Personalized Marketing – 5-step Framework for Building a strategy

by Kuldeep Yadav | Jul 15, 2022 | Marketing

Do you want to be called with your name or just “hey you, hey buddy, hey friend”? I’m sure most people want to be called by their name, why?

Have you ever thought about it why you like to be called by your name? There’s is a simple reason behind this, when we’re called by our name it makes us feel valued. It is a psychological fact that we attract to the person who calls us by our name. It shows that someone is paying attention to us, we are very important to that person, because it is personalized. This is why personalized marketing originated, but personalized marketing isn’t all about calling us by our name, it’s much more than that. Then, what is personalized marketing all about?

What is personalized marketing?

There’re two important factors of every successful business, user interface and user experience. If you’re lacking in any one of them, you’re losing so many of your customers. Personalized marketing focuses on the second user experience. It’s the opposite of mass marketing (which is designed to target a broad demographic or audience) as it focuses on each individual.

It is a marketing technique that focuses on the needs of an individual current or prospective customer, because of this it is also called one-to-one marketing. As it focuses on an individual, it is essentially called the most focused form of targeted marketing.

Personalized marketing is about reaching the right message to the right person with the right offer at the right time, and with the right product or service suggestions by approaching the customers with their name, offering what they want, and providing the most accurate data they’re looking for.

And all of this can be possible if we’ve collected enough data about the customers, their behaviour, interest, and desires.

So, how does the data inform personalized marketing strategy?

How does the data inform personalized marketing?

Data is everything you need to expect the future needs and actions of your customers for better customizing your interactions with your users. It became popular when marketers realized the power of the data.

When you’ll have enough data about your users you can predict where they can land in the buyer’s journey. At that right moment, you can communicate to your user with the right message and the right offer.

There are two channels for collecting the data:

Analytics: Analytics helps you in understanding the user’s behaviour. There are various software to track the behaviour of users, and the most famous tool is google analytics. Google Analytics is the official tool of google that provides data in several fields like how many visitors did visit your website or app, what devices they are using, paid visits or organic visits, bounce rate, etc.

Feedback Form & Customers Surveys: Feedback forms and customer surveys are the most transparent and efficient way of knowing about user experience, user interface, and so many other factors. They tell us what type of products, or services customers are willing to buy from the brand.

People prefer to fill out the survey form and are more comfortable with this technique, but a long-form might irritate them, so always try to keep it precise and short.

The data that will be most beneficial for you for personalized marketing can include:

• Name
• Location
• Paid visits or organic visits
• Devices users are using
• Pages on the website a particular user visited
• Click through rates of every page
• Products viewed by the user
• Time spent on specific pages by the user
• Bounce rate
• Interests
• Spending Levels
• Clicking on call to action or contacting the support
• Chatting on messenger bot or not

On the basis of these factors, we can create a customer persona for our potential buyer, and on the basis of customer persona, we can design a customer journey map. These things will help us personalise the data in every step of our sales funnel. This data can benefit us a lot in different aspects of personalized marketing strategy.

How to create a personalized marketing strategy for your business?

When you have enough data about your customer’s name, location, behaviour and interests then you can easily build a personalized marketing strategy for your business.

A personalized marketing strategy is the most focused and accurate marketing strategy because of paying attention to an individual’s needs. People fear incorporating this marketing strategy into their system because it needs data and clarity on how to perform. Some people only use this for just including the name of the users in their email marketing campaigns, others might not even try because of the confusion.

We’ve tried to cover every aspect of personalized marketing strategy in this blog. Follow the following steps and make a personalized marketing campaign for your own brand:

Build a Team, Research and Compare

If you want to make a successful personalized marketing strategy for your business then you should work with skilled professionals in this field. Make a team, and research the market about the tools and everything they’re using to collect the users’ data.

Leveraging a personalization tool or platform will help you get structured and refined data. If you’re not currently using it then compare all the available options in the market, and make use of the best suitable tool for you.

Collect Data

Once you’ve chosen the best personalization tools for your business, collecting data would be easier for you. Implementation of these tools is easy. Eg when you want to add Google Analytics or Search Console to your website, it just takes a code snippet to connect with your website. Once the code is added, you can get a lot of information from the tool like the time spent on the website, total clicks on the webpages, bounce rate, total visitors, etc.

Analyse & Segment Your Data

In this phase you need to analyse your data on the basis of several factors, after analysing you can segment your data based on the following factors:

• Demographic Data
• Behavioural Data
• Spending Data
• Interests
• Buying Patterns
• Medium of Traffic
• Expectations

You can segment data according to the needs of your business. You need to customize the messages, and marketing material, so you need to decide what factors will affect the most to your customers.

Customize & Personalize the Marketing Material

Here, you need to customize your data, by adding the personalization tone of communication in your marketing material, like addressing your users with their names, providing them with what they want, talking to them and solving their problems through customized messages. You personalize your emails, retargeting ads, landing pages, welcome message, support systems, and much more.

Execute the Campaign & Deliver personalized Content, Engagement, Outreach, Products & Services, Recommendations, and Support

After personalizing your data, here you can execute the campaign by giving your users a personalized experience.

Start with personalized content. You can personalize your content in many forms like customizing your email automation, lead magnets, media apps, social media interactions, and landing pages of the website.

Then you can move on to personalize engagement. It is customized. This is real-time. It can be via chat, phone call, or comments. You should give your customers time and promptly reply to your customers. This can help you in establishing a brand, and lead to long-term relationships with recurring income.

Next is personalized outreach. Representatives from your brand should reach out one-on-one with customers. It is the ultimate in personalized outreach. The representative can use phone, email, or chat app. personalized outreach is beneficial in nurturing the leads. Custom outreach is beneficial for both b2b and b2c brands.

Let’s discuss the next, Products and services. Many companies (most of the brands related to clothing and beauty) provide custom products. This is done to give the products personal touch, and they feel like this has been made only for them. First, companies know about the customer’s needs and on the basis of that, they provide customized products and services. E.g. whenever any projects come to DigiAvtar, we first keep a one-on-one meeting with the client, and then after understanding all the customer’s needs, we start developing the project.

Next is providing personalized recommendations. This is being done somewhat in every industry. But the biggest industry that is using this technique is e-commerce. E.g. someone who visited their online store and liked or disliked something, then while visiting again they show you the similar recommended products of different brands. The big brands that are using this technique are Amazon, Flipkart, Hotstar, YouTube, etc.

So, we’ve discussed the 5-step framework for building a personalized marketing strategy. Follow all the steps along and make a personalized marketing strategy for your brand.

Now, let’s discuss the benefits of personalized marketing

Benefits of Personalized Marketing

There’re a lot of benefits we can get after implementing the techniques of personalized marketing strategies in our marketing materials. As we all know, personalized marketing is focused on the experience of each user. So, user experience is the most important factor in personalized marketing. And there are a lot of benefits we can get by improving our user experience through personalized marketing.

It’s the best strategy for getting closer to our audience along with improving ROI and achieving the desired financial outcomes.

Next, let’s discuss the other benefits of personalized marketing!

1. Builds a happier and satisfied customer base
2. Better and Improved Customer Experience
3. Increase in Brand Loyalty and Brand advocates
4. Customers Get Relevant Content
5. Increment in Brand Engagement
6. Customers Gain Valuable Suggestions
7. More Accurate and Targeted Advertising
8. Drive more Sales and Revenue
9. Consistent brand voice across all the channels
10. Better & Optimized ROI (Return on Investment)

Let’s move ahead and discuss the examples of personalized marketing

Examples of personalized marketing trends

1. Custom & Targeted Emails
2. Custom Messages (Video or Text)
3. Targeted Discounts
4. Engagement Campaign on Social Media Marketing
5. Targeted Ads Campaigns
6. Service and Product Recommendations
7. FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) Campaigns

We also have seen the benefits and examples of personalized marketing, along with how to build a personalized marketing strategy for our brand. Now, let’s move a step further and discuss how companies are using this strategy

How companies are using Personalized Marketing Strategy?

In the starting, there were only some brands that were using this strategy. But, nowadays every business is looking to this strategy. Let’s see how big giants are using this strategy

1. Netflix: – Nextflix is the oldest OTT platform. It shows you your favourite shows, movies, and everything on the basis of only one thing, the behaviour of the user on the platform.
2. Amazon & Flipkart: – These are eCommerce companies which show you relevant products on the basis of your browsing history and previous purchases.
3. FB, Insta YouTube, Spotify, and Jio Saavn: – These are also working on the same strategy of personalization. These show you posts, videos, and songs in the same genre you’ve watched earlier on these platforms.

We’ve seen how big giants are using this marketing strategy for better engagement and seamless user experience. Whether your brand is small or big, you can always start over with this technology.

