Reaching Your Goals: Tips and Tricks

Wanting to jump into marketing to increase awareness, interactions and sales overnight is nice, but it’s not realistic. Like every aspect of your business, marketing is something that takes time, energy and money to flourish. When your marketing strategy is well established (goals, budget) and the wheels are in motion, it can take you to new heights!

So, are you interested in getting started in marketing? We give you some tips and tricks to get you ready!

1. Know what you want 

Defining what your first goal should be is a very good starting point to be able to reach it efficiently. You probably want to increase your followers on all platforms, accelerate sales on your website, get lots of reactions on your posts, or collect a hundred emails a day, in addition to having a calendar filled with meetings with potential clients. To succeed in doing everything at once is not very realistic, and even less so if you don’t have a strategy for each of these objectives. The first step is to prioritize your list. 

At Middle, we implement strategies based on your specific needs and goals. We think of ways to monetize all stages of conversion – awareness, consideration, conversion and referral – by creating sales funnels tailored to your target audience. Awareness, for example, is measured by the number of likes on your Facebook page: the number of people who know about your brand. 

The consideration stage is when potential customers are interested in the options available on the market to meet their needs. This is when they will visit your website, sign up for your newsletter, or send an email to make an appointment. We can measure the achievement of consideration goals in many ways, and this stage is crucial because it precedes conversion. 

This is where the money comes in. It is indeed important to know how to generate revenue in an optimal way, and where the people who buy your products or services come from. Finally, the referral stage is also crucial to generate revenue from your current customers. Now that the conversion steps are clearer, you just need to define what you want! Creating a chart like the following can help you see this more clearly:

2. Measure Results

Now that you’ve defined your goals, it’s important to be able to measure them so you know if you’re putting your efforts in the right place. There are several tools to analyze the results, from the simplest to the most complex. The good news is that platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin offer a dashboard to see your results quickly. Google Analytics will show how many people are visiting your website, but also let you set up conversion goals. If you are one of those who use Mailchimp, you will receive a weekly report by email with a summary of the number of new subscribers. However, it is clear the best thing is to have everything in one place. Google Data Studio is a platform that offers comprehensive reporting and integration of all the data you need to get a clear and quick picture of your progress. At Middle, we value reporting because we can track results in real-time, but it also gives us a basis for our recommendations. That’s why we always offer clients to start the collaboration with the creation of a personalized and automated dashboard, accessible at any time via a unique link. Here is an example of a dashboard, which we use as a guideline for all our decisions:

3. Develop a medium-term strategy 

It is clear, once your goals have been defined, that it is unlikely you will be able to achieve them all in one day. That’s why it’s important to prioritize them and establish strategies to meet each goal.

For example, we might start with a campaign to increase brand awareness, and during the second month, aim to increase your online community to meet consideration and conversion goals. Without a community, it is difficult to sell or even increase the number of meeting requests. 

People are easily influenced, and it is normal that they base their decision on the popularity of a brand before making a purchase on a site. Moreover, trying to reach different goals at the same time would be very expensive and risky. We wouldn’t have time to analyze the best ways to achieve awareness goals, before embarking on consideration and conversion goals. 

When we talk about a medium-term strategy, it refers to strategies to be implemented in the next 6 to 12 months. This way, we can put a complete funnel in place by the end of the fiscal year, but more importantly, analyze all the steps in order to optimize the budget for the upcoming year. That’s how it works: objectives, timeline, implementation, analysis, improvement, and off we go! 

Of course, this time with a knowledge of exactly what needs to be done, or not, to achieve greatness.

4. Have a marketing budget 

Developing a marketing strategy without the slightest idea of the available budget is a very difficult task, if not impossible. How can we be sure that the marketer will be able to achieve specific results while staying within the budget if no budget has been announced in advance? Digital marketing can become a company’s main sales channel: according to an article published by the National Bank, a company’s marketing budget can vary between 2 and 10%. For a company that addresses the customer directly (B2C), the percentage will be between 5% and 10% of their desired turnover. For companies in the business-to-business (B2B) sector, the budget will be between 2% and 5% of the annual sales target. So it depends largely on the product or service you want to sell. Let’s say you sell shoes, your sales last year were $500,000 and you want to increase your sales to $600,000 by next year. Your marketing budget for this year should be at most $30,000. You start with this amount, but you tell your strategist that you have a budget of $20 000 to keep $10 000 for “unforeseen” or last-minute marketing opportunities. That’s it! We’ll let you calculate your marketing budget and come back to us with it, so we can put in place an out-of-the-box strategy to reach your business goals and even exceed them!

Are you still interested in the adventure? Do you have clear objectives to reach and a predefined budget? We’d love to work with you to create a 100% customized strategy with out-of-the-box ideas that fit you! Are you interested too? Let’s talk!