customer profile enables you to reach and sell to targeted accounts. With its help, your team can determine challenges, create personalized approaches, meet customers’ needs, and align your marketing efforts. An ICP will be helpful for future alterations to your product and strategy. Use it when choosing the best marketing channels, identifying how to start communication, and encouraging to purchase.
Congrats, now you know what an ICP is and why it’s crucial. Use our guide to identify the right customers for your business.
Incentivized traffic
Incentivized traffic is the traffic generated by users who receive different types of rewards such as cash, gift, discount, whitepaper, free eBook, or game tokens for visiting specific websites. It brings more visitors to websites and valuable customer data.
In this article, we’ll unveil the benefits and types of incentivized traffic.
Benefits of Incentivized Traffic
Incentivized traffic is an easy way to boost the number of visitors to your website which results in more potential customers. The strategy aims at acquiring customers by providing them with different incentives. Your company can invite prospective customers to click a link to obtain a discount, whitepaper, upgraded product, eBook, or a gift. With incentivized traffic campaigns, you can focus on driving prospects’ interest, encouraging them to explore your content and product, and perform the desired action to get the reward.
Besides increasing customer acquisition rate in a short time, incentivized traffic can bring you even more pros. With its help, you can boost customer reactions. Over time, the high number of downloads and customer acquisition rate will positively influence your ranking in search results. Consequently, more users will see your site.
For instance, if your mobile app is increasingly popular on Google Play or App Store and the number of installs is high, over time it will be more visible for users. Companies will see positive changes from these campaigns in around three days.
Now when the benefits are clear, let’s discover the types.
Types of Incentives
Companies can offer different incentives to increase customer acquisition and boost visits. There are many rewards they can use to encourage people to perform the desired action. Many websites apply content locking and ask users to answer several questions to access it. Gaming sites and apps implement offer walls. They reward gamers with game tokens for referring friends or sharing information about their accounts on social media. Besides, they generate traffic by giving cash, discounts, access to materials, gifts, etc.
Incentives are extremely popular in mobile gaming since they help advance and inspire users to play the game more often. Companies can reward their users with exclusive bonuses.
Angry Birds is a mobile game that demonstrates great results from its incentives for users. The company has daily bonuses for players. Its daily login streaks and bonuses for new levels encourage gamers to play and increase customer retention.
The choice is yours. Choose the strategy that suits you the most to obtain leads. Hope the examples above will help you in deciding how to approach prospects in the best way.
Holiday marketing
Growth hacking is a field in marketing that uses cost-effective tactics to achieve rapid business growth. Growth hackers have to find cheap and creative solutions, run experiments, and measure results.
In the video below, Growth Tribe defines growth hacking and explains how it differs from traditional marketing.
This instructive guide will help you learn more about growth hacking. We’ll explore the benefits of this approach, learn how to set up growth hacking for your business, and unpack some tips and examples.
What Is the Goal of Growth Hacking in Marketing?
The concept of growth hacking appeared in the era of early startups. These businesses needed to enlarge their customer base, market share, and revenue as fast as possible. Meanwhile, startups had extremely low budgets, so they couldn’t afford traditional promotion and customer acquisition tactics.
This situation has formed the primary goal of growth hacking in marketing – to acquire the maximum number of customers for minimal costs as quickly as possible. Following this objective, businesses devised specific growth hacking methods – we’ll explore them later in this article. Now it’s time to discover how exactly growth hacking tactics differ from ones that traditional marketing uses.
Difference Between Growth Hacking and Marketing
Growth hacking lives at the intersection of marketing, technology, and data science. Thus, it goes against traditional marketing in many ways. Let’s discover the main differences between these approaches.
Goals. Traditional marketing focuses mostly on brand awareness and increasing sales. Growth marketing’s be-all and end-all is business growth in general, thus, this approach works with all stages of the sales funnel.
Product. Marketing has everything to do with selling your finished product. Growth hacking goes further and helps companies improve the product in order to meet customer’s expectations.
Expertise. Modern marketers must not only conduct marketing campaigns, but also measure their results on and offline. However, their expertise still lies mostly in the marketing field. Growth hacking requires the ability to automate everything, and knowledge of data analytics and programming. Growth hackers can measure the effect marketing has on business in general.
Budgets. Growth hacking implies limited resources and tries to make the most of them by using offbeat tactics, mechanics, and channels. Traditional marketing often operates with bigger budgets and can afford paid promotional techniques – PPC, targeted ads, TV commercials, SMM, and so on.
Focus on business growth, expertise in data analytics and programming, tight budgets, and management of all stages of the pipeline are core characteristics of growth hacking. Read on to learn how exactly this approach combines and employs all of it.
How Growth Hacking Works
To make business expansion soar without spending a fortune, growth hacking employs automation, data analytics, and creativity. Customer attraction at the top stages of a funnel requires growth hackers to use offbeat techniques. Thus, they constantly come up with novel ways to generate traffic.
After devising a hypothesis, growth hackers start testing them – this is the only way to find out which tactics drive desirable results. Here is the moment when data analytics comes in handy.
To achieve sustainable growth and improve outcomes for future campaigns, growth hackers need to figure out not only WHAT works well but also WHY it does. Thus, growth hackers use data to track customers along their journey down the pipeline and try to understand what causes the existing results and how they can improve conversions at each stage. They constantly explore the target audience's expectations and customer satisfaction and offer to change the product to improve results.
Finally, when growth hackers learn what works best, they automate those processes. After this, they are ready to repeat the cycle with a new hypothesis. These loops of creating hypotheses, running experiments, collecting data, and automating processes are crucial in growth hacking. Let’s explore the details about the importance of this approach.
Why is Growth Hacking Important?
Growth hacking is vital for startups and other businesses on a tight budget. This concept allows brands to expand their audiences and boost revenue even though they can’t afford costly marketing tactics. Growth hackers constantly search for low-priced ways to promote a business and, thus, eliminate a lot of spending.
Better yet, growth hacking has a positive effect on big corporations as well. Employing some basic growth hacking methods, brands can embrace new audiences, improve ROI, and increase customer loyalty. These are just a part of the benefits growth hacking brings about.
Benefits of Growth Hacking
There are a lot of ways growth hacking can affect a business, apart from its low cost and impressive results. Let’s get into detail and unpack the main benefits of this approach.
Provable outcomes. Growth hacking is data-driven, so companies that use it, run experiments, and measure their performance. Thus, they have a full picture of the efficacy of each technique employed. Better yet, they have concrete measurements that allow them to judge and prove the results of strategies they use.
Product improvement. Growth hackers constantly test different options and learn more about the audience – their demands, preferences, interests, and more. It leads to a deeper understanding of how to improve the product or service a company provides.
Adjustable strategies. Modern marketing is kind of tricky – the strategies that worked well half a year ago may suddenly stop bringing desirable results. Growth hacking keeps an eye on performance and allows you to dump less effective methods to new ones. It also works the opposite way – you can scale the bulletproof tactics and apply them to other marketing channels.
Growth hacking can change the game for your business; it works off the beaten track and lets you get incredible results by changing minor details and investing next to nothing in it. For instance, replacing a traditional lead magnet with free access to paid content can drive a 400% increase in opt-ins. Read on to discover more growth hacking strategies and techniques to adopt.
Growth Hacking Strategies and Techniques
Create a brand personality
Collaborate to grow audiences
Find new communication channels
Employ interactive content
Craft a free tool
Thinking through ways to boost your company’s growth can get tough. To help you out with this task, we’ve picked five growth hacking tactics and strategies.
Create a brand personality
Facebook, Tesla, Uber – what factor unites these companies, apart from their rapid growth and market leadership? Well, there are well-known and beloved personalities behind them. That’s not a coincidence – the popularity of these startups’ founders has a dramatic effect on their expansion.
People tend to trust, communicate, and engage with other people more than with faceless businesses. Use this human psychology trait to your advantage – create a strong personality behind your company. You can start with social networks – they are a great place to build your personal brand and communicate with potential clients. To inspire people, start a personal blog telling them about your launch.
Collaborate to grow audiences
Partnerships are a golden opportunity to double or triple your brand’s audience in the blink of an eye. Better yet, it requires next to nothing in investment, especially compared to traditional marketing.
To benefit from this technique, choose the partner carefully. Opt for a complementary business – it ensures an influx of new audience members with the same interests as your brand. For instance, if you sell natural juice, you may collaborate with a protein bar manufacturer. Chances are your best customers are fitness enthusiasts.
Before offering the partnership, get ready. Prepare ideas on how to blend your audiences organically. The options may be tagging each other on social media, launching live streams together, offering product bundles, and so on.
Find new communication channels
Highly competitive communication channels are demanding. To get to your audience there and win, you probably need a huge budget. If you launch a business in a busy industry with well-established leaders, the barriers may become too high.
To break through to your potential customers, consider smaller social networks or resources. Choose the platforms, which your most promising prospects prefer. You may opt for TikTok if you work with a young audience, or go to The Dots if you target professionals from creative industries.
Employ interactive content
Growth hacking requires creating various types of content, from articles to videos to ads, and so on. In an ideal world, your audience would engage with every piece of your content. In reality, the users’ attention spans are limited. To grab their attention, use interactive elements.
Interactive content can lower bounce rates, improve search engine results, boost engagement, etc. Besides,in most cases adding interactive elements costs brands next to nothing.
The best part of this tactic is that elements don't have to be expensive or difficult to produce. You can use special tools to create surveys, quizzes, action buttons, or subscription forms. To create web forms for free, try the form builder from LIKE.TG. It lets you craft embedded, floating, fixed, and pop-up forms from scratch, or use templates. LIKE.TG forms are responsive and adjustable on the go.
Craft a free tool
Lead magnets are a proven technique to broaden the mouth of your lead funnel and collect more contacts. Their magic is based on the reciprocity principle – people are more likely to give something – their money, time, or data – if they got something in advance. By the way, using psychological traits is an extremely effective and free technique. Read our list of hacks to make the most of them.
Returning to lead magnets, you should keep in mind that users are overwhelmed with free ebooks, checklists, and other pieces of content. So, you can take a step further and offer your audience a free tool. People will get used to it and appreciate it, so they become more prone to share their data with you and test your paid tools.
On the basis of these tactics, you may invent your solutions to start growth hacking in your company. To facilitate your transition to the new framework, we’ve created a step-by-step guide.
How to Start Growth Hacking
Check your product-market fit
Create a data lake
Pick your North Star metric
Improve your pirate metrics
Build a backlog of ideas
Switching to the new approach requires resources and an action plan. In this part of the article, we’ll offer you a five-step plan you can follow to engrain growth hacking into your company.
1. Check your product-market fit
Product-market fit is the degree to which a product satisfies market demand. Put simply, if your product-market fit is great, it means that your audience needs your product. Hence, you won’t face significant difficulties in selling it.
To figure out whether you have a good product-market fit or not, you may employ various tactics. At first, consider creating a landing page and measuring the number of leads it brings. This will help you get an idea about the demand for your product.
If you already have a customer base, you may lean on customer retention and satisfaction rates, as well as the number of brand advocates you have. Customer surveys and conversations may come in handy as well.
Try Sean Ellis’ product-market fit survey. It will help you understand how many people will be disappointed with the disappearance of your product. Moreover, you’ll get a better understanding of your core benefits and the opportunities for improvement.
2. Create a data lake
As growth hacking is a data-driven approach, you need to build your data lake – a vast array of raw data. In this step, your task is to collect as much data as you can without worrying about the purpose. Here is the main information you can look for:
the source of a customer’s first visit to your website;
the pages a customer looks through on your site;
the source from where they’ve signed up for a trial;
the interaction with features of your product;
the customer lifetime value;
the references each customer makes;
the results of those references;
the reasons for avoiding your product.
Think through how you will collect this data, where and how you plan to store it, and what tools you will use to analyze the information. The easiest way is to use CRM software. Opt for analytical systems – they are made to manage data about your customers. To find the best option for you, follow our comprehensive guide on CRM systems.
3. Pick your North Star metric
In recent years, Silicon Valley companies have come up with the concept of the North Star metric. This term stands for the single metric that a company uses as a focus for its growth.
Each company chooses its own North Star metric according to its growth model and the value it provides to customers. For instance, Facebook aims at boosting the number of daily active users. For companies that work on a subscription model, the metric might be the number of premium subscribers, or customer lifetime value.
To find your metric, think of what will help you achieve long-term growth. Thus, if you develop an eCommerce business, you can grow due to the number of purchases per month. This would be your North Star metric.
4. Improve your pirate metrics
To successfully grow your North Star metric, you’ll need to keep an eye on pirate metrics as well. The pirate metrics, or AARRR, is a framework devised to help startups understand the customer journey and optimize a sales funnel. AARRR stands for acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue.
Now let’s get into the details and find out how to work on every step:
Acquisition. In this step, you should revise your customer acquisition channels. Find out the one that drives the most valuable traffic and the one that has the lowest cost. Try to improve your conversion rate on these channels – follow our comprehensive guide on conversion rate optimization.