Tools for Personalized Marketing

For making easier all the processes automated and smooth, we need to take the help of the tools. With the help of tools, we can save a lot of our time, with more efficiency. We can also easily scale with the help of the tools. Let’s list the different types of tools for a successful personalized marketing strategy:

1. Data Management
2. Data Analytics Tools & platform
3. Customer Relationship Management(CRM) Software
4. E-mail Marketing Tool

Conclusion

We’ve discussed everything already from what is personalized marketing to, benefits, examples, strategy, and the top companies using this strategy.

In conclusion, it is a technique completely focussing on the needs of an individual, and making him happier by building strong relationships and providing them with the value they yearn for. Brands are building close relationships and improving user experience with the help of this excellent strategy. It can be the greatest asset for the success of your business.

Now, you are free to start over with your own personalized marketing strategy for your business. If you still have questions, you can ask in the comment sections. To read more similar and valuable blogs, visit our blog.

Benefits of blockchain in Digital Marketing: 7 ways of improving your business without becoming a crypto investor

by Kuldeep Yadav | Jul 13, 2022 | Marketing

The early adopters of Bitcoin in 2009 might not have known how massive the adoption would benefit them about 5 to 10 years later.

Statistically, someone who invested $1000 back then had his money turned into not less than $15 million 10 years later.

I will leave you to calculate the return on investment (ROI) yourself.

Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency built on blockchain technology. Fortunately, blockchain technology is not only applicable to cryptocurrency which is in the finance industry.

It is also applicable in other industries and digital marketing is one of them. The benefits of blockchain in digital marketing cannot be overlooked.

Hence, the reason I want to show you the 7 ways it can benefit your business. Don’t forget that you cannot separate an extremely successful business from effective digital marketing practices.

I somehow feel that you are probably wishing that you did not miss out on the Bitcoin rise.

Don’t worry, you have another opportunity.

What you have to do now is to adopt this technology and start taking baby steps to integrate it into your business(s). What this means for you is that, now that the application of blockchain technology in digital marketing is at its infant stage, it is the best time to secure a spot.

In a few years to come, your brand/business will experience the kind of smile the early adopters of Bitcoin had. Let me chip in this; for the tech and giant companies like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Intel, Alibaba, etc. to have secured their spot, it means that the handwriting on the wall is readable.

Before we discuss the benefits of blockchain in digital marketing, let’s get a full grasp of what blockchain technology entails.

What is blockchain technology in simple words?

Blockchain is a decentralised digital system that thrives on three key elements namely;

1. Immutable records
2. Shared ledger technology
3. Smart Contract

Blockchain technology contains chains of blocks of immutable records in the sense that no one can either tamper or change the transaction records in the distributed ledger.

Even if the transaction is erroneous, a new transaction is added to correct the error. Afterwards, both transactions become visible. Its shared ledger technology makes it possible for all the network participants to have access to immutable records.

It also eliminates the possibility of transaction duplicates unlike that of a traditional business network. To make transactions faster, it stores and automatically executes a set of commands and rules called smart contracts.

Having briefly described each element, one can safely say that it is a chain of blocks of immutable distributed ledger that processes, records, and tracks transactions and assets within a business network.

The assets can either be tangible (land, vehicles, furniture, machinery, etc) or intangible (copyrights, licenses, intellectual property, patents, trademarks, etc)

At this juncture, I want to believe that you can explain what blockchain technology is in simple words to your grandmother with ease. You can even go further to talk more about how it works.

It’s time to tell you how it can help your business

Benefits of Blockchain in Digital Marketing: 7 ways of Improving Business with Blockchain Technology

Eliminate the fake factor effect

So many business pages out there in the online space are littered with fake likes, followers and products. This has paved the way for cyber criminals to always have their way into people’s pockets unpermitted. It is also the reason businesses do not reap a good return on investment (ROI) in marketing. Consumers on the other hand now have little to zero trust in advertisements.

The challenge businesses and consumers do experience as aforementioned can be dealt with. That’s where blockchain comes in. You will be able to do away with dubious third parties and deal with the publishers directly. It will help you know if the money you are spending on ads is going to the targeted audience.

At the end of the day, you will achieve an effective marketing practice for your business. You will also gain back the customers’ trust.

Opportunity for Small businesses to build trust

When you are in a red ocean market, it can be very difficult to stand out as a small business. Of course, you do know that consumers do not want to take chances with businesses or brands that are not popular. This system will help you easily establish trust as a growing business.

The fact that customers can easily track the record of the supply chain is already a plus.  Nothing compels a customer to stick with you over your competitors when they know they can verify every step of their buying journey.

Raise your security bar

It is no news that online buyers and sellers are always faced with the issue of uncertainty that surrounds the security of their identity and information. I know that you will feel cool to be involved in a transaction that is transparent and verifiable yet you are anonymous.

It is the beauty of what it can do. It secures all transactions and at the same time keep everyone behind the scene. Honestly, I don’t know about you but I am always thrilled with this feature.

Acquisition of refined and quality consumer information

The issue of signing up with a particular brand and getting unsolicited updates and ads from different other brands is tiring and annoying. With blockchain, people can be in charge of their personal information. They are sure that only the brands they are interested in have access to their information.

Another good thing about it is that these people can charge for giving out their data. Though this may sound not so good for business, in the real sense, the opposite is the case. It saves businesses from wasting money on people whose data will not be useful to them.

Purchase ads without a third party

No business would want to buy ads that are placed on low-quality websites which may not even target the right audience. Trust and quality are of great importance to them.

To ensure that trust, they pay a fee to a company like Google which serves as the middle man to establish what the business and website owners are looking for. You can entirely cut off the middle man ads network like Google and still have the trust factor maintained. Blockchain makes this possible.

Alternative Payment

Blockchain gives you a secure alternative payment that will save you a whole lot from chargebacks, banking fees and fraud. The blockchain’s major alternative form of payment comes in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Though this alternative form may not yet be the order of the day, companies have started utilizing it. You should also queue in.

Transparency in the supply chain

Your business may be the type that sources products and supplies from different channels. If this is true for you, then it’s good for your customers to know. This is because they appreciate it when they are sure that any of your business claims is true.

Your consumers can verify your claims with the help of blockchain. That way, you will be vindicated even before any potential accusation.

Conclusion

What more can I say? It is undoubtedly the future of marketing and business. Start positioning your brand. If you are a small business, you are at an advantage. You can easily compete with larger ones, establish customers’ trust and reduce costs.

Don’t forget that I earlier established that you cannot separate an extremely successful business from effective digital marketing practices. For your business growth, I would employ you to reach out to the most preferred digital marketing agency known for making their clients happy.

Before you leave this page, I will like you to share in the comment section the blockchain benefit(s) that interests you the most. Your response means a lot to me. As a token of my appreciation towards you for engaging with this piece, here is the list of marketing tools that will do your business good.

Frequently Asked Questions

Seasonal Marketing

by Kuldeep Yadav | Jul 13, 2022 | Marketing

Hello everyone, how’re you doing? I hope you’re doing rough and tough in your life. Let me ask you one thing. When is your birthday!

Well, you must be thinking why I’m asking this out-of-context question? But in reality, it’s not out of context, our birthday represents a special day for us in a year, and we do so many things to make it more special. We invite friends, cut cake, host a feast, and hang out with them, and the planning starts at least one month before. It’s the same with Seasonal Marketing.

When something special season comes we promote our products and services by portraying their marketing materials according to that particular season.

So, now the question is, what seasonal marketing is, and how to build a successful seasonal marketing plan with effective ideas to get the best out of seasonal marketing.

What is Seasonal Marketing?

Seasonal Marketing can be described as any promotion that is being done on certain days or times of the year. It refers to the marketing that revolves around special occasions like Holi, Diwali, Black Friday, Christmas, Eid etc. It is the marketing of products and services during these special points of the year.

We can also divide the special days into the following categories

1. Government or Official Holidays: In these holidays mostly comes festivals like Holi, Diwali, Makar Sankranti, Raksha Bandhan, Teej, Jayantis of Great Ancestors, Independence Day, Republic Day etc.
2. Non-traditional Holidays: These are not official but are celebrated by a large number of communities to spread awareness about the cause like Earth Day, Environment Day, Pollution Day etc.
3. Annual Cultural Events: Annual Cultural Events include Spring Break, Back-To-School, Summer Vacation, Winter Vacation Etc. These take place every year at the same time.

Seasonal Marketing doesn’t mean that it’s only done on special days, but we can divide a whole year also into different seasons and can update our marketing plan seasonally. As we see there’re mostly seasons considered summer, winter, fall and rain. So, we can update our marketing plan according to these seasons by updating our marketing materials for a unique and relative theme.

You can choose how you want to make it, and with which factors. Seasonal Marketing shouldn’t coincide with an ‘official’ event. It is necessary because some businesses perform well at certain points in the year and struggle on other days. So, seasonal marketing can help us in boosting our sales and getting the most out of the times when the customers are looking for our services and products.

