Marketing campaigns impact consumers year-round, and at different points in their purchasing decisions. The cycle of marketing solutions runs through seven main filters:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Education
- Shopping
- Purchase
- Loyalty
- Advocacy
Even though your product sales peak at select times throughout the year, your marketing campaign can and should always be pulsing, generating some sort of connection with the consumer.
There are three preliminary goals for your digital marketing solutions to most effectively convert shoppers into loyal consumers.
- Generate a list of potential leads. This can be exhaustive. Focus your initial efforts on the niche category that align best with your target audience, but keep your horizons expansive. You’ll often find that you attract consumers you did not expect, so it’s worth it to make an effort (even if not the largest) in several areas.
- Convert leads into customers. To convert leads into customers, you have to provide sufficient education about your product and be present during the consumer shopping experience.
- Develop long lasting relationships. Once you effectively convert a customer into a buyer, the marketing cycle continues to develop a sense of loyalty between you and the customer and eventually, an advocacy by your consumers for your brand. If your marketing is effective as it should be, your customers will become an additional marketing arm in your campaign.
Let’s look at each of the sales cycle elements. We can break down solution builder to examine when and how to execute each moving piece.
Awareness
Creating awareness about your brand is the first, most essential element in gaining customers that will eventually translate into sales. Providing quality content is the best way to reach your consumers in this phase. Since 90 percent of U.S. smartphone users read their news feed at least once a day, make sure to actively post in all relevant content fields. Post more than once a day because different consumers read their feeds at different times. Try once in the morning for the coffee drinkers, once at mid-day for the lunch breakers and once in the late afternoon for those needing a pick-me-up.
Interest
Next, build interest. Having an interesting product is not alone sufficient for generating demand for your product. Build a campaign around the product or around the content you are sharing to engage consumers. Forty-nine percent of all social media users share information on products they like, hoping to shape others’ opinions. So curate some content that they want to share!
Education
Education is more common once a consumer is already interested, so your priority is making sure that education information is available. Information on products is important and so is information on your brand! Who are you? For what do you stand?
Shopping
Catching consumers where they spend the most time via ads, content shares or high visibility in search engines is crucial. Seventy-five percent of search engine users never scroll past the first page of search results, so it is imperative you put in the legwork to make sure that your brand ranks as one of the highest for relevant search terms.
Purchase
The purchasing experience should be flawless. Ideally, you have seamless compatibility across all channels. A consumer should be able to flip between your store on their desktop, your app on their smartphone and check out in your tangible retail location easily in and across every medium preference.
Loyalty
Forty-seven percent of U.S. Facebook users claim social media as their top indicator of purchases. Once you make a connection that is strong enough, you’ll create a lasting bond with your target audience. For any similar purchases, your loyalists will choose your brand over others.
Advocacy
You’ll find that your loyal consumers always engage with your social media marketing. They are the first to like all of your posts, comment accordingly and use your hashtags in their own photos. This is the point at which your brand loyalists become your advocates, promoting your brand for you. Now they’ll be the ones to generate the beginning of the sales cycle, creating awareness of your brand for their friends and family.
Constantly filtering your marketing campaign through these seven elements will keep your campaign in check to effectively convert leads to sales, and sales to advocates, strengthening the overarching reach of your marketing capacity. When you are ready to enlist a professional service for digital marketing solutions, get in touch with our team at EM360. Until then subscribe to our blog so you never miss our posts.
