Stop Selling. Start Serving.
As you know people buy from someone they trust. And to build trust takes time. You need to cultivate the relationship from know, to like, to trust. Let us tell you how we do it in this blog.
Be a Digital Marketing Rockstar with Joomla!
As you know people buy from someone they trust. And to build trust takes time. You need to cultivate the relationship from know, to like, to trust.
To be able to do this well you need to be authentic in your communication and genuinely know and understand the pains, gains and fears that your ideal customers have. The most popular and effective methodologies when it comes to digital marketing right now are content marketing, marketing automation, and social selling. No matter what methodology you use you need to adapt the mindset of serving - not selling. You know you should avoid to have your ideal customers feeling being sold to. Isn’t that one of the worst feelings? Instead you should give your ideal customers the experience that they made a really good buying decision when they give you their business.
Probably you are already really good at digital marketing but as digital marketers we know we can always improve and optimise our marketing, sales and business. In this blog we share some of our thoughts based on our experience from more than 20-years in the digital marketing business. Pixpro started 1996 as a digital marketing agency of one. Today we are seven team members in our core team.
Sarah presented a session on how you can grow your business with digital marketing at the Joomla! World Conference 2016 in Vancouver. It might give you great insights too.
Your Website Should Rock!
Your website should be your most important digital asset. The go to place for all your ideal customers to get to know you, like you and trust you. Don’t play the ping-pong game to send your prospects to follow you on all the social media platforms. And don't spend most of your content creation time on those platforms. Do not take it the wrong way. You should absolutely take advantage of attracting traffic from social media but don’t send your potential customers to all the platforms that you don’t own and do not control.
Invite the ideal customers to your website and give them access to what they are looking for on your turf. You should spend most of your content marketing creation time on boosting your website. We like to keep in mind that the website is your digital version of your office space, physical store or even your home. And you should care for your guests (the visitors) as well as you would if you had invited them as your guest in a physical space. Make sure your website is attracting the right customers, satisfying their needs for communication and information and most importantly converting the most sales.
We have chosen Joomla! as our preferred CMS. It’s the second most popular website solution in the world. It’s powerful, extendible, flexible and secure. All criterias that are really important factors for us and our clients. There are many templates and extensions to Joomla! available to create a great experience for your visitors and at the same time are good for your business. As we at Pixpro help our clients with their digital marketing needs, we might find a digital marketing problem to which there is no solution that works as requested available. If so, we develop Joomla! extension to solve them and if the extension could be useful for others, we put it in our Lab.
Go Deeper Than Just Defining Your Target Market
It’s not good enough anymore to define your target market with demographics only. To be successful with digital marketing you need to really get specific, relevant and timely to build a relationship with your ideal clients. The target market is way to broad to have a relevant communication and dialogue with. And if it doesn’t feel relevant your message will not hit home for the people that you would like to connect with and build a life long relationship with. This is specifically important if you are offering subscriptions (i.e. services where your ideal clients are paying a monthly subscription for like online educations, apps, retainers, SLA, etc) or if you would like the same customer buy from you more than once. And isn't that something we all would like?
Map out your ideal customer to really get to know the person you want to build a relationship with. We call that detailed description of an ideal customer an avatar, others calls it a persona. We challenge you to get to know your avatar as well as you know your best friend. It’s when you really understand and know the customer you like to serve with your content, products or services you start getting an impact from the way you communicate. And that makes an important difference. People start consuming, liking and sharing your content to others just like them when you are serving them with relevant, consumable content. We at Pixpro have created a workbook to develop avatars that we use in our business when we help our clients to map out their avatars. If you like to download it, you can do it for free.
Define the Customer Journey in Detail
Define your avatar customer journey and figure out how to serve the ideal customer with the right communication at the right time. We use the lifecycle marketing method to map out our customer journeys. If you like to download it, you can do it for free. There are three phases in Lifecycle Marketing:
Attract
Almost 70% of the customer journey is done without any direct contact with a sales person so we as marketers needs to make sure our websites are found when the potential customers are searching for solutions to their problems. The easiest and most effective way is to publish content on your websites regurlary that are SEO friendly so it is easy to get indexed and found by your avatars. To make it easier for our clients we developed PixTitle to make it faster to get relevant and SEO friendly Joomla! page titles on the fly.
The latest trends are using live video like Facebook Live, Periscope and YouTube Live. We encourage you to do live streaming to experience a faster way to ascend your avatars from know, to like, to trust in a much shorter time. You should take advantage to also embed the videos after broadcasting on your website for example in your blog. You can write a short summary and also feature a time line so the readers of the blogpost can fast forward to the section of the video that attracts them the most. This gives you the possibility to also reach the people that don’t follow you on the video streaming platforms and visits your website.