Activation. Ask yourself how good the user’s first experience with your product is and when a potential customer realizes the real value of your product. You can reinforce the activation with a polished value proposition – read our article to create and improve one.
Retention. Try to understand how many of your customers you retain, and why others go. To improve this metric, employ some of the strategies we’ve listed in the article “Seven ways to keep your clients for life.”
Referral. Think through the ways you can turn your customers into your brand advocates.
Revenue. Mull over the question of how you can increase your revenue.
The key indicators in the last steps are your Net Promoter Score, customer lifetime value, and customer acquisition cost. To work these metrics out and improve them, follow the tips from our article “5 KPIs to keep an eye on.”
5. Build a backlog of ideas
With large data arrays and defined metrics, you can start thinking over ways to grow your business. The more ideas you have, the more regular experiments you can run. Consistency is the key to success with testing, so you should have a backlog of hypotheses and creative ideas.
For effective work, your backlog should fit the following criteria:
it has a place to create a list of ideas;
it lets you add a description and hypothesis to each of those ideas;
it allows you to prioritize ideas;
it enables teamwork;
it lets you save the results of your tests.
Thankfully, there are a lot of tools that provide the opportunities listed above. You can opt for any tool from traditional Google Sheets and Trello, to specific software, such as Experiments by GrowthHackers.
After finishing these five steps, you have everything to start running tests. Remember to track their results carefully and replenish your backlog of ideas according to the new data you get. You also need to automate processes that drive desirable outcomes. To perform all these tasks, you’ll need a wide set of tools.
Growth Hacking Tools
Working in a growth hacking framework requires a lot of tools to handle all the processes effectively. We’ve picked our favorites to help you set up integrations, collect data, run experiments, and automate processes.
Zapier is a core service for each marketer and growth hacker. It allows you to connect over 2,000 online services and tools together to help users be more productive. Apart from that, the service lets you create automated workflows with a few clicks without coding or any technical skills.
Colibri.io is a tool for internet monitoring. It helps you learn what people think about your brand or any chosen subject and allows you to approach these people. The service also helps you improve search engine results and your brand visibility on social media.
Optimizely is an A/B-testing tool. You can run experiments and measure the effectiveness of new headlines, offers, or campaigns in general.
LIKE.TG is a multi-channel marketing automation platform. The service lets you work with emails, SMS, push notifications, messengers, and chatbots. With LIKE.TG’s Automation 360 tool you can start automated message flows based on dates, events, and user’s actions. Among other useful features are message personalization, subscriber ratings, and advanced statistics. LIKE.TG provides an easy-to-use drag and drop landing page builder that allows you to create a landing page, online store, or link page for your social media bio without any coding skills and for free. You can also automate sales and communication with your customers with the help of our free CRM system. Sign up with LIKE.TG to automate your marketing, create subscription forms and chatbots, and send up to 15,000 emails to 500 subscribers a month for free.
These are only a couple of the tools you may need as a growth marketer. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to describe all the services in one article. However, we already have articles on the most popular tools:
Landing page creators;
CRM systems;
Form builders;
CMS software;
Chatbot builders.
You can save this guide to address the compilations listed above later. Now, let’s move on to the tips experienced growth hackers would give you.
Growth Hacking Tips
Ensure you can scale
Leverage your strengths
Book more time for tests
Although growth hacking is a relatively new field of marketing, it has accumulated a lot of mistakes and ways to avoid them. Read on to learn more about them.
Ensure you can scale
Growing a company seems alluring – who doesn’t want to boost their revenue? However, before starting growth hacking, make sure that you really can scale your business. Will your infrastructure really fulfill the increased demand?
Check up on the main points of your business and try to answer the following questions:
Is your team ready to manage the increased number of leads and prospects?
Can your infrastructure cope with bigger arrays of data?
Will your current business model work effectively for an upscaled company?
Can you cope with the increase in expenses?
Evaluate your processes, team, resource, and even your psychological willingness to handle a large business. Startups too often cannot cope with rapid growth, and the outcomes can be disastrous.
Leverage your strengths
There are two approaches to improvement. The first one implies focusing on tackling weaknesses to get well-rounded expertise. The problem is it often leads to mediocre or average results at best.
The second approach is to focus on using your strengths. For instance, to promote a new product, you may employ email marketing or influence marketing. Meanwhile, you don’t have the experience of working with digital influencers but have a huge mailing list full of loyal customers. Chances are good email campaigns will bring you more sales with low investment.
Don’t be afraid to refuse marketing channels or strategies that don’t work for you and don’t drive amazing results. Remember that growth hacking is all about testing and finding ways to get better outcomes for lower efforts.
Book more time for tests
You can spend hours discussing the effectiveness of ideas and hypotheses. However, the results of these conversations are only speculative, and putting ideas into practice may lead to completely different outcomes.
You should prefer testing hypotheses rather than talking about them. Keep your meetings short, make good choices, and implement them to get provable results. Be ready to refuse from poorly-performing practices or improve them on the go.
Remember to book enough time for testing your hypotheses. Most of the strategies only bring reliable results after several weeks or months. Don’t rush to get rid of some practices after several days of testing.
Even the most successful examples of growth hacking took time. Let’s examine effective techniques that transformed recent small companies into modern market leaders.
Growth Hacking Examples
Practice is the best teacher, that’s why you can’t learn without examples. We’ve picked three companies that came up with creative solutions to grow their businesses. All of them have a sustainable market share and customer base now.
Dropbox
The file-hosting service, Dropbox, shows a perfect example of rapid growth with little investment. The company didn’t use advertising or costly marketing techniques to acquire new customers. To win their audience, Dropbox created one of the most successful referral programs ever.
As you can see in the picture below, the company offers its users over 500 MB of extra storage space in return for each friend invited to the service. Immediately, this move helped Dropbox achieve a 60% surge in users.
Dollar Shave Club
Dollar Shave Club did the impossible – the company won an oversaturated market, which has been dominated by another brand for decades. To do so, Dollar Shave Club spotted customers' pains and offered a solution – delivering razors and other personal grooming products by mail for only a dollar per month. This is the perfect example of a product-market fit.
To deliver its message and benefits, Dollar Shave Club, invested in video marketing. The reasons for choosing this strategy are simple – this type of content gets 135% more reach on social media. The company crafted a video seasoned with a dose of humor, which went viral. It has got over 26 million views and triggered over 12,000 orders within a couple of days.
Airbnb
In the beginning, the little startup, Airbnb, had a strong competitor – Craigslist. To overpower their rival, Airbnb went cheeky – it encouraged the audience to cross-post Airbnb’s listings on Craigslist’s website with a backlink. The mechanic was super-easy, so hosts could publish their ads on two websites with a single click. As a result, they got more views and traffic, and so did Airbnb.
However, simply pulling traffic from your competitor's website is not enough. Airbnb knew they needed a unique value proposition, so they offered one. The pictures for listings on rival websites were terrible – people couldn't see what they were paying for and refused to book anything. Airbnb owners rented a camera and made high-quality photos of as many apartments as they could. A month after the experiment’s start, revenue doubled. Since then, Airbnb offers professional photo services to hosts.
Growth hacking is the perfect way to scale your business fast with minimal investment. To employ this framework, you need skills in data collection and analytics, programming, as well as a huge dose of creativity. Book time for brainstorming and creative thinking by using automation services for routine tasks. Sign up with LIKE.TG – we’ll help you set up automated email and messaging campaigns, web push notifications, and email flows.
Growth hacking
Growth hacking is a field in marketing that uses cost-effective tactics to achieve rapid business growth. Growth hackers have to find cheap and creative solutions, run experiments, and measure results.
In the video below, Growth Tribe defines growth hacking and explains how it differs from traditional marketing.
This instructive guide will help you learn more about growth hacking. We’ll explore the benefits of this approach, learn how to set up growth hacking for your business, and unpack some tips and examples.
What Is the Goal of Growth Hacking in Marketing?
The concept of growth hacking appeared in the era of early startups. These businesses needed to enlarge their customer base, market share, and revenue as fast as possible. Meanwhile, startups had extremely low budgets, so they couldn’t afford traditional promotion and customer acquisition tactics.
This situation has formed the primary goal of growth hacking in marketing – to acquire the maximum number of customers for minimal costs as quickly as possible. Following this objective, businesses devised specific growth hacking methods – we’ll explore them later in this article. Now it’s time to discover how exactly growth hacking tactics differ from ones that traditional marketing uses.
Difference Between Growth Hacking and Marketing
Growth hacking lives at the intersection of marketing, technology, and data science. Thus, it goes against traditional marketing in many ways. Let’s discover the main differences between these approaches.
Goals. Traditional marketing focuses mostly on brand awareness and increasing sales. Growth marketing’s be-all and end-all is business growth in general, thus, this approach works with all stages of the sales funnel.
Product. Marketing has everything to do with selling your finished product. Growth hacking goes further and helps companies improve the product in order to meet customer’s expectations.
Expertise. Modern marketers must not only conduct marketing campaigns, but also measure their results on and offline. However, their expertise still lies mostly in the marketing field. Growth hacking requires the ability to automate everything, and knowledge of data analytics and programming. Growth hackers can measure the effect marketing has on business in general.
Budgets. Growth hacking implies limited resources and tries to make the most of them by using offbeat tactics, mechanics, and channels. Traditional marketing often operates with bigger budgets and can afford paid promotional techniques – PPC, targeted ads, TV commercials, SMM, and so on.
Focus on business growth, expertise in data analytics and programming, tight budgets, and management of all stages of the pipeline are core characteristics of growth hacking. Read on to learn how exactly this approach combines and employs all of it.
How Growth Hacking Works
To make business expansion soar without spending a fortune, growth hacking employs automation, data analytics, and creativity. Customer attraction at the top stages of a funnel requires growth hackers to use offbeat techniques. Thus, they constantly come up with novel ways to generate traffic.
After devising a hypothesis, growth hackers start testing them – this is the only way to find out which tactics drive desirable results. Here is the moment when data analytics comes in handy.
To achieve sustainable growth and improve outcomes for future campaigns, growth hackers need to figure out not only WHAT works well but also WHY it does. Thus, growth hackers use data to track customers along their journey down the pipeline and try to understand what causes the existing results and how they can improve conversions at each stage. They constantly explore the target audience's expectations and customer satisfaction and offer to change the product to improve results.
Finally, when growth hackers learn what works best, they automate those processes. After this, they are ready to repeat the cycle with a new hypothesis. These loops of creating hypotheses, running experiments, collecting data, and automating processes are crucial in growth hacking. Let’s explore the details about the importance of this approach.
Why is Growth Hacking Important?
Growth hacking is vital for startups and other businesses on a tight budget. This concept allows brands to expand their audiences and boost revenue even though they can’t afford costly marketing tactics. Growth hackers constantly search for low-priced ways to promote a business and, thus, eliminate a lot of spending.
Better yet, growth hacking has a positive effect on big corporations as well. Employing some basic growth hacking methods, brands can embrace new audiences, improve ROI, and increase customer loyalty. These are just a part of the benefits growth hacking brings about.
Benefits of Growth Hacking
There are a lot of ways growth hacking can affect a business, apart from its low cost and impressive results. Let’s get into detail and unpack the main benefits of this approach.
Provable outcomes. Growth hacking is data-driven, so companies that use it, run experiments, and measure their performance. Thus, they have a full picture of the efficacy of each technique employed. Better yet, they have concrete measurements that allow them to judge and prove the results of strategies they use.
Product improvement. Growth hackers constantly test different options and learn more about the audience – their demands, preferences, interests, and more. It leads to a deeper understanding of how to improve the product or service a company provides.
Adjustable strategies. Modern marketing is kind of tricky – the strategies that worked well half a year ago may suddenly stop bringing desirable results. Growth hacking keeps an eye on performance and allows you to dump less effective methods to new ones. It also works the opposite way – you can scale the bulletproof tactics and apply them to other marketing channels.
Growth hacking can change the game for your business; it works off the beaten track and lets you get incredible results by changing minor details and investing next to nothing in it. For instance, replacing a traditional lead magnet with free access to paid content can drive a 400% increase in opt-ins. Read on to discover more growth hacking strategies and techniques to adopt.
Growth Hacking Strategies and Techniques
Create a brand personality
Collaborate to grow audiences
Find new communication channels
Employ interactive content
Craft a free tool
Thinking through ways to boost your company’s growth can get tough. To help you out with this task, we’ve picked five growth hacking tactics and strategies.
Create a brand personality
Facebook, Tesla, Uber – what factor unites these companies, apart from their rapid growth and market leadership? Well, there are well-known and beloved personalities behind them. That’s not a coincidence – the popularity of these startups’ founders has a dramatic effect on their expansion.
People tend to trust, communicate, and engage with other people more than with faceless businesses. Use this human psychology trait to your advantage – create a strong personality behind your company. You can start with social networks – they are a great place to build your personal brand and communicate with potential clients. To inspire people, start a personal blog telling them about your launch.
