Did you know, 69 per cent of small businesses use digital marketing to attract customers and sales, according to Business Dit.
And 47 per cent of small business owners to the marketing entirely on their own.
If you do your own marketing, there are two things you need (aside from an OMB and VA to help you!):
A marketing strategy (or strategies depending on how many marketing activities you do)
A marketing system (or systems)
In this blog, you’ll learn what they are, why you need both strategies and systems when it comes to marketing, and examples of the two.
What is a marketing strategy and what is a marketing system?
In the last blog, we spoke about marketing systems and why they are important, but you also need strategies for the marketing to work before you can fully systemise it – so you need to know what’s working and what your process is for that marketing activity.
Strategy: A road map of where you want your marketing to take your business long term. Your marketing strategy forms part of your overall business strategy and your long-term goals.
System: Gives you the process, steps, and tasks that you need to do to get you there.
Why do you need them both to work together?
According to Optimizely, “a marketing strategy is a long-term plan for achieving a company’s goals by understanding the needs of customers and creating a distinct and sustainable competitive advantage. It encompasses everything from determining who your customers are to deciding what channels you use to reach those customers.”
Every marketing strategy needs a marketing system for it to work without you, so you can work on your business and not so much in it.
For example, think about your sales funnel system.
Lead generation is the process of gaining the interest of potential customers in order to increase future sales. It is a crucial part of the sales process of many companies. A lead is anyone who has shown interest in a company’s products or services but may not yet be qualified to buy.
That’s the word from Sales Force.
To generate leads, you need rinse-and-repeat marketing strategies and your lead generation activities on autopilot. To do this, you need a marketing system.
Marketing strategies vs marketing systems examples
Marketing strategy: A lead magnet to attract people to your business. Your lead magnet is exactly what it sounds like, something magnetic and attractive to your potential customers (your leads). It’s so valuable to them, that they will leave their contact details to get it, and, in turn, you will build your email list.
Marketing system: Create a lead magnet (free items such as a call, eBook, checklist, or a sample of your product), then create an opt-in page. Set up your email nurture sequence to retain the leads in your database. Convert leads to sales with your paid service/product.
You can repeat the same process for other lead magnets now because you have it systemised.
Example of an optimised lead funnel system:
To optimise the lead generation process above, you can have a different set of processes, for example:
- Create a lead magnet (free items such as a call, eBook, checklist, or a sample of your product).
- Create an opt-in page.
- Set up your email nurture sequence to retain the leads in your database.
- Add a tag when the last email is opened.
- Convert leads to sales with your paid service/product.
- Enter lead to paid service/product after sales nurture email sequence.
- If they don’t convert, add lead to nurture email sequence.
From this process, you’re able to classify whether it’s a cold, warm or hot lead.
However, your marketing systems can get quite involved.
For example, if your lead magnet is a paid product it will need another system for the entire process.
It could be even more complex and involve an upsell and downsell process, shopping cart, abandoned cart, or post-purchase follow-up activities.
And all these processes are part of your sales funnel system and should be documented and associated by segmentation, automation and integration with other apps.
How to get started with your marketing systems
Get started with my Power Hour session to review your current marketing project, and optimise and streamline your current marketing systems.
I’m dedicated to providing tailored solutions to your specific needs, and I’m ready to help you to accelerate your business in the second quarter of this year.
60-minute Power Hour session
Together in this one-hour session, we will go through a new project (or an existing one that you just haven’t managed to start).
You will receive:
- Feedback and recommendations on streamlining or optimising your business systems or processes.
- Or a review of an area of your business, for example, tech stack, marketing funnel, onboarding process, email management, digital filing, diary management, planning systems, project plan, email segmentation set up, and so on.
Outcome: We will identify areas of improvement and fine tune your existing processes.
If you’re interested, join the waitlist.