So, now I hope you’ve understood why seasonal marketing plans can be a game-changing factor in our marketing plans. Creating seasonal marketing campaigns for our brand keeps our marketing plan fresh. Customers get excited by getting the special seasonal offer for the products they’re looking for.

How to Build a Seasonal Marketing Plan?

Creating Seasonal Marketing isn’t that hard, it’s simple if you’ve understood the concept of seasonal marketing. As aforementioned you can either create a seasonal marketing plan around special days or holidays, or you can make it for winter, spring, summer, rain, and fall. It depends on you and your business.

As we know that a seasonal marketing strategy isn’t general marketing but it is a customized marketing plan for a particular season. It can help us in boosting our brand awareness, and increase sales at intervals throughout the year.

Let’s build a seasonal marketing plan step by step:

Understand Your Niche and Audience

Understanding your niche and audience is a must in this competitive digital world. If you know who you’re marketing to and what’s the place of your business in the industry then it’ll be a focussed marketing campaign. We always run focused marketing campaigns to get better results.

For understanding our potential clients we need to create a customer profile on the basis of age, location, gender, profession, your customer’s expectations, pain points, and much more. This customer profile is called customer persona. If you don’t know how to create a marketing persona, then click here, the directed blog will help you in creating a marketing persona for your business.

A thorough understanding of your customers will help you in designing your products and services specific to your customer’s needs, and understanding your business’s niche.

Determine Goals

Without having a goal you’re not moving anywhere, so you should always determine goals in every aspect of your life.

Always determine what you want to achieve from a particular campaign, it’ll help you in tracking how successful your marketing campaign has been.

Goals keep you motivated, so ensure to determine some for your marketing campaigns.

Research Your Competitors

Researching your competitors and dissecting their successful marketing campaigns can help you a lot in building a successful marketing campaign of your own. Dissecting piece by piece their successful marketing campaigns you can know how they approach the audience for buying their services or products, and what tactics they are using to attract the visitors.

This will help you in giving a form to your seasonal marketing campaigns and using the tested marketing tactics.

Build Your Marketing Calendar

We should create a yearly marketing calendar including all the major events, and holidays. It’ll help you in keeping pace with the holidays and be on time. Include all the events, and big holidays, it’ll also help you create your content planner.

Plan Early: Time is of the Essence

Planning early can save you from last-moment anxiety, and irritation. As we all know that seasonal marketing is all about marketing around a specific time, so if time passes we can’t perform it. To be safe from missing out on the opportunity you need to plan everything in advance.

Plan your offer, the channels you’ll be promoting on, which assets you’ll be using, and what technicalities will be needed. So, you need to plan all these things in advance

Tap into the sentiment of the season:

You can tap into the sentiment of the season by putting a creative spin on products, services, and other offerings. For this, you need to understand the customer’s emotions, and how they feel about your brand.

For tapping into the sentiments of your customers, you can showcase to them the stories of your previous customers, and how they achieved the desired results through your products and services. Showcase your testimonials, and reviews to build trust and authority in the market. Offer something free to make them feel valued.

People don’t easily leave their previous brands, and move ahead to a new one because of their core beliefs, and what’s the way of changing beliefs without forcing them on the customers?

We all know that stories are easy to remember and make a larger impact on the human brain, so incorporating storytelling in seasonal marketing campaigns can help us in touching the audiences. It’ll make our brand memorable, recognizable, and trustable, and will help us in tapping the sentiment of the season.

Leverage Social Media and User-generated content

We should not forget the importance of social media, it can be included in every marketing strategy, as social media presence is the best way to showcase your company’s profile and marketing tactics.

As well your social media presence should reflect the seasonal marketing plan by having posts related to the overall marketing campaign.

You can send your social media users to your website or store from where they can buy your products, can create an atmosphere of excitement around the special offers you’re willing to provide, can drive users to the email list, and can engage with your users through giveaways and user-generated content.

User-generated content is the content generated by users through participating in different types of competitions. This is a great way of engaging with your users and using their created content by giving them credit for it. They also enjoy these types of events because they’re actively participating in the competition and interacting with the business. You can incentivize the whole campaign to perform particular tasks.

Maximize Your Discounts

Who doesn’t like discounts? I don’t know about you, but I feel so much happier when I get something at discount.

Well, this is also a marketing tactic of providing a discount on a particular occasion or season sales. You can also make this part of your marketing campaigns. Keep discounts on your products and services according to the seasons

One thing you need to remember is always keep your discounts percentage-wise (50%), not like 50$ etc. It impacts so much. Percentage sign makes customers believe that they’re having a great deal. 50% look more than 50$, even when they’re equal.

Host a Giveaway

Giveaways are the best way of getting the data from your user in return for some free usable materials. Hosting a giveaway isn’t all about giving your users something, but giving something valuable that can have value in their life.

So, the service or product you’re providing in a giveaway should be useful to your users. Giveaways can help you in growing your following, and spread brand awareness.

Always host a season-centric giveaway to support the seasonal marketing campaigns.

Don’t Try to Be the Best: Make Yourself Unique

Don’t try to be the best, as if you’re trying to provide the same deal as your competitors are providing with better benefits, then your customers will compare your brand to your competitors. So, to avoid this problem you need to be unique. Make a unique deal for your customers that they can’t get at any other time during the year. You can also provide a limited-time edition product that’s only valid during a specific timeframe.

Improve Your SEO

Don’t you want to rank higher on search engines? Everyone wants that their social media pages and website should rank higher on search engine result pages than their competitors.

But, to achieve this you need to focus on SEO which is also called search engine optimisation. It helps in driving organic free traffic and can potentially increase sales of your products or services during the season sale.

For improving SEO, you should start a blog on your website, and keep it updated with frequent blog posts. Content Marketing is an excellent SEO tool, as well as it is beneficial in educating your customers about your products and services. But, you need to improve the technicality of the websites, website speed, and keep the content relevant to your brand.

Because SEO works well when the content is relevant.

Bring Back Old Success Marketing Campaigns

You need to look back sometimes, as everyone says, history repeats itself. List the successful seasonal marketing campaigns. Now, you need to repeat those successful seasonal marketing campaigns.

Even some big brands run the same seasonal promotions every year. It helps in building brand loyalty and drives new and old customers who want to get in on the offers. It can also excite your current followers for visiting the shop and making the purchase.

So, always try to repeat the success, by running successful campaigns.

Create Tailored Email Outreach

If we’re talking about marketing strategies and we don’t talk about the emails, then all in vain. Well, the reason behind this is, that people provide email more frequently than their mobile number, and email is a great way to nurture your leads.

As we know that we can’t convert our users into customers so easily because of their previous core beliefs system, and trust factors.

So, we can nurture our new subscribers by sending them a series of emails about offers according to the particular season.

We can also send our current email subscribers a special offer designed only for them. So, don’t leave it.

Scheduling

Well choosing the best time for starting the seasonal marketing campaign is easy. You need to watch your competitors closely and note down when they start promoting their offers on a particular season, you just need to start the promotions of special offers just before them. One thing more, don’t forget your audience because they are the ones who’ll make a purchase, not your competitors. So, schedule your seasonal marketing campaign on the best time to communicate with your users. And build your marketing material in a storytelling format and with what your users will most likely engage with.

So, schedule everything before time and your competitors keeping in mind your audience.

Execution

Execution is the most important part, well, you need to promote your offers on each platforms your business or you are active on. One of the most common characteristics of a successful business is to make the best use of Omnichannel Marketing. You should also incorporate it into your marketing campaigns. Omnichannel Marketing is all about providing your users with a uniform and seamless experience on each platform they visit with. It is a business marketing strategy that is used to provide a seamless and best user experience along with improving business growth. Team DigiAvtar have already written a blog for you on this topic, click here to know more about Omnichannel Marketing.

Well, we’ve discussed the steps of creating a seasonal marketing campaign with the help of the aforementioned steps, now let’s talk about the benefits of seasonal Marketing plans

Benefits of Launching a Seasonal Marketing Campaign

Many new and established businesses can be seen enjoying the benefits of seasonal marketing plans. With the help of seasonal transitions and holidays, they appeal to their new and existing customers with special offers. Here are some common benefits every business can enjoy from seasonal marketing strategies:

1. Create Immediacy & appealing to Seasonal Excitement
2. Drives Traffic
3. Increase Brand Awareness
4. Makes Your Brand Recognizable
5. Converting Potential Customers into Paying Clients
6. Shows Adaptiveness of the Businesses towards the Market
7. Boost Products Sales
8. Cost-Effective and Reusable
9. Increase visibility and Chances of Conversion

Every marketing plan has its own benefits according to its nature, as seasonal marketing has. We’ve discussed the most important benefits we can get by implementing seasonal marketing in our business.

Let’s move forward and discuss about some tips and ideas for seasonal marketing campaigns.