Collaborate to grow audiences
Partnerships are a golden opportunity to double or triple your brand’s audience in the blink of an eye. Better yet, it requires next to nothing in investment, especially compared to traditional marketing.
To benefit from this technique, choose the partner carefully. Opt for a complementary business – it ensures an influx of new audience members with the same interests as your brand. For instance, if you sell natural juice, you may collaborate with a protein bar manufacturer. Chances are your best customers are fitness enthusiasts.
Before offering the partnership, get ready. Prepare ideas on how to blend your audiences organically. The options may be tagging each other on social media, launching live streams together, offering product bundles, and so on.
Find new communication channels
Highly competitive communication channels are demanding. To get to your audience there and win, you probably need a huge budget. If you launch a business in a busy industry with well-established leaders, the barriers may become too high.
To break through to your potential customers, consider smaller social networks or resources. Choose the platforms, which your most promising prospects prefer. You may opt for TikTok if you work with a young audience, or go to The Dots if you target professionals from creative industries.
Employ interactive content
Growth hacking requires creating various types of content, from articles to videos to ads, and so on. In an ideal world, your audience would engage with every piece of your content. In reality, the users’ attention spans are limited. To grab their attention, use interactive elements.
Interactive content can lower bounce rates, improve search engine results, boost engagement, etc. Besides,in most cases adding interactive elements costs brands next to nothing.
The best part of this tactic is that elements don't have to be expensive or difficult to produce. You can use special tools to create surveys, quizzes, action buttons, or subscription forms. To create web forms for free, try the form builder from LIKE.TG. It lets you craft embedded, floating, fixed, and pop-up forms from scratch, or use templates. LIKE.TG forms are responsive and adjustable on the go.
Craft a free tool
Lead magnets are a proven technique to broaden the mouth of your lead funnel and collect more contacts. Their magic is based on the reciprocity principle – people are more likely to give something – their money, time, or data – if they got something in advance. By the way, using psychological traits is an extremely effective and free technique. Read our list of hacks to make the most of them.
Returning to lead magnets, you should keep in mind that users are overwhelmed with free ebooks, checklists, and other pieces of content. So, you can take a step further and offer your audience a free tool. People will get used to it and appreciate it, so they become more prone to share their data with you and test your paid tools.
On the basis of these tactics, you may invent your solutions to start growth hacking in your company. To facilitate your transition to the new framework, we’ve created a step-by-step guide.
How to Start Growth Hacking
Check your product-market fit
Create a data lake
Pick your North Star metric
Improve your pirate metrics
Build a backlog of ideas
Switching to the new approach requires resources and an action plan. In this part of the article, we’ll offer you a five-step plan you can follow to engrain growth hacking into your company.
1. Check your product-market fit
Product-market fit is the degree to which a product satisfies market demand. Put simply, if your product-market fit is great, it means that your audience needs your product. Hence, you won’t face significant difficulties in selling it.
To figure out whether you have a good product-market fit or not, you may employ various tactics. At first, consider creating a landing page and measuring the number of leads it brings. This will help you get an idea about the demand for your product.
If you already have a customer base, you may lean on customer retention and satisfaction rates, as well as the number of brand advocates you have. Customer surveys and conversations may come in handy as well.
Try Sean Ellis’ product-market fit survey. It will help you understand how many people will be disappointed with the disappearance of your product. Moreover, you’ll get a better understanding of your core benefits and the opportunities for improvement.
2. Create a data lake
As growth hacking is a data-driven approach, you need to build your data lake – a vast array of raw data. In this step, your task is to collect as much data as you can without worrying about the purpose. Here is the main information you can look for:
the source of a customer’s first visit to your website;
the pages a customer looks through on your site;
the source from where they’ve signed up for a trial;
the interaction with features of your product;
the customer lifetime value;
the references each customer makes;
the results of those references;
the reasons for avoiding your product.
Think through how you will collect this data, where and how you plan to store it, and what tools you will use to analyze the information. The easiest way is to use CRM software. Opt for analytical systems – they are made to manage data about your customers. To find the best option for you, follow our comprehensive guide on CRM systems.
3. Pick your North Star metric
In recent years, Silicon Valley companies have come up with the concept of the North Star metric. This term stands for the single metric that a company uses as a focus for its growth.
Each company chooses its own North Star metric according to its growth model and the value it provides to customers. For instance, Facebook aims at boosting the number of daily active users. For companies that work on a subscription model, the metric might be the number of premium subscribers, or customer lifetime value.
To find your metric, think of what will help you achieve long-term growth. Thus, if you develop an eCommerce business, you can grow due to the number of purchases per month. This would be your North Star metric.
4. Improve your pirate metrics
To successfully grow your North Star metric, you’ll need to keep an eye on pirate metrics as well. The pirate metrics, or AARRR, is a framework devised to help startups understand the customer journey and optimize a sales funnel. AARRR stands for acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue.
Now let’s get into the details and find out how to work on every step:
Acquisition. In this step, you should revise your customer acquisition channels. Find out the one that drives the most valuable traffic and the one that has the lowest cost. Try to improve your conversion rate on these channels – follow our comprehensive guide on conversion rate optimization.
Activation. Ask yourself how good the user’s first experience with your product is and when a potential customer realizes the real value of your product. You can reinforce the activation with a polished value proposition – read our article to create and improve one.
Retention. Try to understand how many of your customers you retain, and why others go. To improve this metric, employ some of the strategies we’ve listed in the article “Seven ways to keep your clients for life.”
Referral. Think through the ways you can turn your customers into your brand advocates.
Revenue. Mull over the question of how you can increase your revenue.
The key indicators in the last steps are your Net Promoter Score, customer lifetime value, and customer acquisition cost. To work these metrics out and improve them, follow the tips from our article “5 KPIs to keep an eye on.”
5. Build a backlog of ideas
With large data arrays and defined metrics, you can start thinking over ways to grow your business. The more ideas you have, the more regular experiments you can run. Consistency is the key to success with testing, so you should have a backlog of hypotheses and creative ideas.
For effective work, your backlog should fit the following criteria:
it has a place to create a list of ideas;
it lets you add a description and hypothesis to each of those ideas;
it allows you to prioritize ideas;
it enables teamwork;
it lets you save the results of your tests.
Thankfully, there are a lot of tools that provide the opportunities listed above. You can opt for any tool from traditional Google Sheets and Trello, to specific software, such as Experiments by GrowthHackers.
After finishing these five steps, you have everything to start running tests. Remember to track their results carefully and replenish your backlog of ideas according to the new data you get. You also need to automate processes that drive desirable outcomes. To perform all these tasks, you’ll need a wide set of tools.
Growth Hacking Tools
Working in a growth hacking framework requires a lot of tools to handle all the processes effectively. We’ve picked our favorites to help you set up integrations, collect data, run experiments, and automate processes.
Zapier is a core service for each marketer and growth hacker. It allows you to connect over 2,000 online services and tools together to help users be more productive. Apart from that, the service lets you create automated workflows with a few clicks without coding or any technical skills.
Colibri.io is a tool for internet monitoring. It helps you learn what people think about your brand or any chosen subject and allows you to approach these people. The service also helps you improve search engine results and your brand visibility on social media.
Optimizely is an A/B-testing tool. You can run experiments and measure the effectiveness of new headlines, offers, or campaigns in general.
LIKE.TG is a multi-channel marketing automation platform. The service lets you work with emails, SMS, push notifications, messengers, and chatbots. With LIKE.TG’s Automation 360 tool you can start automated message flows based on dates, events, and user’s actions. Among other useful features are message personalization, subscriber ratings, and advanced statistics. LIKE.TG provides an easy-to-use drag and drop landing page builder that allows you to create a landing page, online store, or link page for your social media bio without any coding skills and for free. You can also automate sales and communication with your customers with the help of our free CRM system. Sign up with LIKE.TG to automate your marketing, create subscription forms and chatbots, and send up to 15,000 emails to 500 subscribers a month for free.
These are only a couple of the tools you may need as a growth marketer. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to describe all the services in one article. However, we already have articles on the most popular tools:
Landing page creators;
CRM systems;
Form builders;
CMS software;
Chatbot builders.
You can save this guide to address the compilations listed above later. Now, let’s move on to the tips experienced growth hackers would give you.
Growth Hacking Tips
Ensure you can scale
Leverage your strengths
Book more time for tests
Although growth hacking is a relatively new field of marketing, it has accumulated a lot of mistakes and ways to avoid them. Read on to learn more about them.
Ensure you can scale
Growing a company seems alluring – who doesn’t want to boost their revenue? However, before starting growth hacking, make sure that you really can scale your business. Will your infrastructure really fulfill the increased demand?
Check up on the main points of your business and try to answer the following questions:
Is your team ready to manage the increased number of leads and prospects?
Can your infrastructure cope with bigger arrays of data?
Will your current business model work effectively for an upscaled company?
Can you cope with the increase in expenses?
Evaluate your processes, team, resource, and even your psychological willingness to handle a large business. Startups too often cannot cope with rapid growth, and the outcomes can be disastrous.
Leverage your strengths
There are two approaches to improvement. The first one implies focusing on tackling weaknesses to get well-rounded expertise. The problem is it often leads to mediocre or average results at best.
The second approach is to focus on using your strengths. For instance, to promote a new product, you may employ email marketing or influence marketing. Meanwhile, you don’t have the experience of working with digital influencers but have a huge mailing list full of loyal customers. Chances are good email campaigns will bring you more sales with low investment.
Don’t be afraid to refuse marketing channels or strategies that don’t work for you and don’t drive amazing results. Remember that growth hacking is all about testing and finding ways to get better outcomes for lower efforts.
Book more time for tests
You can spend hours discussing the effectiveness of ideas and hypotheses. However, the results of these conversations are only speculative, and putting ideas into practice may lead to completely different outcomes.
You should prefer testing hypotheses rather than talking about them. Keep your meetings short, make good choices, and implement them to get provable results. Be ready to refuse from poorly-performing practices or improve them on the go.
Remember to book enough time for testing your hypotheses. Most of the strategies only bring reliable results after several weeks or months. Don’t rush to get rid of some practices after several days of testing.
Even the most successful examples of growth hacking took time. Let’s examine effective techniques that transformed recent small companies into modern market leaders.
Growth Hacking Examples
Practice is the best teacher, that’s why you can’t learn without examples. We’ve picked three companies that came up with creative solutions to grow their businesses. All of them have a sustainable market share and customer base now.
Dropbox
The file-hosting service, Dropbox, shows a perfect example of rapid growth with little investment. The company didn’t use advertising or costly marketing techniques to acquire new customers. To win their audience, Dropbox created one of the most successful referral programs ever.
As you can see in the picture below, the company offers its users over 500 MB of extra storage space in return for each friend invited to the service. Immediately, this move helped Dropbox achieve a 60% surge in users.
Dollar Shave Club
Dollar Shave Club did the impossible – the company won an oversaturated market, which has been dominated by another brand for decades. To do so, Dollar Shave Club spotted customers' pains and offered a solution – delivering razors and other personal grooming products by mail for only a dollar per month. This is the perfect example of a product-market fit.
To deliver its message and benefits, Dollar Shave Club, invested in video marketing. The reasons for choosing this strategy are simple – this type of content gets 135% more reach on social media. The company crafted a video seasoned with a dose of humor, which went viral. It has got over 26 million views and triggered over 12,000 orders within a couple of days.
Airbnb
In the beginning, the little startup, Airbnb, had a strong competitor – Craigslist. To overpower their rival, Airbnb went cheeky – it encouraged the audience to cross-post Airbnb’s listings on Craigslist’s website with a backlink. The mechanic was super-easy, so hosts could publish their ads on two websites with a single click. As a result, they got more views and traffic, and so did Airbnb.
However, simply pulling traffic from your competitor's website is not enough. Airbnb knew they needed a unique value proposition, so they offered one. The pictures for listings on rival websites were terrible – people couldn't see what they were paying for and refused to book anything. Airbnb owners rented a camera and made high-quality photos of as many apartments as they could. A month after the experiment’s start, revenue doubled. Since then, Airbnb offers professional photo services to hosts.
Growth hacking is the perfect way to scale your business fast with minimal investment. To employ this framework, you need skills in data collection and analytics, programming, as well as a huge dose of creativity. Book time for brainstorming and creative thinking by using automation services for routine tasks. Sign up with LIKE.TG – we’ll help you set up automated email and messaging campaigns, web push notifications, and email flows.
Hot lead
A hot lead is a marketing lead interested in a brand's product. They realize the competitive advantages of your product, and have the budget and authority to make a purchase. These leads are at the bottom of your sales funnel.
In this article, you'll learn the difference between cold, warm, and hot leads and how to convert hot leads. So, stay tuned!
The Difference Between Cold, Warm, and Hot Leads
These three types of leads represent the way a user comes through to become your customer. They have different intents and needs, so they require different approaches. Let's take a closer look at the features of each type of lead.
Cold leads are at the top of your sales funnel. They may not know that your brand solves their problem, or they may not be interested in your products yet. Your sales representatives could collect their contacts via cold calling or cold emailing. You need to develop a step-by-step lead nurturing strategy to convert a cold lead into a customer.