If you use Joomla! we also recommend to use the tag feature to help your avatars to consume more relevant information you have published on the website. It’s also a great way to attract traffic from search engines since they seems to like tag pages. We see a lot more traffic when we have spend time optimising the tag description that is placed above all the articles intros of the articles that has that tag.
Make it easy to find content on your site. Use the feature search where ever you feel that it will add to the user experience on your site. Our most popular Joomla! extensions PixSearch is free and it makes on site searching more enjoyable. We are very proud that this extension has been featured in Joomla! books, it’s been preinstalled in some webhosts one-click-install of Joomla! and several Joomla! blogs has listed it as a must have extension for your Joomla! website over the years. We are please that we could give back to the community providing a free extensions that so many have fallen in love with, with hundreds of thousands of downloads the past 9 years.
Sell
Yes, I know that we just said that you should stop selling. But to make it easy for the avatars to buy from you, you need to use content marketing to educate them on why your business is the right partner for them, how your service and products will help them transition from the pain they have at the moment or the void they have to a place where they feel that they got the solution that they are looking for. Sometimes they don’t even know their problem but just feels pain and you can help them identify the problem and help them find a way to solve it.
In this phase we at Pixpro use Marketing Automation to communicate with our potential customers based on their behaviour. That gives us a lot of data and we can trigger communications and tasks based on that data driven information. You can use open source solutions like Mautic that has integrations with Joomla! or as we at Pixpro do, choose to use the cloud based solution Infusionsoft that also integrates with Joomla!
We use retargeting to follow up with our websites visitors in this phase. It is really an effective way if you do it right. Helping your potential client to move further along the customer journey by serving them with timely and relevant followup. This takes a lot of thoughts and a solid retargeting strategy so you don’t get into the not so effective way just to annoy your website visitors following them around the web with ads that they don’t feel is relevant for them. So don’t be a stalker. Use the right way to use the technology of retargeting by serving not annoying. I you use Joomla! it could be tricky to find a way to insert a unique tracking code (cookie) on specific pages. We have developed a Joomla! Extension that cater for this need - PixTracker.
Wow
When yur customers have given you their business by placing an order with you the most important task you as a marketer has is to enforce the feeling that they made the right choice. You need to confirm their order promptly, tell them how the delivery of the product or service will be done and wow them with something that they didn’t expect. Like an extra bonus that they didn’t know about when they gave you their business.
Remember to utiliz your transaction emails from the e-commerce or follow-up emails from the order forms on your website. How can you adapt them to really be personal and tell your clients that you are thankful for their business. The transaction emails and confirmation emails have the highest open rates so use this golden opportunity to communicate not just confirm.
Use the strengths of Joomla! access levels and create a customer hub where you can continue to serve your customers with more useful information and continue the conversation with support desk features, and also offer more services and products that will help your avatars. Think about how you can develop a product journey to support your customers moving forward. To attract new clients is expensive and time consuming. It's far more efficient to wow your clients, have them ordering more and introducing your company, products and services to others.
Use an Editorial Calendar
Plan and organize your activities in a marketing calendar so it synchronised with other sales efforts. If you use Joomla! we suggest you to take PixPublish Starter out for a spin. It is one of our free Joomla! extensions. Our users loves the possibility to see all the upcoming articles in a calendar view to have a better overview what will be published, when and for whom. They also enjoy the feature to use drag and drop articles in the calendar to different dates to change the publishing dates and the nifty feature to create articles from the calendar view. If you are working with portals, intranets, multi language sites etc you should check out PixPublish Premium. It is more feature rich with calendar filters on language, access levels etc.
Optimise Your Marketing Efforts
Finally, of the most important tasks for a digital marketer is to measure and track the marketing activities. We use the website statistics services Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics. We use it to be able to track the website visitors behaviour so we can see how we attract visitors, what they consume and how long they stay. This gives us insights how to optimise the visitors experience of the website and the conversion rates.
Since many of our clients are operating in the EU we needed to find a solution for them to comply to the EU-law that states that the visitor needs to accept all cookies and also be able to revoke their decision. PixCookies Restrict is a Joomla! extension that we developed that makes sure that all the cookies that Joomla! places on the visitors device is removed until they accept the cookie. It also comes with the feature to be able to revoke the decision. Our PixAnalytics extension makes it easy to also place all the tracking cookies for other services when the visitor has accepted cookies.
We would love if you share what your take away is. Do you agree or disagree? What are you doing today that works? What do you need to improve?