Seasonal Marketing Tips and Ideas

1. Provide Helpful Content or Customized Product Guides
2. Photo/collage Contests
3. Free Samples for attracting visitors & solving some of their problems
4. Use of Limited-time Offers for creating a sense of immediacy
5. Use of Daily Offers
6. Seasonal Social Media Posts and Ads for creating a seasonal game
7. “Best of” Content
8. Animated Content on Social Media and Ads for grabbing user’s attention
9. Automated Countdown Timer to Landing Pages and Ads for building anticipation
10. Season Specific Testimonials & Social Proofs in Ad Copy and Images
11. Always Keep your ads simple and enticing
12. Use of Carousel for Sharing Photos of Seasonal Product Categories and Products
13. FB’s 360 video
14. Add Gift Wrapping on Checkout
15. Look at your competitors and listen to your audience
16. Building an email list
17. Track your campaign and revenue for checking whether the campaign is successful or not, and reusable
18. Plan your seasonal marketing campaign in the off-season
19. Don’t start and stop all of your marketing at once
20. Start Early and Visually
21. Use previous data to know the best time for your marketing campaign
22. Don’t offend your audience and make storytelling your friend.

Conclusion

Seasonal marketing plans are made for a specific period of time in a year. We should update our marketing plans with seasonal marketing. It helps us in communicating easily with our users and helping them in getting the products and services according to the particular season. So, it boosts sales in a great way.

You must be willing to make a seasonal marketing plan for your company, well, by following the aforementioned steps you can make a seasonal marketing plan for your brand.

If you’ve any more questions, you can ask us in the comment section, and visit our blog for more similar blogs.

Cause Marketing

by Kuldeep Yadav | Jul 13, 2022 | Marketing

Cause, the reason for doing something. We do everything for a cause like we study so that we could earn money. We earn money so that we could live a happy and prosperous life. We love someone so that we don’t feel alone. I would say in everything we do there’s a hidden cause.

Using the cause in marketing is called cause marketing. Well, I don’t think it should be enough for you to understand what the cause marketing is. So, let’s elaborate furthermore!

What is Cause Marketing?

Well, let me take you back to 1983 when the term “cause marketing” was coined. In 1983 American Express launched a marketing program, they mentioned that on each use of their credit card use a penny will go to the Statue of Liberty Renovation Program, and 1 dollar for each newly issued card.

By using these tactics they saw a 28% increase in card use, and it also helped the project come to reality. That was the same year American Express coined the phrase “cause-related marketing” or “cause marketing”. Since then many big brands have started using cause marketing.

As you’ve seen what American Express did and what happened after using this tactic. There were two effects first it increased the use of cards means sales, and second, it also helped in completing a social project, the renovation of the Statue of Liberty. So, both the company as well as society got benefitted from this.

I hope you know understand what cause marketing is, it is a collaboration between a for-profit company and a non-profit organization for the benefit of both by incorporating a social cause along with the products or services.

Why should we develop a cause marketing strategy?

Well, do you remember who the popular sibling in your family is, the monitor in the class or the leader in the project of the company? What are the qualities that differ from that person?

Hmm…You also must be thinking, keep your horses down, and let me make it clear to you, there are many qualities that a person should possess, and one of them is responsibility. And don’t let me tell you, who hates responsibility? We, being human are attracted to the entities that show and take responsibility, so as with the brands.

Users also expect that the brands they are using should be socially responsible. That’s where the cause marketing takes place.

Some research was performed and it came to know that

• 80 % of the users believe that brands should address and work on social or environmental issues.
• 46% of the users pay close attention to the action of the brands.
• 70% of the users want to know how brands are supporting social or environmental issues.
• 91% of the users want to switch to a brand that is supporting a social or environmental cause at the same price and quality.
• 92% said that they would buy a product from the brand that is supporting a social or environmental issue
• 67% of the people say that they have bought products from a brand that is supporting a social or environmental issue in the past 1 year.

Now, that you have seen the statistics & how people are fascinated with this marketing strategy, you can yourself see how much beneficial it can be for your brands. Have your mind also started to cook a cause-related marketing campaign for your business.

Cause-related marketing will not only boost the brand’s corporate social responsibility but helps in getting more sales for the brand and creating more awareness for the non-profit organization along with ethical contributions(donations). It’s a win-win strategy for both for-profit businesses and non-profit organizations.

Corporate social responsibility is the sum of all the actions a company takes to satisfy social needs. Definitely, it requires investment and yields measurable outcomes. While on the other hand, cause-related marketing is a communication tool for that brands to increase customer loyalty and brand reputation along with fulfilling corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Cause-related marketing isn’t just an opportunity to make the world a better place for future generations but it serves genuine business goals also.

What type of Brands should develop a Cause Related Marketing Strategy?

Having a cause along with your business makes your brand more lively, vibrant and meaningful.

Well, any kind of brand can develop a cause-related marketing strategy, and it’s the best way to show the world that they’re not just taking from society but also giving back by playing a role in helping social or environmental causes.

If you want to make a statement in the world then it’s the path you can walk on. It’s beyond selling just only products and services. You can always leverage this marketing strategy. Whether you’re a service-based business or a brick-and-mortar store, you can always follow a cause-related marketing strategy.

If you are a service-based company then by donating a portion of your profits, you can help social causes with money. If you are a brick-and-mortar business or product-based company then you can adopt a one-for-one strategy by donating one product for each sale to the people who need the product but can’t afford to buy. You can also donate a part of your profits by selling the products.

Along with helping the money, products, and time, we also help organizations bring awareness to social causes. The helps in getting people aware of environmental, social, educational, and health-related issues that should be dealt with. So, people also start playing their roles working with the organization for the betterment of human society and the world.

With the help of cause marketing, you just don’t sell your products and services but make a real difference in the world.

So, you can see whether it is product-based or service-based, there’s always room for you to implement a Cause Marketing strategy in your marketing strategies.

So far, we’ve gone through a lot in this article, let’s move further and learn how to build a cause marketing campaign for our business.

How to build a successful cause marketing campaign for your business?

You’ll find plenty of blogs, and videos all over the internet about this, but we’re providing here a step-by-step and simple approach to achieve what we all yearn for:

Choose something your company stands for and you believe in:

It’s a must to determine your corporation’s mission, vision and values. They’re the most important factor and milestone of your brand. Determine what your company stand for and what you believe in. If you believe in something, then the employees of your corporation will believe in that Cause. If the staff of your company buys it then they’ll work hard for helping society. The collective energy of all will reflect in the work and you’ll see this reflected in the growth of your business.

Identify Your Related Cause

You must know that relevancy matters the most. If the cause your brand is supporting is relevant to what your company stands for then it’ll be easier for you to scale. There are many examples of companies who got successful with the help of cause marketing assisting uncommon causes. But it doesn’t seem genuine, it looks like only a strategy for selling the product, but cause marketing isn’t just about selling the products. It is increasing sales while working for the betterment of society.

If the cause your business is addressing is relevant to your brand then it’ll look genuine. We know our audience and we’ll build a cause marketing campaign around the values of our target audience. It’ll not only help in spreading awareness but also help in increasing Loyalty to the Brand because it’ll be something that people value.

Determine what you want to contribute: Not just money

You need to determine what you want to contribute to society through the Cause Marketing Campaign: money, time, product, or services.

One thing I would suggest is not to contribute only money. Donating money isn’t the only way you can help with societal or environmental issues.

We’ve already discussed that people want to see the company’s responsibility toward social causes, and donating money isn’t the right way to show the responsibility. It was found in a survey that 64% of the users think that donating money alone isn’t enough.

Integrate social welfare directly into your business working on social causes along with non-profit organizations. It will establish a company as a socially responsible brand.

Determine how you want to contribute & set your goal

It’s your decision how you want to contribute to society, but always remember it’s not all about donating money, but spreading awareness too. Set up a goal, it is the key to achieving your goals. You can also choose your way of contribution from the following:

• Marketing Services for the Organization
• Donations for the products
• Donating equipment
• Making volunteer groups from the company

Collaborate and co-promote with a Non-profit

Collaborate with a non-profit organization having somewhat similar values your company stands for, and co-promote each other. You can use the following methods of promoting each other:

• Announcing affiliation on social media, newsletter, website, and newspapers
• Sending Joint press releases to the news outlets
• Tagging each other on social media platforms
• Having each other’s logos in the marketing material
• Telling about the experiences on different platforms

Get involved with your audience

Involving your audience is an excellent idea for spreading awareness while building brand loyalty along with brand advocates. When you involve your audience it’ll make them feel responsible also for what you believe. Once they start feeling responsible they’ll start promoting and advocating your products, services, and brand.

Focus on Social and Earned Media & Keep Call to Action Clear and Easy to Follow

This is the last step you should implement in 7 step framework of building a cause marketing campaign. We all know that people engage on social media so much, and they spend quite a long time on these platforms. You can post all about everything from announcing your involvement with the non-profit organization to achieving the goal you become a partner.