Warm leads are in the middle of your sales funnel. They are familiar with your brand. Warm leads could have subscribed to your email newsletter, followed you on Facebook or Instagram, or visited your website. They realize that your brand provides a possible solution to your problem but are not ready to buy yet. They may have doubts regarding the product or have no authority to make a buying decision. You need to implement a personalized approach to make them choose your company.
Hot leads are your most valuable prospects because they are at the bottom of your sales funnel. These leads know much about your company and realize the benefits of your product. They're highly qualified leads. They have both desire and authority to buy, but they need a final push. Sales reps should act immediately not to lose such a deal. The more time you think about how to approach a hot lead, the faster it will turn cold.
Now that you know how cold, warm, and hot leads differ, it's time to move on. We'll share some practical tips that will help you convert hot leads into customers.
How to convert hot leads?
Hot leads have a whooping conversion rate. In addition, you don't even need to nurture them. Your task is to remove the last obstacle which prevents them from becoming your client. So, we'll share our experience in converting hot leads into customers.
Identify the sources of acquisition and engagement. This information is essential since it helps you determine your leads' needs. You'll get insights into their customer journey and discover their interests. You can get this information in your CRM or Google Analytics if you haven't nurtured the leads on your own. LIKE.TG provides a free CRM which adds leads automatically after they perform targeted actions on a landing page, chatbot, live chat on your website,email campaign, subscription form, or make a payment. So, once they click "Order," they will be added to your CRM. For more details, read this guide. You'll get to know which products they're interested in and which channels bring you more profits.
Provide the necessary marketing support. Although hot leads know pretty much about your company, they may need the final push before making a purchase. Never treat your cold, warm, and hot leads with the same content and offers. Discover your leads' hesitations and obstacles to provide the necessary collateral when it comes to a purchase. You can share your most successful case studies and testimonials, offer a demo, or give a discount.
Use personalization and segmentation. These tools reinforce your personalized approach to every lead. People appreciate brands caring about their individual needs and preferences, so don't miss a chance to become such a brand. With personalization, you can send the same email but include dynamic content, which varies depending on the data you have. Segmentation allows you to divide your leads into segments based on common characteristics and appeal to them with relevant offers. With LIKE.TG, you can send personalized and segmented emails for free.
Offer a free trial. Although hot leads spend much time on research and realize the benefits of your SaaS product, it may be difficult for them to buy a plan in advance. Let them evaluate its features and competitive advantages with the help of a free trial. You can enable leads to use all the advanced features of your product during a week, and if they like it, they will buy. Ask your customer care agents to support leads this week to help make the most of your product.
Use a CRM system. With a CRM, you can keep track of all your deals, monitor how they move from the top to the bottom of the sales funnel, and communicate with them in the most appropriate channel. LIKE.TG provides a free CRM that will help you effectively manage your sales process and communication channels in one place. You can collect and store customer data, launch marketing campaigns, add new deals, and connect with leads from a single platform. Allocate the deals among your sales reps and reward those who perform better.
Congrats, now you know how hot leads differ from cold and warm prospects. Get inspired by our tips and register with LIKE.TG to bring communications with your customers to the next level!
Guest blogging
Guest blogging is the process of writing articles for another company that aims at sharing expertise and popularizing a certain brand’s website. It helps content creators increase their traffic, attain new customers, improve domain authority, establishtheir position as industry leaders and experts, improve brand recognition, and maintain relationships with companies in the same industry.
In this video, you’llget guest blogging tips, learn how to search for guest blogging sites, anddiscover how tofindkeywords for topics that have high traffic.
In this article, we’ll unpack the reasons to leverage guest blogging, its benefits, and opportunities. Next, we’ll proceed to the stepsyou need to take to start guest blogging, find appropriate websites, and monetize your efforts.
Why should youstart guest blogging?
Writing evergreen articles or creating other forms of content that are relevant and fit for a partnering company is a challenging task. However, it offers several benefits for guest bloggers. By sharing their expertise, companies obtain high traffic, new leads and customers, domain authority, brand awareness, and good relationships with businesses within the market. Besides, it enables brands to obtain constant growth and win customer trust.
Guest blogging is beneficial for both the author and the website hosting their content. Becoming a guest blogger improves a brand’s exposure to different target audiences and attracts people interested in a particular topic.
Now that you have the reasons to hire professionals to create quality blog posts, let’s proceed to the next section to discuss the advantages of this effective technique.
Benefits of Guest Blogging
Creating original and quality content for companies in the same industry isn’t an easy task, but it’s worth the effort because of the various benefits it brings:
high website traffic;
wide reach;
good relationships with influencers and well-established companies in the industry;
extra social media shares;
big social media following;
established position of an industry leader and expert;
additional backlinksto your website;
high brand awareness;
qualified leads;
fast sales cycle;
big sales volume;
profound content marketing knowledge and new skills;
different points of view and information for readers.
The pros are clear now, so it’s time to review how bloggers can find an opportunity to write a guest post.
Howto Find Guest Blogging Opportunities
Use Google search
Consider prolific guest bloggers
Look through backlinks of your rival companies
Become a part of relevant communities
As a guest blogger, you will definitely look for opportunities to place your articles on relevant sites with high authority. When doing this, remember to review blogs that relate to your industry and have an audience that will be interested in your company. For example, if your brand sells and specializes in beauty products, it’s better to look for a website that contains information about cosmetics, skincare essentials, fragrances, etc.
Use Google search
The majority of blogs that need guest bloggers inform about this on their websites. You can easily find them by leveraging Google search operators.
Say, your brand provides customers with marketing automation software solutions. To find a placeto post something related to your industry, you need to create a query in Google that contains your main keyword plus “submit guest post” (use quotation marks) to obtain all marketing automation websites open to guest posting. Your query should look like this:
marketing automation platform + “submit guest post”
Look, you instantly receive around 15,800 results for your query. The only thing you need to do now is to find the most relevant websites for your business.
Consider prolific guest bloggers
One more opportunity is to find some great authors in your industry who always come up with relevant and quality content. Look through their accounts on social media to see their articles and the companies they promote. These brands can be perfect for your articles as well. Find them on Google, and check out whether it’s possible to publish your guest post. Explore their guidelines.
To search for an influential guest blogger, you should create the following query in Google:
name + “guest post by” (use quotation marks)
For example, let’s look for guest posts written by Kay Dexter, a marketing strategist. You can see the necessary query below:
Kay Dexter + “guest post by”
By writing this way, you’ll obtain the websites that contain Kay Dexter’s guest posts.
Look through backlinks of your rival companies
To get great websites for your guest posts, you can always leverage Ahrefs or SEMRush. Select your key competitors, and check their recent backlink profiles. If your competitors succeed in publishing their guest posts on some good websites, there’s a chance that they will publish your articles as well.
For example, let’s check Runner’s World’s website and its backlinks in Ahrefs.
Become a part of relevant communities
Depending on the type of your business, you can join an appropriate community for new opportunities. For example, if you work in digital marketing, it’s worth creating a group on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Slack. This way, you can find websites that welcome articles from other companies. Besides joining such a community, you should also show your active participation in it.
Now that you know where to find some opportunities for your guest blogging, follow our guide to start creating guest posts and publishing them on reliable and relevant websites.
How to Start Guest Blogging
Look for guest blogging opportunities
Get to knowyour target websites’ content
Explore the guest posts on these blogs
Find out what types of authors these sitesneed
Study their guidelines
Pitch a great idea for your post, and write an article
Create a guest bio
Monitor and evaluate your post’s performance
To kickstart your guest blogging, you should be aware of several steps. We’ll discuss them in more detail below.
Look for guest blogging opportunities. As we’ve already mentioned in the previous section, when searching for some chances to guest post, pay attention to the websites that operate in your industry. The blogs you search for should be in the same niche, have an audience that will be interested in your company, and have a high level of engagement. Look for potential clients through Google search, prolific guest bloggers, social media, competitor backlinks, or communities of guest bloggers. MyBlogGuest is one of the examples of such communities.
Get to know your targetwebsites’ content. Before writing any guest posts, you need to understand the content of your target blog. Explore the audience they write for and the type of content they publish. You should be aware of all these factsbefore writing for them.
Explore the guest posts on these blogs. Look through and analyze the guest posts from other writers and compare them with articles published by the owner. Find out whether they succeeded to perform like the owner’s blog posts. For this purpose, see the number of comments and shares. If the audience doesn’t demonstrate a high level of engagement, it’s better to avoid such blogs. They won’t let you establish authority or bring traffic to your website.
Find out what types of authors these sites need.Take a look at several bios of experts invited to write posts. It will enable you to figure out what kinds of people they work with: freelancers, bloggers, or business owners.
Study their guidelines. Before contacting a blog owner, you should see their guest posting guidelines first and try to follow them when creating a guest post. Be aware of the posts they would like to see, the format, and other essential details. It’s necessary to avoid any complications during your partnership and make a great article.
Pitch a great idea for your post and write an article. Once you read the guidelines, you will know for sure what thingsthis or that blog requires. If it mentions submitting a topic idea, you can prepare several of the most appropriate ones. Depending on the quality of thiswebsite’s content, you should prepare a relatedpost. Look through the previous guest posts to create something similar so that your content is relevant.
Create a guest bio. This part is the most important for you because it contains self-promotion links.Try to do your best to describe yourself as an expert to gain trust. You can include a link to your site, social profile, or information about your background and experience.
Monitor and evaluate your post’s performance. Finally, you need to track the progress of your guest post. If you strive to boost traffic to your site, then measure the results by using Google Analytics. This way, you’ll define the success of your article.
It’s time to jump into the next section and walk you through the ways to search for sites that welcome guest posts.
How to Find Guest Blogging Sites
Sometimes writers have problems with finding the right sites to guest blog. In this section, we’ll unveil several ways to do it.
Look for special blogs on Google. You can easily find the necessary lists of sites that allow guest bloggers to write articles for them. Many people have studied this question before and shared their knowledge on Google. This way, you’ll have a quick look at the websites related to your niche and their domain authority. The only thing left is to choose the most appropriate ones for your company.
Use special tools. You can research the necessary websites with different tools. For example, platforms like BuzzSumo enables users to search for guest blogs by writing topic keywords + “guest post” or “guest post by.” As a result, you’ll have a list of blogs that allow guest posts.
Analyze the activity of your competitors. By using different tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush, you have an opportunity to take a look at your competitors’ actions and strategies: their backlinks, websites where they guest posted, and see the authority of websites they write for. This analytics is one of the primary sources of guest blogging sites. You can choose the companies that suit you the most and contact their teams.
Now let’s figure out how to earn money using guest blogging.
How to Make Money Guest Blogging
Savvy marketers know the numerous advantages of guest blogging and ways to earn money by implementing this strategy. There are several things you should consider to receive money for your articles.
Sell your product. The easiest way to monetize your guest posts is to promote your product and ultimately sell it to a new audience. You can choose an appropriate moment to educate readers about your company and explain what problems it can help solve. For example, if your article is about platforms that help build websites for free, don’t forget to mention that you have such a service with a free plan or trial period and place a link if possible.
Offer to create posts for compensation. If you are a freelancer and you are good at writing informative and relevant articles, guest blogging might be your additional source of income. Consider writing posts for influencers, teaching others how to write such blog posts, partnering up with companies and creating content for them, or creating an online course on guest posting.
Sell affiliate products. One more great idea to earn money withguest blogging is to sell other companies’ products. You need to masterfully describe them and educate your readers about their benefits. The two main advantages are that the product isn’t yours, so you don’t need to spend extra time on its development, and you get money for its promotion and selling. Put links that lead to these products, promote courses, webinars, and training, or invite them to join online communities.
Write sponsored reviews.Companies often need feedback and reviews from experts in the same industry. You can become one and earn some money. However, stick only to honest reviews to avoid harming your reputation.
In a nutshell, guest blogging should be a crucial part of a successful company’s strategy. It brings brand recognition and a wide target audience and positively affects SEO. If youaim to become a guest blogger or considering hosting guest articles on your site, just give it a try.
HTML email
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language.
The video produced by Code School explains how to write HTML emails and provides tips to follow.
Create the look of your text; you can use:
bold;
italics;
color of the text.
An HTML email is designed like a website with the help of graphics, colors, table columns, and links. You don't need to be a programmer to create it since email marketing services provide flexible campaign builders.
Let's create HTML emails!
We have an HTML email editor for tech-savvy marketers and drag and drop editor, which requires no HTML knowledge.
Register and create an HTML email!
Plain text, in comparison, is an email that contains only text and has no formatting. A well-formatted HTML email will yield better results than a plain text format. Some people want their email to look better, more vibrant, brighter.
A lot of businesses use HTML emails to make their message look more formal, professional, and often much more in line with their corporate image. If you want to create web sites, you cannot do this without HTML. The basics of HTML will significantly simplify your life, and your website will become much more interesting.
The text of a plain email can only contain ASCII characters. This means that the text of the letter will NOT have the following text formatting elements:
bold;
italics;
color;
images;
font styles.