With the earned media you can mention each other in the advertising copies, videos, and creatives. It’s the best way you can do it in earned media. Earned media or paid promotions are the best way in reaching to millions of people in no time. Go for it and use it wisely as you need to spend money on paid promotions.

You should not confuse your audience by giving different calls to action, keep a single call to action in one type of marketing material and easy to follow.

Take a deep breath for a moment, so far we’ve seen a 7 step framework for building a powerful and successful cause marketing campaign. Start building your own campaign for the success of your business.

Now, let’s take a look at the benefits you’ll get by implementing the 7-step framework of a cause marketing campaign.

Benefits of Cause Marketing for small businesses

There are lots of benefits of a successful cause marketing campaign for small businesses in which some are the following:

1. Gives Vibrancy and Meaning to Your Brand
2. Establishes Your Brand Socially Responsible with fulfilling the demand for Corporate Social Responsibility
3. Improves Corporate Image
4. Increases Brand Loyalty and Create Brand Advocate
5. Boost Staff’s Will and Morale
6. Building Trustworthy Relationships with the Businesses and Audience (Community)
7. Standing Your Business Out from the Competition

We’ve discussed the benefits of having cause marketing a place in your marketing tactics, now let’s discuss some examples of the company having Cause Marketing in their Marketing Eco-system.

Examples of Cause Marketing of Indian Companies

We’re going to brief some famous Indian companies who’re using Cause Marketing for promoting their products and services. Some of them are the following:

1. Nihar Naturals’ “Small Steps towards Progress” Campaign: – I think every Indian has seen this campaign on television. It was launched in 2012 by Nihar Naturals in association with Child Rights and You (CRY) foundation working on child rights for over 3 decades. In this, it was committed to donate 2% of all sale proceeds from “Nihar Shanti Amla” to CRY. Marico the owner of Nihar Naturals launched this campaign having Vidhya Balan as brand ambassador. Vidhya Balan is an Indian film actor, and this campaign was run as a television commercial featuring her. Nihar Shanti Amla has changed the lives of more than 3 lakh children with its program “Chhote Kadam Pragati Ki Aur.”
2. Mahindra’s #SeedTheRise Campaign: – It is a digitally driven crowdfunding campaign run by Mahindra and Mahindra to improve the lives of the farmers of India. This initiative was co-powered by a digital agency named Flying Cursor Interactive. In this initiative total risen donation was 1 crore which was matched by Mahindra with another 1 crore. These 2 crores were donated for the welfare of the farmer of India.
3. Clinic Plus’ “M for Mother, Mother for Strength” Campaign: – Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL) launched this television commercial on the occasion of Mother’s Day. Clinic Plus is a shampoo and this campaign was launched under the title ‘M se Maa, Maa se Ma Mazbooti’ (‘M for Mother, Mother for Strength).  It was launched to support the girls of India in Education. It is basically focused on reducing girl dropouts from schools. This tells a story of a mother playing the important role in a girl’s life by helping her in pursuing her education every time when the family thinks of the dropout. If you’re an Indian you also must’ve seen this commercial on television.
4. Lenovo and Yuwa’s #PitchToHer Campaign: – I was run by Lenovo in association with Yuwa, a non-profit organization that teaches girls to play football for the betterment of their lives. In this social campaign, the brightest minds were invited to pitch smart ideas to impact the life of the girls from the organization through technology. The winning heart ideas were provided with a month-long sponsored internship.
5. Nivea India’s “Mom’s Touch” Campaign: – It was a cause marketing campaign run by Nivea India for the better of the children from marginalized communities by providing them quality education. It was run by Nivea and partnered with Aseema Charitable Trust which also brought forth stories of extraordinary mothers.

You’ve seen that in this world of competition, somewhat every company in every industry is using cause marketing to promote their products incorporating Storytelling in their Marketing Materials.

Again take a deep breath, I know it’s been a lot but sit tight for some time more and read carefully because half knowledge is always dangerous. It’s time to get acquainted with some tips in Cause Marketing.

Tips for Cause Marketing

Well, tips are the ways of remembering everything we learn so far. Without wasting time, let’s see, what tips you should keep in mind while performing Cause Marketing for Your Business:

1. Choose a related cause to support and you feel passionate about
2. Create a Simple, But Memorable Message incorporating Storytelling
3. Give More than Just Money, It can be time, services, and anything that keeps you integrated directly with the cause
4. Create a Strong Advertising Campaign
5. Set Up a Goal and Keep Your Launching Timing perfect According to The Audience
6. Have a single and clear CTA

Until now you must have started dreaming about your own cause marketing campaign. Well, that’s good everything that comes in reality first comes to mind. Thoughts are responsible for every creation we see.

Let’s conclude it in some words

Conclusion

I would say this can be the best marketing strategy if you do it the right way. Don’t perform this if you just want to sell your products, believe in the cause you’re associating with, and the cause should also reflect in your brand. Follow the strategy told in this article and boom, you’ll definitely get what you deserve. For performing this strategy you need to be aligned with the cause. Follow the 7-step framework, and keep in mind the tips, you’ll definitely reach where you want to.

You shouldn’t have any questions, as we’ve tried to cover everything for you. But if you still have Team DigiAvtar is here for you. You can place your queries related to this article in the comment section blog. If you want to read a similar blog on marketing then visit our blog.

B2B Marketing

by Kuldeep Yadav | Jun 27, 2022 | Marketing

We’ve heard these marketing terms b2b, b2c, blah, blah, blah…

Do you know what these terms mean? When one company is selling their products then someone or another company is buying them. On the basis of the type of the customer, we differentiate them whether they are performing b2b operations or b2c.

What is the meaning of b2b marketing?

Let’s understand first what b2b means! Well, the word is self-explanatory, it means business-to-business marketing (b2b).

In simple words, when a company is aiming to sell their products to a group of people or businesses rather than an individual buyer, then it’s called b2b marketing.

This whole sales process is called a b2b sales process in which all the steps, phases, and series of events are included that occur when a business is selling its services or products to another business. It is a way of generating demands for products and services from other companies.

B2B marketing strategy doesn’t bind itself to some particular types of strategies but any strategy can be a b2b marketing strategy if it is being used to promote and sell products or services to other businesses.

B2B and B2C marketing can intersect in a lot of ways, you need to define yourself what is according to you b2b or what is b2c, as they’re not any strict definitions of these marketing strategies.

One person can represent both b2b or b2c depending on the purchase, for what and why they are making it. E.g. some masters of marketing say that freelancers and solopreneurs are technically a b2c audience, do you agree?

Well, they can be both! How? Let’s make it clear with another example.

Freelancers and solopreneurs also need to take a strong decision on how to spend their resources and where. At this position they work as a business, so they should be targeting through b2b marketing strategies.

But, on the other hand when they’re making a purchase for their personal use, services or products on which their career or income sources isn’t dependent then they should be targeted under b2c marketing strategies.

I hope you all have got it crystal clear!!!

So, you must be thinking to perform it as soon as possible and getting the most out of this marketing strategy for your business, let’s wait until we’re coming to the topic.

Types of Strategies of B2B Marketing

There’re plenty of strategies being used in B2B Marketing. We’re including here the top most and easily implementable strategies.

Website and SEO

These are the two things you should be always focusing on, no marketing campaign can be said successful if you’re not focussing on these two things.

Every B2B company should have a fully responsive mobile-friendly website. The sales process of a B2B customers is longer than that of B2C customers, they just don’t buy anything being impulsive.

Before purchasing from other businesses, they perform a lot of market research and I would say that a website is the most effective way to showcase the benefits of your products and services, and spread awareness.

Follow the CATT Marketing funnel, it’s an easy and effective marketing funnel to make the best use of the marketing strategies. In which c represents Content, and attention, trust, transaction respectively for ATT.

First, develop your content, the content should be educational and informational to educate your customers, it’ll help in getting attention. As much they’ll consume the content and engage with the brand, their trust in the company will get stronger and the transactions will occur effortlessly.

In the same way, good website design will help your user in remembering your brand name easily because it’ll provide them outstanding user experience with an awesome user interface.

We at DigiAvtar also specialise in providing the best website designing & development services for our customers as this is a big part of every marketing campaign.

What if you have a fully responsive mobile-friendly website and none is able to find your website on the internet? Don’t worry search engine optimisation is a solution for this, so once your website is ready focus on performing SEO tactics that include, on-page optimisation, off-page optimisation, and technical optimisation. If you’re using WordPress then there’re so many plugins that can be helpful for you in easily adding the alt text to images, optimising site speed and much more.

Search Engine Optimisation is the way of getting organic and targeted traffic if you’re focusing on the right keywords as well as on the search intent of the users.

Now, let’s move ahead to the next strategy of B2B Marketing which is

Content Marketing

Well, content is worshipped everywhere, without content no marketing campaigns can run. But why is it an important part of B2B Marketing strategies?