When developing an HTML email,do not forget about simplicity, do not complicate your work, you’d better stick to the option of two columns. The usage of images should be minimized, like Outlook, for instance, does not support background images. You can use background images for decoration, but since the email should be easy to read, it is better to do without it. Because the message view window in email clientsoften takes only a small part of the general window, your email should be no more than 600 pixels wide. After all, nobody likes horizontal scroll bars. Besides, remember to keep proportions.
Hard bounce
A hard bounce means that email delivery to a certain recipienthas failed permanently. Most of the time, recipients themselves cause hard bounces to happen.
Hard Bounce Causes
invalid email addresses;
invalid domain names; or
the email server of the recipient, by policy, blocks the delivery.
It happens sometimes that subscribers, for personal reasons, do not wish to give out their real email address. So when filling in the form on your website or landing page, they insert a random email address just to pass the procedure requirements.
However, it may occur that valid email addresses are giving hard bounces, or the subscriber could have unsubscribedby mistake, and this caused a hard bounce. In such cases, the subscriber needs to opt-inonce again to be in your subscribers’ list.
In case of a hard bounce, the sender gets an autoresponderemail, also called a delivery notification.
With the LIKE.TG Email Verifier, you can decrease the number of hard bounces. The service checks your mailing list and removes invalid email addresses. As a result, you stay out of the spam folder, increase email deliverability and your sender reputation.
Gross rating point
Gross Rating Point (GRP) is a ratio used to measure the influence of advertising campaigns on theirtarget audience. It helps companies define their approaches to reach specific target markets and allocate their budgets effectively.
In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits of evaluating your gross rating point and figure out the measures you need to calculate this ratio.
Why is a gross rating point important?
GRP is an essential measure that enables businesses to assess the success of their advertising campaigns. It measures the number of campaign impressions and identifies the level of advertising delivery and exposure. Media buyers use this percentage to determine the strongest components of their media plans.
Evaluating your gross rating point is crucial because it helps measure the impact of your advertising campaigns and messages on people who perceive them. The ratio can be leveraged for various forms of media, such as radio, television, the internet, and billboards.
When having GRP, media owners know the approaches they should and shouldn’t consider to win their target market. Moreover, it allows companies to allocate their resources to develop appropriate advertising campaigns that can effectively reach out to people.
Now that you know why you need to take this measure into account, we’ll proceed to the calculations.
How to Calculate Gross Rating Point
By estimating GRPs, media planners can uncover the number of impressions they managed to obtain through specific channels and campaigns. Media buyers can receive information on the audience they succeeded to reach and compare it with the population.
If you leverage various types of media and strive to determine the efficiency of your advertising campaigns and the number of impressions, see the formula below. It will help you estimate the ratio easily.
Let’s take country A, for example. 60 million of its population are young people aged 20 to 33 years old. A firm’s owner decides to launch a campaign and see its results. It delivers an average frequency of 8 impressions to 1,000,000 young people.
Let’s calculate GRP for this business by using the formula above.
GRP = (1,000,000 / 60,000,000) * 8 = 1.67% * 8 = 13.36
To sum it up, if it’s necessary for you to know the level of your campaign’s effectiveness, you should calculate your GRP. As a result, you’ll know the approaches that work well with your audience, choose the right channels, and deliver messages that resonate with your target market.
Guerrilla marketing
Guerrilla marketing is a marketing field that uses unconventional tactics to promote a product or brand. Brands can hold guerrilla marketing campaigns online, offline, or with a mix of both.
In the video below, marketing expert, coach, and blogger Adam Erhart explains what guerrilla marketing is and how it works.
This post will concentrate on the practical side of guerrilla marketing. We’ll unpack some strategies and examples and share a step-by-step guide on how to set up your guerrilla marketing campaign. Also, you'll learn a little something about the types and benefits of guerrilla marketing. First, let’s explore the main features of guerrilla marketing.
Features of guerrilla marketing
Because of its complexity, it’s hard to define the term guerrilla marketing. However, you can recognize a guerrilla marketing campaign when you see one. All you have to do is look for certain features.
The element of surprise. This type of marketing offers unusual interactions with potential customers. Often, guerrilla marketing tries to surprise or shock the audience.
Cost-effectiveness. Most guerrilla marketing campaigns have low budgets but drive great results. This trait makes guerrilla marketing resemblegrowth hacking.
Interactiveness. Guerrilla marketing relies on emotions and experiences and nudges the target audience to participate in a campaign.
Used in B2C. Emotions are a great sales driver for B2C. In B2B, decisions are made more thoughtfully and thoroughly, which makes guerrilla marketing less applicable in this sector.
Provocativeness. As guerrilla marketing relies on emotional interaction, campaigns are often provocative and risky.
Nowhere is the last point more palpable than in the question of the legitimacy of guerrilla marketing.
Is guerrilla marketing illegal?
The shocking character of most guerrilla marketing campaigns and recurring news about brands being punished for them make people think that guerrilla marketing is illegal. However, that’s not always the case.
Sometimes companies get into trouble with the law because of their guerrilla marketing. For instance, many years ago Coca Cola got fined for placing branded graffiti in New Orleans’s historic areas. It turned out that the brand didn’t get permission from local authorities to do so.
However, you can stay within the law and still be creative and provocative with your promotional campaigns. To avoid problems, consult a lawyer. They will help you check the restrictions, get permission, and so on.
Guerrilla marketing tactics surprise your audience, make them interact with your brand, and provoke emotions, sometimes to the point of being scandalous. The question is are these strategies effective? Let’s crunch some numbers and find the answer.
Guerrilla Marketing Statistics
Guerrilla marketing is not as holistic a phenomenon as, for example,email marketing or SMM. Thus, it’s hard to measure its efficiency in general. We’ve assembled statistics on using unconventional approaches to brand promotion to find out if it is effective.
27%of decision-makers in Germany use unconventional marketing to promote their brand.
Guerrilla marketers spend 90% less on advertising because of using unconventional approaches.
Word-of-mouth accounts for 54% of purchasing decisions.
Guerrilla marketing can nudge your potential customers towards a purchase and help you save some of your marketing budget at the same time. Still, only a small percentage of marketers benefit from this approach. Read on to find out what positive effects guerrilla marketing can have on your business.
Guerrilla Marketing Benefits
We’ve learned that guerrilla marketing is a cost-effective and efficient way to promote a business. Let’s go through the other advantages of this approach.
Increased brand awareness.Guerrilla marketing is all about creating a buzz around a company. Provocative and unconventional campaigns are the perfect fuel for building brand awareness.
Standing outfrom competitors. Bold and memorable guerrilla marketing actions work as well as a unique value proposition does in terms of setting your business apart from competitors.
Emotional connection with a brand.Since guerrilla marketing is good at provoking emotions, a single campaign can create a strong connection between a brand and a customer. This connection is the be-all-and-end-all of strong long-lasting relationships with buyers.
Building partnerships. Most guerrilla marketing campaigns are complex undertakings, that require collaboration between several businesses or organizations. Hence, guerrilla marketing can be the perfect base for creating partnerships.
So, guerrilla marketing can be a game-changer for your business. It can make your brand famous worldwide off the bat without wasting a dime on promotion. Read on to learn about various types of guerrilla marketing you can employ.
Types of Guerrilla Marketing
Ambush marketing
Undercover marketing
Ambient marketing
Experiential marketing
As a complex subject, guerrilla marketing may come in different forms. Let’s discover the most popular of them and find the differences.
Ambush marketing
This is a high-risk strategy, which occurs when a company interrupts an event held or sponsored by another brand. For instance, if your competitor sponsors a local sports event, you can offer winners or attendees valuable prizes. This move lets you get all of the profit from a rival's activity.
This tactic creates a memorable occurrence and gives a brand access to the opponent's audience. However, it may cause problems with the law, as event sponsors often have regulated agreements with event organizers.
Undercover marketing
This tactic implies making a hidden sale pitch to a prospective customerwithout them knowing it. The tactic aims at creating buzz and a community around the product.
The most well-known example of such an approach is product placement in movies or TV shows. You might have seen your favorite characters drinking a beverage from a specific brand or prone to wear shoes by a famous fashion house.
Sometimes marketers get more creative with undercover marketing and come up with an unusual campaign, as Sony Ericsson did. The company hired actors, who played tourists. They asked regular people on the street to take their photos with Sony Ericsson mobile phones.
Ambient marketing
Perhaps, the most popular form of guerrilla marketing is ambient marketing. The term stands for placing a gripping message or imagery in an unexpected place. Hence, ambient marketing takes place fully offline. However, this type of guerrilla marketing doesn’t boil down to placing an ad somewhere unexpected. The message itself should be shocking, surprising, and creative.
Experiential marketing
The core of experiential marketing is creating a situation where the target audience gets into a memorable situation and connects with something that symbolizes your brand. Experiential marketing campaigns aim at building a close bond between your company and its prospective customers.
The types of campaigns listed above are just the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot more ways to do guerrilla marketing; we’ll discuss more strategies further. Now, let’s find out how to launch a guerrilla marketing campaign.
How to Set Up a Guerrilla Marketing Campaign
Get to know your audience
Set goals
Analyze your environment
Come up with a technique
Execute your plan
Measure results
Guerrilla marketing not only requires a lot of creativity but also an action plan. Here are six steps you need to take to engrain guerrilla marketing into your marketing strategy.
1. Get to know your audience
Knowing your audience is a cornerstone of your guerrilla marketing success. To trigger emotions with your marketing campaigns, you need to know your audience's desires, fears, and pain points.
To learn more about your target audience, explore your current customers. Probably, your sales and customer service teams can tell you who your customers are, why they value your product or service, and what makes them tick. You can also find forums and Facebook groups where your potential customers discuss their problems.
To keep the information at hand, craft a customer profile. Our instructive guide on the data to include and the sources of information will help you out.
Apply a jobs-to-be-done approach as well. It will help you understand how customers interact with your brand, where you can target them, and what activities or messages you can provide to them.
2. Set goals
Although guerrilla marketing is a lot of fun, remember that its main task is to meet your goals. Thus, you need to set specific, measurable, accurate, reliable, and timely objectives for your campaign.
Guerrilla marketing often aims at creating buzz and increasing brand awareness. However, you may want to use your campaigns to drive sales as well. Make sure your campaign’s goal resonates with your global business objectives.
The best way to set KPIs for your guerrilla marketing campaign is to lean on the previous results. If you’re starting from scratch, benchmark your goals with your competitors’ results – it will give you a clear starting point.
3. Analyze your environment
Your task with guerrilla marketing is to catch potential customers off guard in a familiar environment. Moreover, you need to surprise and delight them. Thus, you can’t go without an analysis of thriving trends.
Start by learning what people are talking about at the moment. This is where social listening tools will come in handy. Another magic wand for you is Google Trends – a service to analyze the popularity of top search queries.
Apart from exploring current situations and trends, learn more about your competitors. Try to find their examples of guerrilla marketing campaigns and analyze them. Both best and worst practices can provide you with valuable insights on how to shape your unique distinguishable action.
4. Come up with a technique
If you are floundering to find a technique for your guerrilla marketing campaign, good old brainstorming can help you get the ball rolling. Gather your colleagues together and encourage them to generate some ideas. Set the time limits for a session and make sure everyone enunciates their suggestions. The main rule here is to avoid evaluating the ideas on-the-go – it will impede the creative process.
In the following stage, you need to assemble the ideas created before and gauge them. Rely on your customers’ preferences and pains, your business goals, and current trends. Take into consideration the resources you have to bring the idea to life. There is no point in stopping at the viral video creation if you don’t have the team or budget for it.
5. Execute your plan
As we said before, a guerrilla marketing campaign is a complex undertaking. It requires you and your partners to consolidate a lot of efforts. For instance, to simply stick a poster in a public place, you need to form the pitch, create the design, print, and glue the poster. Make sure each stage of work is done properly and in a timely fashion.
To save your campaign from flopping, take one more critical look at it before executing it. Think of how customers may perceive your message and how they will react. Try to find the possible downfalls and predict how they will affect the campaign overall.
Finally, there is always the chance that everything will fall flat. You should consider it, foresee the worst possible scenario and generate a plan B in case it occurrs.
6. Measure results
As guerrilla marketing campaigns on average aim at creating buzz, it may seem hard to measure their results. If you are puzzled over how to track them, here are a couple of hints.
Keep an eye on your brand’s mentions in the media. A successful provocative campaign will always get a bunch of publications.
Use social listening tools. Services like Agorapulseor Mentionwill help you overhear conversations about your campaign on social media and find if it hit the goal.
Conduct research. You can survey your customers and random people to ask if they have heard about the campaign and how they perceive your brand after it.
Compare “before” and “after.”To evaluate the effect a guerrilla marketing campaign had on your sales, measure them before launching the action and sometime after it.
Of course, guerrilla marketing doesn’t allow you to reach the level of precision that digital marketing does. However, the tactics listed above will help you measure the effectiveness of your campaign.