As we’ve aforementioned that B2B don’t purchase anything being impulsive, so before making a decision they prefer to get the information about the products and services of a particular company.

To get the information they prefer long-form articles rather than an advertisement. So, B2B marketing companies should focus more on creating content rather than spending so much on advertising. Advertising is always a part, but in b2b it should be minimal, as advertising is impulsive in nature and b2b marketing isn’t.

Your long-form article should include valuable information to help in the success and growth of the businesses. If you’re providing value, they’ll always have time to look back at it.

So, befriend with content marketing, and bring the most out of the b2b marketing campaigns.

E-Mail Marketing

Email marketing helps in getting engaged with your audience without disturbing them with the overwhelming ads. It is the best way to deliver the content you developed in the previous section directly to the inbox of your consumers.

As we all know that email marketing is the work of the person who has patience, and it takes time to show results so as with b2b marketing, the client in b2b marketing also takes time before making the decision to purchase.

So, craft your emails and segment them according to the businesses’ needs, and analyse the results. Colds are also effective in these cases as they’re also targeted according to the need of the client.

It’ll be easier for you if you include drip marketing email sequence and marketing automation in your email marketing campaigns. It’ll decrease your cost and save time. Email marketing automation will also help you in nurturing the leads faster than sending out targeted emails.

PPC Campaigns

You must be wondering I’ve aforementioned that in b2b marketing advertising doesn’t impart so much. Well, I’m still with those words, but still, you can get so much with the advertising. How, let’s discuss!

Don’t directly try to sell your products or services to businesses through PPC campaigns as it’ll show urgency that’s the form of impulsiveness and businesses wouldn’t take any action.

So, rather than directing the targeted consumers to the sales page, direct them to the blogs, or pages that can help in building their trust in your brand and products.

Don’t show them what they can buy from you but show them why they should buy from you.

Social Media

As we’ve discussed a little bit about the CATT marketing funnel, in which A represents attention and you can get attention only if people know about you. Social media can be the best tool for you to build brand awareness.

Social media is a tool which not only works as an awareness tool but also works as an engagement tool. It’s the easiest way to showcase your expertise in a particular field and establish yourself as a brand in the market. But only presenting on social media will not help you, you’ll need to be active on social media and engage with your users.

In the terms of B2B Marketing, you may gather leads with the help of social media but you need to nurture them with the help of other ways and platforms.

Over the past few years, organic reach in social media is decreasing because of user saturation and content shock. So, we always should have a budget for paid advertising on social media.

Include Reviews, Testimonial, Case Studies and Success Stories

I hope you’ve understood until now how important reviews, testimonials, case studies and success stories are. The success of b2b marketing depends on trust, and to build trust we need to show them the stories of the businesses who’ve got successful with the help of our business’s services or products.

The easiest way to show the stories are reviews, testimonials, case studies and success stories, so make these part of your marketing campaigns.

There’re many ways to get reviews and testimonials like Google My Business, Trust Pilot etc. It’s better to take reviews on platforms like these because it’s easy to manage the reviews in a single place. You can also check out the reviews of the clients on Google My Business of DigiAvtar.

On the other hand, you can publish success stories and case studies on your blogs’ Social Media channels or on YouTube. As we all know storytelling is the way through which our mind can remember everything.

So making the stories and case studies part of our b2b marketing campaigns can help in strengthening trust, and giving closer to a purchase decision.

All these things help in organic ranking and outranking the competitors in Ads Click Rates.

Well, we’ve discussed so many strategies to perform b2b marketing campaigns and make them successful by implementing small steps.

Now, let’s know what the tips are that should be remembered in b2b marketing.

Tips in b2b marketing

Research about pain points of potential customers

Researching about the customers is the best way to get ahead of the market before starting, so research a little bit about your potential customers. Know their needs, desires, and pain points. Build a customer persona on the basis of these factors. Provide the solutions to their problems with the help of your products and services.

Use Storytelling: Tell a Story

Our minds can comprehend easily a story. So, always incorporate storytelling in your marketing strategies and campaigns wherever it is possible. The story can be either product, brand, service, or customer story.

Incorporate Multimedia Content

Don’t be dependent on just text, include multimedia content in your marketing strategies and campaigns. Our eyes are more attentive to the movable content. So, it’s better if you’ve included animation in your content with the help of videos, gifs, visuals etc.

Be in Context

As we all know, content is king. But are you agree that content is a king without context? No, without context content can’t do anything, it’s just a piece of some sentences.

So, always be in context, keeping your brand voice consistent all over the marketing materials. It’s easy to imagine and comprehend the meaning of the content in context.

Use Marketing Automation

Marketing automation saves a lot of effort and time. Incorporating it will help to be available 24/7 to all of your users, it’ll feel valued when they’ll get answers on time. We can use marketing automation somewhat in every segment of our campaigns from engaging with the audience to getting leads and nurturing them to transactions.

Use Influencer Marketing

Influence marketing can be most effective in the b2b marketing strategies. As marketing is all about trust and people trust most on the public figures. So, to make influencer marketing cost-effective contact local influencers so that you’ll be able to target local audiences in a cost-effective way.

Clear CTAs in the content

If you’re not mentioning a clear call to action in your marketing content then you’re confusing your audience and moving them away from your business. If we get confused about something we just want to leave it if we can. So, if you’re providing two or more calls to action in a particular marketing material you’re moving away from your clients by confusing them.

Always keep a single call to action on what you want to make your users do with the particular content so that the chances of clicking on the CTAs will be higher.

Track Campaigns and Use Reports

It’s better to track and use reports for the improvements. As we can’t deliver a perfect product to our users, so we always need to keep improving our products and services. It’s an ever-running process, not a one-time task and you’ll be able to improve only if you’re keeping track of what you’re doing.

Well, we’ve seen a lot of strategies and tips for b2b marketing, now it’s time to reap the benefits. Let’s see what types of benefits you’ll get by implementing these strategies.

Benefits of b2b Marketing

Like any other marketing strategy, this marketing strategy also has so many benefits, here we’re pointing out some of the most valuable benefits of b2b marketing in today’s technological world.

1. Improved Brand Awareness
2. Identifying New Markets
3. Scalability
4. Improved Efficiency and Productivity
5. Large Scale Ordering
6. Increased Sales
7. Increased Customer Life Time Value
8. Makes Marketing Accountable
9. Improved Return on Investment(ROI)

Launching of b2b Marketing Campaigns

Use the following steps and launch your b2b marketing campaigns with the help of these steps with no difficulty.

1. Create a customer persona by performing market research
2. Create a Map of your Marketing Campaigns
3. Write down your marketing materials, goals, timeline, and resources
4. Build the perfect team
5. Implement the business-to-business (b2b) marketing strategies told in this blog post.

Well, launching the marketing campaigns takes somewhat similar steps to every marketing strategy. I hope we’ve covered every important aspect of b2b marketing in this post, so let’s conclude this article here.

Conclusion

B2B marketing is best for targeting businesses and the entities that have to take the decision like some big companies. It’s easy to scale in b2b marketing. We connect different types of businesses that open doors to new markets for our businesses. And we can implement b2b marketing strategies with some simple steps.

One thing that needs to always remember is that whether it’s a b2b marketing strategy or a b2c marketing strategy always focus on benefits rather than features. Communicate with your audience by talking about the benefits of your products and services, not about the features. When someone talks about features it seems that they’re boasting and that’s not liked by anyone.

So always describe the benefits of your product, it’ll be easier for you to perform any type of marketing tactics.

If you still have any questions related to b2b marketing, you can ask in the comment section, and for more similar blogs visit our blog.

Omnichannel Marketing Strategy for Small Business | 13 Steps of Developing Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

by Kuldeep Yadav | May 23, 2022 | Marketing

Hello there, I hope you’re here to learn about Omnichannel Marketing, and how can you make the best use of your own business.

Let’s see some flashbacks first before starting out with Omnichannel Marketing. Let me take you back to 2010 somewhat 12 years from now. You’ll agree that at that time social media channels were not as evolved as now. Now, every social media channel provides you with tons of features for promoting your business in this digital world and establishing yourself as a brand.

It was the same with online shopping websites. There were only some selected online stores from where you could buy your products, consumers were limited to either these selected eCommerce websites or brick-and-mortar stores. The competition wasn’t so much high and so the world wasn’t so much technology-driven.

But in the present scenario, there’re hundreds of social media channels, and thousands of online shopping websites, and everyone is trying to prove themselves better than any others in the market.

So, because of all these platforms, most brands are having multiple avenues from which people can buy their products and services. That’s why you also need to leverage all of these multiple avenues to market your products and services in this technology-driven world.

Your consumers should be able to buy from you on any platform they’re using, whether it’s social media that’s having a shop option or your website, any other online store where your products and services are being displayed, or from your brick-and-mortar store.

You can make this possible only in one way, and that’s by making the best use of Omnichannel marketing.

Let’s learn first what is the meaning of Omnichannel?

What is Omnichannel?

Omnichannel means, all the ways and channels possible, sometimes spells as Omni-channel. Omnichannel is a cross-channel content strategy. It is used for lead nurturing by improving the customer experience and driving better relationships across all possible channels and touchpoints. In this approach, a brand gives access to all of its products, offers, and services to customers on all the channels, platforms, and devices.

What is the Omnichannel Experience?

As we all know that with the help of omnichannel marketing Brands promote their products and services in all the ways possible and in all places. But, they do this to provide the omnichannel experience.

Providing an omnichannel experience is an effort to provide an integrated and cohesive customer experience to every user no matter on which platform the user is reaching out to us. So keeping the seamless and consistent experience on each platform is called Omnichannel experience.

We’ve known what the Omnichannel experience is!

Let me ask you one important question. Do you think Multichannel Marketing and Omnichannel Marketing are single entities?

Well, they’re two totally different marketing strategies, having many things in common, but some things different. So before getting together with Omnichannel Marketing, we need to understand the difference between multichannel & Omnichannel Marketing Strategies, so we don’t get confused about which is one!

Difference between Omnichannel and Multichannel Marketing

Both the Marketing Strategies are based on the idea of engaging consumers across multiple platforms. So, the role of the user is very important here.

In the Multichannel Marketing Strategy, we look at the particular platform only and make sure that the transaction is being completed there. Multichannel is all about using multiple platforms to promote your products and services. The user connects with the multiple platforms in different conditions, and his entire customer journey is ruled by the choices he’ll make on that particular platform. These choices are being put in front of the user by the company beforehand, so he/ she will have to make purchases on the basis of these choices.

When users interact with the brands who’re using Multichannel Marketing as their marketing strategy they feel like, on each platform of the brand, they’re interacting with the different entities. Because in this marketing strategy multiple platforms are being used, but they’re used in unison, and the brand voice isn’t consistent.

But in Omni-channel Marketing, we’re just not using multiple platforms, but we make sure that all the platforms will work in unison. This is done by creating a user’s journey map before implementing the marketing strategy. In this it is assumed that the customer journey can span between 2-3 platforms, so you’ve to make sure that the brand voice and the experience on each platform should be uniform and seamless. Being users the centre of attention on every level, this marketing strategy provides the best user experience. To provide a seamless user experience in Omnichannel marketing, data of the users is collected from different sources, and then the brands make effort to personalized user experience through all the platforms.

When users interact with the brands that are performing Omnichannel Marketing in their business, they feel like they’re interacting with just one platform even switching between 2 or 3 platforms of that brand, because in this all the platforms work as a single entity, in unison for providing unified user experience, and keeping the brand voice consistent.

Last but not least don’t get confused with Omnichannel and Multichannel Marketing, you could be able to differentiate which brand is using which marketing strategy if you keep in mind just one thing: in multichannel individual channels don’t integrate with other channels, none of them speaks to each other, but in Omni-channel, all the channels are being integrated to work as a single entity.

What is Omnichannel Marketing?

Well, we’ve already discussed a lot about what the buzz is about Omnichannel Marketing, but we’ll be elaborating more.

It is a customer-centric approach in which we ensure that our clients will have a positive, and consistent user experience across the brand channels.

It is the integration of all the marketing tactics such as branding, messaging, storytelling, and all the online and offline marketing touchpoints. This is done to provide the consumers with an impactful user experience from top to bottom of the sales funnel.

It makes the users’ journey totally effortless by providing consumers, with a seamless, integrated, and personalized experience.

We can cover all about Omnichannel marketing in the following topics:

• Creating a user journey map to keep everything uniform across the channels
• Focuses on integrating all of a company’s touchpoints from SMM platforms, website, email, mobile, and brick-and-mortar stores.
• Customers can move seamlessly among any of the above mentioned different channels without breaking the consistency of the brand voice.
• It is the cohesion of different channels of marketing
• Keeping your Brand voice, mission, vision and values consistent & making them identifiable on each platform
• Provides personalized messaging based on the interests of the users.
• Keeping your visual identity Uniform

I hope all of your doubts are obliterated about Omnichannel marketing. Let’s move ahead and discuss the steps of developing a successful Omni-channel marketing strategy.

Steps of building a successful Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

Every digital marketer and marketing agency describes the steps of building Omnichannel marketing in its own words. We’re providing the step-by-step process you should implement to build a robust Omnichannel Marketing Strategy:

Collecting User Data: Data Collection

Data collection is very necessary and to collect accurate and timely data about your consumers, every brand should use Unified Marketing Measurement (UMM). UMM is an attribution level model. These attributions are the personal level metrics such as demographics, psychographics, geographic, historic, and aggregate measurements of media mix modelling.

This data will help you in understanding how your target audiences want to interact with your brand, and which platform and device they want to interact with. This will also help you in building messaging of your brand, and what type of products are your users looking for.

If you collect the data, you will be able to develop a rough draft of what you need.

Analysing Collected Data: Emphasized Context

You have raw data that you collected in the first step, but you need to refine the data. It’ll help you in making sure what’s useful and what’s not. Analyse your data in this step.

You are thinking about what the metrics are on the basis of which we can analyse the data. You must’ve heard one thing, “Content is King”.

It’s still true but not completely, without context content is nothing. Well, we have the king now, the data we collected in the first step. But we’ve to analyse it and then refine it.

Ask some questions about the relevancy of the data such as what kind of content is your consumer consuming, when are they consuming the content, is your marketing materials relevant to what they are desiring, and what is the occasion when they feel most valued, have you optimized your content for the devices they’re using your content on?

These questions will help you in putting your raw data in different sections so that you can easily know who your consumers are and what’re their expectations?

You can also segment your users on the basis of the following factors:

• Past Purchases
• Behaviour
• Interest
• Desires
• Average order value
• Loyalty Status
• Lifecycle

Create a Customer’s Journey Map for Personalization

I hope you would’ve understood what omnichannel marketing is all about. We all want to hear from a person, not from software or tool that automatically generates the same messages over and over again. Nowadays robots and bots have also been advanced, but they generate what we instruct them. So, to keep messaging personalized we need to create a customer’s journey map, so that they’ll feel like they’re being listened to and some person is replying to them not a bot.

Make a customer journey map for each of the segments we’ve discussed in the previous section. The customer journey map evaluates all the steps taken by the consumers from discovering the brand to purchasing from it. Outlining the customer journey map will help us in creating more targeted campaigns in Omni-channel marketing. Because when we outline the customer journey map many factors are considered in which some of which are out of the brand’s control. Always consider individual user interests, user interface, and user experience, economic, geographic, and historic factors while creating the map.

Determining Branding Rules and Guidelines

Branding rules and guidelines help you in keeping your messaging and creativity consistent on all the platforms. These rules and guidelines will help you spread awareness about your brand and make your brand easily recognizable with a consistent brand voice and visual identity.

Choosing Your Marketing Platforms: Aligning Your Website and Social Media Channels with Omni-channel Marketing

Well, you’ve complete control over your website, and social media channels also provide you with tons of features for interaction and engagement with your users.

You don’t need to run everywhere to build an Omnichannel experience, it’s a slow process. Start with your website first, your landing pages and web pages should be designed perfectly and mobile responsive. The content should adapt according to a different screen-sized, it needs to display well no matter what the screen sizes are. Start working on your website and make your website mobile responsive, if you’re unable to do that, we can help you, connect with us Team Digiavtar will take care of everything.

You don’t need to focus on every social media available in marketing, as there’re hundreds of social media platforms.

You should focus on 1-3 SMM platforms, or any number you can handle. We’re saying this because if you’re using so many platforms, and engage with your users on one platform but not on others then they’ll get offended. So, it’s better to use only the number of social media channels we can use.

Always make sure that you’re engaging with the users who’re reaching out to you from these social media handles keeping your tone of communication uniform, and posting consistently valuable relevant content to keep your audiences attached to your brand.

Solve Your Customer’s Queries in No time: Make Customer Support Your Top Priority

Whenever you’re moving one step ahead in Omni-channel Marketing, always take those steps to solve your users’ query with that step. And on the current platforms also, always try to give your users the answers to their queries as soon as possible, it’ll feel them valued, and increase their loyalty towards the brand. Every consumer wants an easy and issue-free experience, but if any issues occur, always try to solve them in no time.

Establish Your Brand Online: Keep Consistent Brand Voice across Channels but Avoid Duplication of Content

Branding is the ultimate aim of all of your marketing efforts so that you’ll not need to put effort into making you reachable, and recognizable because branding is the solution. But, I would say don’t make just a brand, but build a cohesive brand. A cohesive brand delivers a cohesive user experience to its users. Keep your persona approachable, and conversational whether it’s a SMM platform, website or your brick and mortar store.