With this action plan on hand, you can set up a guerrilla marketing campaign without missing any important part of it. Now it's time to get into details and learn some strategies you can adopt.
Guerrilla Marketing Strategies and Tips
Open a pop-up shop
Use posters and stickers
Give samples
Be concise and consistent
Focus on smaller groups
Thinking through guerrilla marketing techniques can get tough. We’ve picked several strategies and pro-tips to facilitate your creative process.
Open a pop-up shop
A pop-up shop is a temporary store, that businesses can easily set up and take down. Generally, these shops are not used to generate sales but to drive the customer’s attention to a brand. Hence, the key to success with a pop-up shop it’s choosing the best location.
If you want to employ this tactic, try to think outside the box and pick an unusual yet well-trodden spot. For instance, you may open a pop-up shop inside another shop or at a big event. Another option is to rent a van or truck and create a mobile version of the store.
To achieve your pop-up shop goals, remember to launch a promo campaign. It allows you to embrace a much bigger audience. Consider trying various types of marketing to grab audience attention. For instance, you may employ influencer marketing.
Use posters and stickers
Posters and stickers are a cost-effective guerrilla marketing tactic. You can offer your clients branded stickers so they can show off your brand to others.
An even more effective way to use this strategy is to place your posters in public places, such as walls, pavement, sculptures, and so on. You can also benefit by sticking them on moving objects, such as public transport.
Be careful with this tactic. Make sure you aren’t breaking the law or annoying the public by placing your posters and stickers here and there. So, try to be mindful of this tactic and avoid being intrusive.
Give samples
The effectiveness of samples is based on two principles. The first is people generally love receiving something good for free. The second is after receiving it, they feel obligated to buy something. It’s called reciprocity – a basic human psychology feature, that nudges a person to do someone a favor if they got a favor upfront.
If you decide to take advantage of the reciprocity principle, make sure you offer something valuable. People should feel pleased and even stunned after receiving your sample.
Offer you samples at events that gather the proper audience. Another option is to distribute your samples through business partners. Finally, you can employ social media marketing and launch giveaways.
Be concise and consistent
Succinct and consistent messaging is the key to success with marketing tactics. In guerrilla marketing, it is even more important as campaigns catch your audience off guard and provoke an immediate response. So, fine-tune your campaign’s message until it is razor-sharp and unambiguous.
To multiply the effect, come up with a follow-up communications plan. For instance, you can add a hashtag to your offline campaign, monitor it on social media, and get user-generated content.
Focus on smaller groups
A target audience usually consists of several distinct groups of customers. Instead of trying to embrace them all with your guerrilla marketing campaign, focus on smaller segments.
This approach will help you create more effective campaigns that drive palpable results. Better yet, it allows you to build sustained relationships with customers easily and raise brand advocates.
These tactics and tips have proven their effectiveness. To follow them and keep your campaigns offbeat, you need practice.
Guerrilla marketing works better when it’s coupled with other strategies. You can use email marketing, chatbots, web push notifications, and SMS as a part of your campaign. To add these tactics to your marketing strategy in a couple of clicks, sign up with LIKE.TG.
High-low pricing
High-low pricing is a widely used pricing strategy that allows companies to charge more for initially introduced products and then sell them at a much lower price during promotional campaigns. These usually include seasonal deals, clearance sales, and markdowns. The primary goal of these campaigns is to increase revenue.
In this article, we’ll explain why firms use this method, unveil its pros and cons, compare it to the Everyday Low Prices (EDLP) strategy, and share some examples.
Firstly, we’ll uncover the benefits that this strategy provides as well as its shortcomings.
Advantages and Disadvantages of High-Low Pricing
Almost every retail business selling mass-market products uses this pricing strategy. Promoting a product twice as cheaper as its regular price allows companies to enhance flash sales and impulse purchases. Customers are tempted to buy due to a powerful sense of urgency no matter whether they actually need this item and turn a blind eye to price gouging.
For this method to work, both businesses and clients should know the relative price for each item, which is an average price for a product on the market. When launching a high-low pricing campaign, ensure that you actually charge much less than your competitors do.
Now you should understand the advantages and disadvantages of this strategy. The benefits you may get include the following ones.
Revenue increase.If promoted well, a sharp price declinewill increase your total sales volume, and therefore, your revenue.
Selling low-demand products. High-low pricing is your chance to convert old stocks, excess inventory, and slow-moving items into cash. Each firm has items that collect dust on the gloomy shelves of their warehouse. Be proactive and launch campaigns to promote goods that don’t sell and get more space for new arrivals.
Boosting website traffic. If you promote your deal via email campaigns, chatbots, and web push notifications, you increase your website traffic naturally, which has a positive impact on your search rankings.
Although the advantages seem very attractive, this strategy has drawbacks as well. Check them out below.
Customers wait for deals. If you run high-low pricing campaigns on a regular basis, your clients will adjust to this and wait for the deals because of much lower prices, which can hurt your revenue.
Customers can doubt your product quality. Clients know that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Big discounts make them question the quality of your goods, and they can get rather suspicious of your brand.
Marketing costs can be high. Sometimes promoting a product can cost more than selling it at a relative price, and thus, the strategy won’t pay off. However, you don’t need to spend a dollar when promoting your deals with LIKE.TG marketing tools. You can send emails to 500 subscribers a month for freeandinform 10,000 users about your sales via web push notifications.
You see that these benefits can be tangible if yougive your campaign a good thoughtand choose a reliable marketing platform.
Big brands often combine high-low pricing and Everyday Low Prices strategies. Let’s see the difference between these two tactics.
High-Low Pricing vs. Everyday Low Prices (EDLP)
While a high-low pricing strategy implies setting a high price initially and then lowering it during promotional campaigns, EDLP allows companies to set a low price without making their customers wait for deals.
With EDLP, clients don’t need to compare manufacturers and search for the lowest price since a firm promises to keep prices low during a specified period or even forever. You definitely have a supermarket chain in your region that has established a reputation as the lowest price seller. This strategy was applied by Walmart, Procter Gamble, Food Lion.
EDLP strategy allows stores to predict demand and prevent sharp fluctuations that occur during high-low pricing campaigns. Besides, companies don’t have to pay regularly for promoting one-day deals as high-low pricing requires. On the other hand, companies that use EDLP can’t benefit from creating discounts since they will hurt their profit margin. Moreover, if you sell at lower prices, your budget for other essential issues will be rather tight. You won’t be able to invest much in hiring a highly experienced staff to improve your customer service or invest more in a better promotion.
Both pricing strategies have pros and cons. If you go for EDLP, you can present your brand as the most profitable choice, while choosing a high-low pricing technique will provide more opportunities to increase sales volume and sell low-demand items.
Examples of High-Low Pricing
This strategy is widely popular in the fashion and shoe industry. The most famous companies reaping its benefits include Nike, Reebok, and Adidas. Considering the fashion industry, Nordstrom and Macy’s choose this strategy. Their prices are relatively high, but these brands regularly motivate and reward their clients with big discounts devoted to the end of the season. This way, they sell off-season goods, retain customers, and acquire new prospectsto assess their quality at a reduced price.
Now that you realize the advantages and disadvantages of high-low pricing, you can start using it in your business with the marketing tools provided by LIKE.TGfor free.
Hard sell
A hard sell is a direct sales approach that uses insistent language, pressure, and aggressive techniques to make leadspurchase a product immediately. It results in customers having negative feelings and impressions about a particular company.
In this article, we’ll review several reasons why a hard sell doesn’t work, compare a hard sell and a soft sell, and grab some inspiration from examples.
4Reasons Why Hard Selling Doesn’t Work
Companies can choose among a great variety of sales techniques that bring excellent results to their business leaders. However, some sales representatives still use a hard-sell approach. The strategy absolutely ignores customers’ needs and wants and only focuses on the fact of purchase. Let’s find out why a hard sell approach doesn’t work.
Insistent language of sales reps. The tactic can intimidate buyers with an often aggressive tone of voice. It leaves negative emotions and impressions about a company and discourages customers from purchasing a brand’s products or services again.
The intimidating character of communication with buyers. The method can easily hurt the feelings of buyers because of sales reps’ excessive persistence and the goal of closing a deal. Salespeople as representatives of a company greatly influence the opinion of consumers. Unpleasant communication with sales reps results in a bad impression and takes away the desire to buy something or deal with a brand. Moreover, customers can share negative comments on such companies’ sites, complain about annoying calls, messages, and emails, and, as a result, downgrade their rating and discredit these firms.
The absence of information about productvalue. A hard sell focuses primarily on closing a deal. That’s why sales representatives try to sell a product as soon as possible by telling about its features rather than providing its actual benefits and explaining what problems it can solve.
Mistrust in what companies try to convey.Sales reps are often insensitive and desperate to sell a product, which can provoke customers’ mistrust and suspicion. As a result, people won’t buy any products from such brands.
Now that you know the reasons why it’s better not to consider a hard sell in your marketing strategy, let’s proceed to the difference between a hard and a soft sell.
Hard Sell vs. Soft Sell
A hard sell is a sales strategy that involves persuading customers to buy products or services. The approach is considered aggressive because of the invasive behavior of salespeople. Sales reps usually use insistent language and strive to close a deal as fast as possible. They often ask prospectsto purchase certain products without explaining their value and the benefits they can bring.
A soft sell is an indirect approach that entails salespeople offering products and services to customers. However, in this strategy, sales reps focus on building relationships with leadsand buyers. They aim to gain trust rather than push customers to buyunnecessary goods.
To reach their consumers, sales representatives learn about their challenges, interests, and points of view. It helps figure out whether their product or service is a great fit for customers. Moreover, salespeople provide genuine recommendations to help consumers solve their problems.
Let’s walk you through some hard sell examples.
Hard Sell Examples
You can encounter hard sells in some infomercialsyou can see on TV. They are packed with reasons to buy certain products and a call to action so that customers could purchase immediately. These long commercials also include an expert’s testimony to convince a consumer to make a purchase.
Let’s take the PajamaJeans infomercial, for example. It includes the features of the product, a special TV offer, and a call to action.
To sum it up, if you aim to build trust and strong relationships with your customers and want them to become regular clients, it’s no secret that you should better master a soft sell. Consider using soft language and non-aggressive approaches to not only keep your existing customers but also attract new ones.
Gross profit
Gross profit is a profit that remains after deducting the production costs. It helps evaluate how efficiently a business uses its labor and supplies in the process of manufacturing and get to know the financial performance of a company.
Why is it important to measure your gross profit?
The measure indicates the revenueacompanybrings to its owner aftercalculating the investmentsin producing and selling products or offering services. It helps evaluate the profitability of a specific company and monitor its financial performance. Besides, it demonstrates the sufficiency of a company in terms of using labor and raw materials.
A decrease in gross profit during a certain period helps identify the reasons for this process so that a company can take action to resolve the problem. Indicators that influence gross profit include:
changes in the products;
the efficiency of company management;
changes in accounting policies;
the cost of purchasing raw materials;
the number of employees;
the level of competitiveness of products and services;
sales volume.
If you want to calculate your company's gross profit, you need to subtract the costs for manufacturing and selling products. These are variable costs, including costs for direct labor, raw materials, shipping, packaging, etc. Afterward, your company can determine whether the business brings revenue.
Now let's make the difference between the two main types of profit clear.
Gross Profit vs. Net Profit
Profit is the money your firm generates. It shows you how efficiently and successfully your company operates by comparing current revenues with the previous ones. If you aim to track your firm's financial performance, you need to be ready to distinguish the two main types of profits.
Knowing the difference is essential for investors because gross and net profit help determine whether a certain company obtains revenue. In case it doesn't earn, these parameters also enable investors to figure out where the firm loses money.
Gross profit. It is money a company obtains after deducting the costs related to the investments in production and selling the goods and services. It tells you how effectively you use labor and raw materials to produce goods. With the help of this measure, you can evaluate the financial performance of your business. After figuring this out, you can decide whether to cut down the expenses on manufacturing and selling the products or charge a higher price for your goods if the business doesn't perform well.
Net profit.If you want to evaluate your net profit, you need to estimate gross profit first and then deduct all operating and interest costs as well as tax expenses over a certain time. This measure helps you monitor the financial health of your firm. Net profit also determines when to expand your business or reduce expenses. If you own a company, you need to calculate net profit because it helps creditors be aware of the state of your business and the cash available. Entrepreneurs would also refer to this parameter when considering investing in your firm.
You have to estimate the values of the two parameters to create an income statement, demonstrating your revenue and expenditures. Knowing the peculiarities of these two types of profit enables you to see a realistic picture of your business. To calculate them correctly, you need to have the necessary formula, so let's dive in.
How to Calculate Gross Profit
One of the essential things you need to know when running a business is how to measure your company's gross profit. This metric focuses on variable costs (alter with the change in output), including direct labor, credit card fees, materials, and shipping. The measure excludes fixed costs, such as property taxes, insurance, rent, and advertising.
Below you can see a formula that helps you estimate the metric easily. You need to subtract the sum of money spent to produce and sell products from the revenue you managed to obtain to calculate this measure.