Consistency brings the feeling of reliability and responsibility and hen trust is developed in the marketing. So we need to keep our brand voice and messaging the same across the channels making the use of uniform storytelling.

Consistency will increase brand exposure, if you’re not sure how to keep consistency then create a brand style guide before starting. Because if you’re not consistent then it’ll result in a disconnected experience and that’ll cause more harm than good.

Don’t just copy-paste the same data everywhere, but repurpose it on the basis of platforms. You can convert a blog post into a YouTube Video for YouTube, Creative for FB & or Instagram. Can also use an illustration for Pinterest, and a summary and creative for LinkedIn. It depends on you how you’re going to repurpose your content keeping the tone of communication the same. It will also save you from the duplication of content

Create Quality Content having repeated taglines

People remember taglines the most because they represent some strong emotion. Taglines are the summary of what is going to come next.

That is why whenever something is organised whether it’s revolution or any function, a slogan or theme is attached to this.

It’s easy for us to connect with the theme, and this theme represents everything for what the function is being organised.

When you’ll look at our own brand DigiAvtar, you find that a tagline is being attached to it that is “Digitalising Brands for Exponential Growth”. I hope the tagline is telling you what we stand for.

One thing to remember is always to be honest, and make genuine taglines that don’t lure people with false and tricky headlines.

Digiavtar is digitalising brands for establishing their robust web presence, and after take working on different marketing strategies for the exponential growth of the brands. So, as we’ve built a genuine tagline for our brand, so you should do that.

Keep your tagline in your own ton of communication, and unique in both online and offline marketing materials.

Invest in the Right Tools

Investing in the right tools can save you a fortune. The world is evolving and there are tools available to perform every single task. Every company is investing in tools, and you should also get one step ahead of the rest of the market.

Include a fully integrated Marketing technology stack according to your requirement in your marketing campaigns. The marketing Technology stack is the group of tools that can work together to improve all of your marketing experience.

The different kinds of tools that are being used in the marketing are the following: –

1. Website Designing and Development Tools
2. Graphics Designing Tools
3. Video Marketing Tools
4. Email Marketing Tools
5. Content Management and Marketing tools
6. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software
7. Marketing Automation Tools
8. Video and Web Conferencing Tools
9. Integrated Customer Engagement Tools
10. Social Media Management and Marketing Tools
11. Data Analytics and Visualization Tools

Befriend with technology, it’s better to accept changes than to avoid them. All of the tools mentioned above are very necessary for the success of the Omni-channel marketing strategy. For example, CRM allows you to record each people’s journey from becoming a prospect to a buyer.

As you can see how much CRM is imparting in this strategy, as with other tools, they’re also as much impactful and useful.

Keep your checkout process simple and streamlined

It’s a survey that most the online stores or eCommerce websites use the 3 step checkout process, and in some stores, we can see providing single page checkout. So, if you’re exceeding 3 steps I’m sure you’re going to lose a lot of consumers.

So, it’s better to keep your checkout process simple, and streamlined across the channels. You should always try to offer an easy, quick, and seamless experience for your checkout process.

It is very much necessary to make your checkout process effortless. Remove friction from your checkout process in any place you see it.

Retarget Abandoned Carts

Always retarget your consumer who’s abandoned the checkout process after adding the products to the cart. It means they trust your brand, but something is keeping them back from making a decision.

So, you can easily convert these users into customers with little effort. Give them a push by sending push-notifications when they click away from the checkout process.

It has happened to me also several times, sometimes I stopped buying the products, but when I got the push notifications, I went ahead and purchased the products.

So, implement this strategy, because when the brand sends a push notification, people feel like they’ve listened to. And it makes them feel valued, so they make purchases.

Personalize Your Paid Ads: Connect Your Digital and Print Ads

Always make your ads personalized and target according to a specific user persona. Be specific as much as you can, it’ll provide you with high ROI. You can’t target a generic audience, as everybody’s interests, needs, and psychographics are different.

As of now, you must’ve understood that being personalized is the heart of Omnichannel marketing, so you should present offers to your audiences personalized to their needs.

For grabbing the attention and making the ad copy personalized, you should pay attention to storytelling marketing, with the help of storytelling marketing, you can make sure that they’ll find your offer tailor-made only for themselves

Always keep your digital and print ads relevant and consistent, and try to connect both the platforms, because Omni-channel marketing believes in providing a unified user experience.

Implementing, Analysing and Optimization of the Marketing Strategies

As we all know that there’re hundreds of strategies that can be used in Omni-channel Marketing, but can you determine what will work for you and what will not?

None can say which strategy will work, so go implement the strategies, analyse your results of marketing campaigns, test them on the basis of different factors, then optimize the whole marketing plan, and again repeat the process.

Always use your data to find and nurture brand advocates, that can bring business without promotions.

We’ve already discussed the tools in which you should invest your money, with the help of those tools we can track the right metrics, and from analysing and testing those metrics we can derive actionable insights that can help us to optimize campaigns.

Always keep improving yourself, and make yourself comfortable with the new marketing strategies.

Examples of Omnichannel Marketing

You can see using this type of marketing in the big brands, and even nowadays small businesses also have started working on the strategies of Omnichannel Marketing.

You can identify with the following tips if the company is using Omni-channel marketing:

• Getting messages or emails while visiting a website or offline store.
• Getting being notified about the promotion and sale
• Getting push notification to complete the checkout process
• Getting thank you message after buying some products
• Getting answers to your queries in no time
• Seeing Visual Brand Identity and Brand Voice Same across the channels

Famous Companies who are implementing Omnichannel Marketing strategies are the following:

1. Starbucks
2. IKEA
3. Nike
4. Wall Greens
5. Timberland
6. Disney
7. Bank of America
8. Oasis
9. Pepperfry
10. Amazon
11. Apple
12. Flipkart
13. Google Chrome

The aforementioned companies are the world’s topmost companies that’ve included Omni-channel marketing in their marketing strategies.

We’ve seen so much in this blog but, without knowing about the benefits we can get from Omnichannel Marketing, it’ll be incomplete, and don’t you want to know what benefits you’ll get if you perform the Omnichannel Marketing tactics.

Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing Strategies

We’ve come so far and we’re certain now that this marketing technique is all about seamless customer experience. In this approach, we make effort to provide a personalized experience to each user, so they feel that they’ve been listened to and understood. And it makes them feel valued, and who doesn’t want to be valued in someone’s life?

This emotion creates a sense of comfort in users’ mind and they tend to loyal, and thus seamless sales start happening. With Omni-channel marketing, we try to represent all our marketing channels as a single entity by providing users similar user experiences on each platform. We try to fill the gap between the offline and online world, by keeping both the voices same. We all have a digital and real-world avatar. Filling the gap between the online and offline world is the best thing that makes this marketing strategy so much success in today’s scenario.

So, are you going to implement these tactics for your business now? Good luck with that!

There’re uncountable benefits of Omnichannel Marketing, but we’ve tried to summarize them in some principle topics that are following:

1. It helps in Reaching New Customer Segments.
2. Improve Customer Lifetime Value.
3. Provides a better user experience at every step of the customer journey.
4. Unify all the offline and online marketing channels of a particular brand for effortless consumption.
5. Provides Better Customer Data in various segments.
6. Helps in establishing a Uniform Brand Strategy and Visual Identity.
7. It increases operational efficiency by including inter-departmental coordination and agility.
8. It boosts customer loyalty & provides a high sense of brand loyalty and faith.
9. Improves Brand Recalling.
10. Build More Brand Advocates.
11. Helps in increasing revenue exponentially.
12. By retargeting the abandoned carts, in the end we find fewer abandoned carts in online stores.

Conclusion

We’ve discussed the many benefits Omni-channel marketing can provide to us. It can take your marketing game to the next level. Most the businesses haven’t started using it, and who’s using it are confused with multichannel marketing. They take both the same but there’s a vast difference in multichannel and Omnichannel Marketing Strategies.

Every industry is implementing Omni-channel Marketing Strategies, to gain great exposure in marketing, but the topmost industries are the following: Retail, Healthcare, automotive, Financial, eCommerce, Marketing etc. These industries are also following many trends of Omnichannel marketing such as; integration of offline and online stores, focusing on the brand building, not the channel, Using more devices for a single purchase, and leveraging multiple channels for the awesome experience.

So, if you start using it from today, then you’ll be much more ahead of everyone. Omni-channel marketing is all about the user and user experience. So, it’s your responsibility to make your community feel valued, and make their experience awesome and unforgettable. Provide your users what they desire from you, you’ll get what you want.

Provide value and make your consumers feel valued, you will also get value in return for increased sales, and engagement with an added benefit of brand loyalty.

If you still have questions about anything related to Omnichannel marketing, Team DigiAvtar is at your service, you’re free to comment in the comment section, we’ll solve your queries as soon as possible.

If you want to learn more about other marketing strategies, then feel free to check out our blog.