Gross Profit Example
Now it's time to practice how to estimate gross profit with the help of the example below. Further, we'll compare the gross profits of two competing businesses. Let's imagine that we have two companies that manufacture and sell toys for children.
Say, company A obtained its $30,000 revenue in June. The firm spent $20,000 on the manufacturing and selling process to get such a profit.
Now it's time to proceed to company B, which also obtained its $30,000 revenue in June, and this firm spent $22,000 to produce and sell the same amount of products. Let's now estimate the gross profit of company B.
The calculations above demonstrate that company A has $2,000 more in gross profit. It shows that they use their funds more efficiently to produce the same amount of toys for children in the same time frame.
It's essential to know how to increase your gross profit, and that's why we'll offer several tips.
5Tips to Increase Your Gross Profit
Increase your selling price
Boost sales
Reduce the cost of products your company sells
Remove products that don't bring profit
Get more customers
Increase your selling price. Consider increasing the price of your products or services. However, ensure that the cost of such goods is the same. Increasing the price allows you to obtain higher revenue and, as a result, a higher gross profit. You should remember that if you charge your customers a price that is too high, you can face the risk of losing them.
Boost sales.Consider implementing different strategies to increase your sales. For this purpose, you can enhance your sales channels and use social media platforms and messengers to offer your products and services. With LIKE.TG, you can use chatbots, email campaigns, and landing pages to sell your goods. Besides, think about promoting your products on various platforms by describing their benefits and the issues they can solve. Make sure that your customer service helps your existing and potential clients with their problems.
Reduce the cost of products your company sells. If you can find a way to cut down the cost of goods sold, you will be able to increase your gross profit. You can find suppliers that offer lower prices and use cheaper raw materials or labor-saving technology to implement this technique. However, ensure that it won't influence the quality of your goods because customers can choose your competitors to obtain products of better quality.
Remove products that don't bring profit. First of all, you need to identify the products or services that allow your business to benefit and bring good revenue. Pay attention to these certain goods to make the profit even bigger. Secondly, find out which of the goods don't bring you any benefit to learn about the improvements that should be made or consider removing these products.
Get more customers. You can reach your potential customers in several ways, such asemail marketing, video marketing, social media, blog posts, etc. With email marketing, you can convert your leads into customers. LIKE.TG allows you to send out a newsletter that includes engaging content about your products. This enables your prospectsto discover more about your company and purchase from your brand.
Now you know that gross profit is an essential parameter for any business. If you want to determine whether your company uses resources efficiently and brings you revenue, it would be useful to calculate the measure.
Greylisting
Email greylisting is a method of protecting email users from spam. A Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) that uses greylisting blocks a suspicious email with a “temporary rejected” error. In such a situation, a legitimate SMTP server makes multiple attempts to resend a delayed email until it is finally accepted. Servers for mass email spam, on the contrary, usually do not have such sophisticated features.
How Email Greylisting Works
SMTP rules provide that a greylisting server filters unknown email servers and gives a “temporarily rejection” back to the sending server. Legitimate SMTP servers retry sending after a 15-minute delay by default, on and on.
If a greylisting filter considers an email suspicious but lets it through after retrying the delivery, the next emails are going through without delays. This is because the greylisting server remembers the sender’s name and other details and whitelists it without any additional settings from a user.
Another positive aspect of greylisting is that for MTAs, sending a temporary error is a cost-effective measure since it doesn’t require much CPU (central processor) power and memory for its performance, unlike most of the other spam filtering programs.
Unfortunately, in cases where the sending server is poorly set up, the delay time may be far more than 15 minutes by default, which might irritate recipients if they have gotten used to the instantaneous nature of emails. Another disadvantage is that junk mailers adjust to greylisting and queue spam emails for redelivery, which weakens this anti-spam method. Anyway, the delay buys some time for other systems to identify the suspicious sending server as a source of spam.
How to Avoid Email Greylisting
Take care of your IP-address reputation
Use a reliable domain
Sign your email with a real sender’s name
Allow instant unsubscribing
Format the headings and the message correctly
Avoid using stop-words
Take care of your IP-address reputation. LIKE.TG ensures a good IP-address reputation, minimizing your chances of getting greylisted.
Use a reliable domain. In an email address, the email domain goes after @ symbol, for example, [email protected]. It takes time to earn a reputation for your email domain.
Sign your email with a real sender’s name. A real name instead of something like that — [email protected], helps to build trust among your audience and increase open rates. An attractive sender’s name should be like this: Adam at Example.com and influence your reputation in the eyes of both the audience and spam filters.
Allow instant unsubscribing. Many reasons may cause users’ intention to unsubscribe, but not allowing them to do so leaves no other choice but mark email as spam. If a critical number of subscribers marked your emails as spam, the chances are that your IP-address reputation will suffer, and greylisting filters will consider emails from you to be suspicious.
Format the headings and the message correctly. The headings and the message itself should be formatted, according to RFC 5322 (internet message format) and HTML standards.
Avoid using stop-words. Stop words like “Buy,” ”Amazing,” “Free,” “Cheap,” etc., may alarm greylisting filters that an email is not trustworthy. Be extremely careful with emails that are expected to be instantly delivered like welcome, transactional, confirmation, etc.
Giveaway email
Giveaway email is a source of holding giveaways. Сompanies use it to inform users about the beginning and ending of the giveaway, keeping them interested with updates and notifications via emails along the way.
This video by Teachable explains what a giveaway is and provides 4 advanced tips for gathering more subscribers.
Giveaway is a promotion tool for gathering new subscribers which spins around the concept of a gift — some product which companies give away to the luckiest participant at random. It is expected that for the sake of winning the prize people will spread the word about the brand on socials.
Why are giveaways important?
Engage with an existing audience
Accelerate your mailing list growth
Improve brand image
Gain product exposure
Easy and cheap to create
Engage with an existing audience. Giveaways are great for refreshing relationships with your subscribers since regular newsletters and promotions are sometimes not enough for keeping people engaged. The hope of getting a free item brings subscribers lots of positive emotions associated with your brand.
Accelerate your mailing list growth. Your current audience can generate new entries for you. It happens if you give bonus points for sharing that giveaway on socials, fuelling the word-of-mouth. That is a reason why some giveaways go viral bringing new subscribers in even if there is no audience yet.
Improve brand image. When your company gives away something that people need and like, it results in a wave of positive feedback. Giveaways enable you to spread a positive image of your company when people mention your brand in their posts and tweets.
Gain product exposure. If you sell electronics and set wireless headphones as a prize, such giveaway will attract much attention to the product. A giveaway may also work as a method of promoting particular products.
Easy and cheap to create. There are many services on the internet for creating giveaways. It is also cheaper compared with other promotions since it requires only one product and a little bit of email marketing magic.
How to write a giveaway email?
Holding a giveaway is not about sending a single email — it requires creativity and a few email campaigns. To create a successful giveaway email strategy, you may utilize the following sequence of emails:
Giveaway submission — Notification about expiry — Winner announcement — Thank-you email.
If you sell accessories, you can give two items away as a prize: a watch for men and a fitness bracelet for women to cover a broader audience. When you close a giveaway, you have a segmented audience for future email campaigns. Let’s have a closer look at the giveaway email types:
Giveaway submission. In this email, name the prize that appeals specifically to your target audience and tell how to take part in a giveaway. Create a CTA leading to the website to show more details on participation terms and leave their personal information like email addresses, names, gender, mailing addresses, etc., to join the giveaway. Send it to your existing audience first, and then set it up as a triggered email for new entries.
Notification about expiry. Depending on the sweepstakes’ duration, send an email to tell how many days are left before you choose a winner. Include a timer with a countdown to create that feeling of urgency. The longer the giveaway, the more emails you need to send for keeping participants engaged. Keep on encouraging shares all the time by giving bonus points.
Winner announcement. Send an email to inform all participants about the luckiest one. Make a transparent random choice using service like random.org. Add a link to a video in this email to ensure that everything is fair. And don’t forget to mail the prize to a winner!
Thank-you email. Follow-up giveaway’s success by sending a thank-you email to all participants. Give a time-limited discount on the product that they have been hoping to get recently to increase sales. You can ask a winner to live feedback, make photo or video, which you can use for increasing trust to the brand.
Giveaway email examples
Lonely Planet. This giveaway offers a trip for two to the Yellowstone National Park and a complete set of new guides to get the most of it.
Apple Music Festival. In this example, free tickets are the prize for the winner. There is nothing but the names of famous bands and musicians that make users click that call-to-action button and take part.
Kid Coe. The text “Let’s get lost” is the first thing that gathers users’ attention and reminds about the famous Chet Baker’s song, romantic and lighthearted. The giveaway suggests taking part for the sake of winning one of five tours worldwide.
Green marketing
Green marketing is developing and selling environmentally friendly goods or services. It helps improve credibility, enter a new audience segment, and stand out among competitors as more and more people become environmentally conscious.
Why is green marketing important?
Our planet is facing a lot of threats such as air and water pollution, food waste, plastic pollution, and deforestation. Chemicals manufactured by factories can be found anywhere, and that is why many companies consider producing their goods in a more environmentally friendly manner. Moreover, the level of ecological awareness among consumers is increasing, and people are eager to purchase eco-friendly products despite their higher prices.
Many brands try their best to address the wishes of their customers and have started the production of such goods with respect to their responsibilities as residents of this planet. Green marketing has a positive influence on people’s health and the state of the environment. This type of marketing entails every stage of a business, from packaging to public relations.
Let’s walk you through the benefits of this approach to explore this topic in more detail before implementing it into your business.
Benefits of Green Marketing
With green marketing, companies have an excellent opportunity to change our planet for the better and support people who are aware of the situation to help the environment. By creating sustainable products, companies want to reduce the negative impact of waste products on our nature. Going green enables you to win the trust and loyalty of your customers. It helps you:
stand out in the increasingly competitive environment;
reduce the negative impact of production on the environment;
save energy, reduce the use of natural resources and carbon footprint;
produce recyclable products;
improve your credibility;
enter a new audience segment;
ensure long-term growth;
implement innovations;
obtain a higher revenue.
Knowing about the benefits of green marketing may not be enough since you should also be aware of the strategies. Luckily, there are many ways to go green. Let’s review them right away.
4Green Marketing Strategies
You can find a lot of strategies related to green marketing that can help you create a sustainable brand to help our planet. Let’s review some of them.
Sustainable design. It’s not just about a recycling logo on your product packaging, it’s about a full life cycle of your product in mind. You should pay attention to the details like sources of your materials or workers involved in the process. Moreover, your company should control the amount of waste generated and how your products are packaged and delivered. You have to consider a lot of things that have an impact on our environment when designing for sustainability.
Responsibility. If you’re giving a thought to going green, your brand should be ready for a profound change. Green marketing is about becoming conscious of pollution. If you want to prove the sincerity of your intentions, rethink your company in terms of ecological and social responsibility and show customers that you care about our planet.
Green pricing. Environmentally friendly products usually have a high value due to the increased cost of sustainable design. However, customers are still willing to pay for themdespite the high costs. Therefore, if you charge high prices for your eco products, ensure to communicate specifics to prove that your goods are worth their price. Keep in mind that the greater your mission, the greater your opportunity to gain exposure for your brand’s goods.
Sustainable packaging. The number one reason for the pollution of our planet is the excessive use of plastic. According to Greenpeace, 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic have been produced since the 1950s, while only around 9% have been recycled. Nowadays, consumers are more responsible and try to avoid plastic packaging. That’s why it’s advisable to create recycled or no-plastic packaging for your brand.
Now that you know some of the strategies, it’s time to learn how to implement them.
6Green Marketing Ideas
Use recycled materials
Consider using bulk email service
Upgrade your equipment and vehicles
Highlight that your company is eco-friendly
Invest in social media marketing
Support environmental initiatives
Sustainable brands admit that environmental protection empowered their companies to obtain even more revenue and a broader customer base. However, becoming an environmentally friendly company is not that easy. You should be ready to utilize green marketing ideas and invest more funds than you expect to get such a long-awaited profit. Below you’ll find great ideas to implement if going green is your aim.
Use recycled materials
Try your best to use recycled materials and reduce the consumption of virgin products. Recycling reduces refining and processing of raw materials, which helps eliminate air and water pollution. It also helps save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Let’s take Allégorie, for example. The brand uses recycled apple and mango peels to create textiles through eco-friendly processes.
Consider using bulk email service
Newsletters give you an incredible opportunity to reach your target audience without any necessity in printing promotional flyers, enabling you to save more trees. Besides, email marketing is more effective in obtaining feedback from customers about your campaigns.
With LIKE.TG, you can send the necessary number ofemail campaigns to your customer base. You can inform your audience about your decision to produce goods that are safe for our environment. Use our drag and drop editor to create your unique emails.
Upgrade your equipment and vehicles
The vehicles you usually use to deliver your products have an impact on our environment.It would be great to allocate some of your resources to buy new equipment and vehicles.It’s advisable to change to electrical models and reduce the level of carbon your company produces.Due to this fact, many brands prefer to use fuel-efficient vehicles.Don’t forget to include your logo on such a car.
Highlight that your company is eco-friendly
If your brand incorporates eco-friendly practices, such as energy-efficient office equipment, collaborating with vendors that prioritize sustainability, or developing an in-house recycling program for paper and electronics, tell people about it. Some customers prefer to purchase green products, so it’s necessary to inform them about your practices. It will give them a wider choice of products and an opportunity to select the best.
For example, on the website of Dr. Scholl’s Shoes, a shopper can find all the necessary information about the brand’s sustainability.
Invest in social media marketing
Sincesocial media marketingis more environmentally friendly and isn’t less popular than offline marketing, it would be a great step to invest in it to reach your customers with your innovative ideas and eco-friendly products.
Take a look at The Body Shop’s campaigns against animal testing through its Instagram account.
Support environmental initiatives
Some brands make donations to support our planet. Some of them even create special foundations and charities. Donating funds allows your company to support environmental initiatives, make our planet a better place, and gain credibility and trust.
People Tree, a brand founded in 1991 and known for its clothes from environmentally-friendly materials, supports various initiatives. The company has the People Tree Foundation, an independent charity aimed at promoting environmental justice. With the help of this foundation, People Tree tries to protect our planet and develop awareness about the issues that threaten it.
Now let’s see how famous brands implement some of these ideas.
6Green Marketing Examples
We’ve prepared several examples of socially responsible brands that protect the environment, oppose animal testing, produce recyclable goods, and advocate sustainable ways of production.
TOMS
TOMS, a brand famous for its comfortable shoes, uses its business to improve lives and not harm the environment. If you visit the company’s site, you can see that TOMS has been trying to expand sustainable practices in key areas of their business by using Earth-friendly materials like sustainable cotton and reducing waste and energy use over the past five years. Moreover, the brand’s team provides their customers with packaging made from recycled materials.
Green Toys
The company assumes that to raise a happy and healthy child, you should provide a healthy environment. This makes everybody think about our Earth and how we take care of it. Green Toys are safe for kids and the environment as they are made from 100% recyclable materials.
The Body Shop
The famous cosmetics brand fights cruelty by campaigning against animal testing and selling 100% vegetarian products. This brand is considered the first international cosmetics company to champion a cruelty-free policy.
Boden
Universal brands like Boden have to pay attention to the sourcing and supply chain since they significantly influence our environment. That’s why the company follows through when it comes to sustainability and uses sustainable and organic cotton to manufacture clothes.
Love Beauty and Planet
Unilever is a multinational consumer goods company that has many brands, and Love Beauty and Planet is one of them. The brand was created to make customers and the planet more beautiful. The company assumes that the beauty industry and its impact on the environment are inseparable and design their bottles for shampoos, hand creams, and other products from recycled plastic.
Avocado Mattress
Avocado, a brand of eco-friendly mattresses, is committed to using organic materials to produce pillows, mattresses, and bedding. The team maintains such practices to safeguard their customers’ health and protect our planet from adverse impacts.
Green marketing includes progressive ideas that are necessary for our planet due to water and air pollution, animal cruelty, and other environmental problems. By going green, your brand enables people to live better, conscious, and responsible lives.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a web analytics service from Google, which is a popular and widely-used service on the web.
Watch the video on how to track your email campaign performancewith Google Analytics!
The service can be provided on a freemium basis, which means the use of the software is free of charge, with only its basic features available. To get access to more features of Google Analytics, users have to buy a premium membership. This membership is more enterprise-oriented and includes a wide variety of analytical functions.
Google Analytics in email marketingserves as a tool to look for the insights of subscribers.
How can you get your subscribers’ insight with the help of Google Analytics?
1. Interests
Google Analytics gives you an analysis of the pages your audience is visiting and defines the core interests of your website visitors. Based on the information, you can know your audience better and can create proper content for them.
2. Demographics
You can find out the age category and gender of your most active visitors to send them relevant content. After you define the critical segment of your audience, you can save it and monitor its behavior.
Age demographics in Google Analytics:
Gender demographics in Google Analytics:
3. Analyze visitors’ behavior on the website
4. Analyze your conversion paths with the help of MCF Channel Grouping Path
Google Analytics helps you to see clearlyif your website ignites people’s interest, which pages need optimization, and which conversionpathswork better for you.
Giffen goods
Giffen goods are low-cost goods customers purchase more once their price increases. These products challenge the widely accepted law of demand. The examples include essential products necessary for living such as bread, wheat, and rice.
In this article, we’ll review the history and examples of Giffen goods and compare Giffen and Veblen goods.
Giffen Goods vs Veblen Goods
The terms Giffen and Veblen goods are often used interchangeably, yet they have a slight but significant difference. Let’s review each concept in more detail to find this distinctive feature.
Giffen goods are low-priced products, the demand for which rises along with the price. These products are necessary to fulfill the need for food, and they have only a few substitutes. Bread, wheat, and rice are examples of Giffen goods. The thought of Giffen goods undermines the fundamental law of demand.
Veblen goods are high-quality premium goods, the demand for which increases along with its price. This is caused by the exclusive nature of these products. Examples include sports cars, expensive accessories (diamond rings, watches, necklaces), luxury couture clothing, etc. The exclusiveness of these goods shows people’s success and demonstrates their wealth. The producers of Veblen goods focus on rich customers who can afford to buy from brands associated with luxury, exclusiveness, and wealth.
Simply put, both Giffen and Veblen goods defy the generally accepted law of demand and create a special demand curve. The curve is upward-sloping for these products. Once the price for goods increases, the demand rises as well. However, the main difference between the two is that Giffen goods focus on low-cost products whereas Veblen goods — on luxury, exclusive and premium products.
Now let’s dive into the history of Giffen goods.
History of Giffen Goods
The concept “Giffen goods” appeared for the first time in the late 1800s in regard to Sir Robert Giffen. He was an outstanding economist and statistician who highlighted the concept of Giffen goods that violate the common law of demand. One of the most influential economists, Alfred Marshall, wrote in the third edition of his Principles of Economics that despite an increase in bread’s price, people still consumed it because it was the cheapest compared to other foods.
Observations concluded that there are low-cost products that violate generally accepted rules about the demand for products. These goods are usually non-luxury and almost don’t have substitutes. The demand for bread, rice, and wheat increases when they become more expensive and decreases when these goods are cheaper.
Now that you know some essential historical facts, it’s time to explore the examples.
Examples of Giffen Goods
You can find examples of Giffen goods among the primary foods you consume every day. The main product on which Robert Giffen built his theory was bread. From then until now, bread has stayed among the essential goods necessary for our living. Since it was the cheapest product a long time ago, the demand for it rose along with its price. It was caused by poor people’s inability to buy more expensive meat and other products. Products such as rice, wheat, and potato are also Giffen goods.
Congrats, now you know the basics of Giffen goods. Hope this information helped answer your questions.
Go-to-market strategy
A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a detailed plan that encompasses a target audience, a marketing plan, and a sales strategy and allows brands to launch their new solutions successfully to the market. It serves companies as a roadmap, helps them evaluate the chances of product success, and forecasts future performance with the help of available data and market research.
In this article, we’ll review the reasons to have a go-to-market strategy, its 4 components, and examples. We’ll also find out how to build this strategy.
Why do you need a go-to-market strategy?
A well-executed plan is a must when you want to launch a new product, start a new product line, create a new branch of your company or establish a startup from scratch. Some companies break down within the first year of operation because of lack of research, wrong market, inability to develop a product customers need, or ineffective marketing strategies. However, initiating a strategy allows you to avoid such scenarios with your newly created product. To do it, you need to prepare a marketing plan, conduct market research, and select the most effective sales strategy before the actual launch to meet consumers’ expectations and satisfy their needs.
With a GTM strategy, you will identify all possible opportunities for further company growth, develop appropriate messaging and product positioning to make your product stand out from the competition. A go-to-market plan enables your marketing team to approach your customers, boost conversions, and establish a strong position within the market. Besides, it allows you to gain a competitive advantage, ensure customer satisfaction, good sales volume, and high profits.
Now that you know the reasons to consider a go-to-market plan before a product launch, it’s time to unveil the components of this strategy.
4 Go-to-Market Strategy Components
Product-market fit, target audience, competition and demand, and distribution are the main elements of a GMS strategy. Let’s have a closer look at each of them.
In a product-market fit section, you should mention the issues your product can help remove.
In a target audience section, you need to identify people who might experience problems your product can help solve. You should list the problems your solution can reduce or eliminate. Think of the price customers will be willing to pay for your offer.
In a competition and demand section, you should review the list of potential competitors, companies that already market similar products. Conduct research to assess the demand for this product and the number of brands that offer it. You can also analyze their strategies and pricing.
In the distribution section, you should find out which mediums are most comfortable for you to sell products and for customers to buy them. Analyze all available marketing channels to identify those you will leverage in the future. For instance, you can develop a website, search for a third-party distributor, create accounts on social media, incorporate chatbots, etc. With LIKE.TG’s landing page builder, you can create an outstanding landing page or online store within minutes. Then, share this link with customers through email or chatbot messages. You can easily connect all channels in LIKE.TG.
The elements of the strategy are clear, so let’s proceed to the next section to figure out how to build a go-to-market strategy.
How to build a go-to-market strategy?
Building a go-to-market strategy isn’t difficult, but it requires you to be detail-oriented. You need to consider the most important points that will impact the success of your business. We’ve listed seven essential steps for you to follow and develop a detailed plan for your new product.
Outline your buyer persona. Gather your team to figure out the ideal customer you target. You need to identify occupation, goals, pain points, interests, needs, preferences, age, etc. These details will help you present the right product that meets customer expectations. To choose the right sales strategy, you need to understand customers’ motivations and problems. They are the ones who will use your product, so you need to be accurate when defining your ideal customer and developing a buyer persona.
Tailor your messaging. To create a relevant marketing message that resonates with your target audience, you need to make lists for each of your personas. In each list, you should mention customers’ main problems they face daily and write down your solutions. You should also list the product's value. The message you create should include both customers’ pain points and product value.
Select the most effective sales strategy. Every product needs to have the right sales strategy. The choice depends on the complexity, scalability, and price of your solution. You can choose the strategy after you explore your target audience, positioning, and channels. Besides, your sales strategy should also contain information about your competitor.
Carry out inbound and outbound techniques to establish brand awareness. You can use both inbound and outbound strategies. With inbound marketing, potential clients find out about your company from different channels like social media networks, quality content, or ads that bring them to your website organically. Unlike inbound marketing, outbound marketing implies a salesperson reaching leads by phone, sending warm emails, or searching for prospects at events.
Allocate enough time to create great content. Informative content can become a magnet for inbound prospects. These people have some knowledge of your industry and know about the problems your product can help solve. So, these potential customers are more likely to buy. Content marketing means a lot for website traffic. If your site has quality educational materials, it can attract interested people. Your team needs to use the right keywords in articles and comply with SEO principles to rank higher on Google. If you do everything necessary, your website will generate organic traffic and bring new customers. Besides, ensure to conduct content and keyword research before writing any blog posts. This step is a must if you want to create relevant articles that will rank high in search results. Remember, to make your content look more attractive and engaging, you need visuals. You can add quality images, infographics, and videos to let users perceive information easier.
Look for ways to boost conversions. Once your content is ready, you should pick up key metrics you’ll use to evaluate the performance of your product. Your sales team needs to track conversions and sales volume. Conduct training for your sales team so that they understand how to work with prospects and reduce the sales cycle. Then, you need to assess the work of your sales reps. If they underperform, identify the problems, and eliminate them.
Evaluate your sales cycle and shorten it. At this step, you need to find out how long it takes to win a deal. Your team should list the objections sales reps face when they interact with leads and find ways to avoid them. You can consider lead nurturing.
It’s time to proceed to the next section to discover some examples..
Go-to-Market Strategy Examples
You can find dozens of brands that strive to conquer the market, but only those with a competitive advantage and well-developed strategy succeed. Before entering, companies develop their sales strategy, explore customers’ needs and desires, and conduct market research. They all do it differently yet manage to hook their audiences’ attention. So, let’s review some amazing examples.
Baggu
Baggu produces simple things people use in everyday life. The company sells reusable bags with prints that can satisfy any taste. Although its products are quite simple, a brand succeeded in creating an excellent GMS strategy and becoming a favorite brand of environmentally conscious customers. In addition to being a sustainable brand, Baggu is also a leader in terms of the functionality and style of its shopping bags.
Owala
Owala offers customers water bottles. Although it might not look different from other companies in the same niche, it does. In its motto and go-to-market strategy, you can see that these water bottles are the easiest in their use. Owala makes it possible for you to not even open the bottle to have a sip of water. For example, during your jogging, you no longer need to stop to drink water. The brand’s target audience is active people. So, by solving problems of specific audience segments, the company succeeded in surviving and even dominating its competitors.
Congrats, now you know the importance of a GMS strategy and how to do it right. Hope our examples above inspired you to create a plan for your business.