Category: Marketing

At this stage, your goal is to generate repeat buys and real profits. While your entry-point offer was designed for conversions, your ascension offers should be geared for profits—because if you’re serving your customers well, they’ll want to buy again and again.

Ascension offers may be simple upsells made after that initial purchase… bigger, better solutions… or “done for you” add-ons.

So now we must ask ourselves, what is our core flagship offer and how do we continue to deliver value after the first sale is made? What is the thing that we are selling? 

How we continue to deliver value after the first sale is really important, because having upsells and cross sales gives you the ability to sell to customers you already have. It will give you higher Average Customer values, which is going to give you higher margins. Which means you can spend more to acquire new customers. 

Why does this matter? It matters because of this universal law of marketing and customer acquisition, he or she who is able and willing to spend the most to acquire a customer wins.

Very often the business with the best product messaging very often is the business that can throw the most into customer acquisition. Now there are two ways to do that.

The first way is to just raise a lot of money. The problem is if you have a lot of money, that doesn’t last forever. At some point you need economics. 

The second way, and the most timeless and predictable approach, is to simply have the highest value customers of anyone in your market. If your customers are worth more to you than they are to your competitors, you can spend more to acquire them at the same margin. 

If a customer is worth twice as much to you than it is to your competitor, you can spend twice as much trying to acquire them to make the same margin. You can invest in your customer acquisition, because your customers are investing in your business. You can invest in your customer experiences, and when we invest more into the customer we build brands that have greater value. Meaning, people are more likely to choose you over someone else, which can actually lower acquisition costs. 

Happy customers refer others to us, which is called zero dollar customer acquisition, and generally just ensures you’re making a bigger impact. You can invest more in the customer experience and customer acquisition process if you don’t have high margins. 

If you deliver a preview experience, you can utilize revenue maximizers like up sells, cross sales, and bundles. These are things that would follow up the initial sale or are combined with the initial sale to increase the Average Customer Value.

The best example of an immediate upsell is the classic McDonalds, “would you like fries with that?” You got just a burger, do you also want fries with that? 

What distinguishes…

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Happy customers love to share their experience, but sometimes they need some encouragement to do so. The cool thing is, once they do, they become even more loyal to your brand.

So, at this stage of the Customer Value Journey, ask people to share their positive experience with your brand by writing a review or sharing a social media post.

Once you get to stage seven, the Customer Value Journey is going to get a whole lot easier for you. This stage is all about learning your customer’s experience, and building up your testimonial database. 

The most important part of this step is asking these four questions. 

What Was Your Life Like Before Finding Our Solutions? What Challenges Were You Facing That Caused You to Consider Us? 

These questions are great not only because it gives you some really good stories, but because it gives you some insight on how you can provide similar prospects with that AHA moment. Understanding the average day of your clients is important in reflecting on your Customer Value Journey, and helps you understand what really set you apart from your competitors.

What Key Features Had the Biggest and/or Fastest Impact?

Not only is this going to get you to really specific stories, you will understand the specific things you provided that gave the biggest impact. The answers to these questions will not only give you great insight and testimonials, it will provide you with ideas for new lead magnets. This part is a new Entry Point Offer goldmine! 

What Has Been the Impact or Results in Your Life or Business Since Using Our Product or Service? 

This is a fairly broad question, and that’s why we put it after the others. You will have already gotten all of the specifics out of the way with #1 & #2. But when you ask this question, this is where you get the most valuable stories. You can use this part as testimonials, as an order form, as a sales page, this part is testimonial gold. 

If You Were Asked to Justify this Purchase to Your Boss or a Friend, What Would You Say? 

This is our favorite question by far. If you had to go back in time and justify this purchase, what would you say? I promise you what we’re going to find is a lot of great ideas for the jobs that your product or service has done. You’ll get a lot of great ideas for your core message canvas. This question is about backfilling all of the assets that you may not have. Here you’re going directly to the customer who are already happy, and using their justifications to help you sell to new customers. 

Hopefully you now understand just how valuable the Advocate stage could be, as well as the key questions you need to ask to get your customers talking. Here’s how it works for our example companies.

When…

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Up until now, any “promotion” your customers have done has been passive. But in the promotion stage, your customers actively spread the word about your brands, products, and services. They tell stories, make recommendations, and share your offers because they truly believe in them.

Active promotion may be an affiliate or commission relationship—or just a free offer for sending some new customers your way. The point is, it’s a win-win for both of you.

One thing worth mentioning before we dive in; Happy customers don’t promote, SUCCESSFUL customers do. 

Our biggest question in the Promote stage is: How are you going to turn your BEST customers into your marketing partners? 

If you don’t have a referral program, an affiliate program, or a valued reseller program … who is willing to drive your message to the organization you need to build out these programs? This is word of mouth marketing, and it is very important so start thinking about how you want to build this. 

Look to your most successful customers, they’re going to be the people who actively promote for you. But then, let’s think about our customers who already have our prospects but are offering a different product or service. 

At DigitalMarketer we are a training and certification company, we are not a services based company. What that means is we don’t compete with agencies or consultants. This also means that there is an opportunity for us to work with agencies and consultants. 

When we realized this we decided to launch our Certified Partner Program, which you can learn more about at DigitalMarketer.Com/Partner. This program lets us work with the largest segments of our customer base, who have customers that we want but they’re providing a solution that we’re not providing. 

When we train our customers, they are able to use our company frameworks to work with their clients. If their clients want to learn to do their marketing themselves? We’re the first education company they see.

So who is that for you? Remember, it’s not the happy clients that refer, it’s the successful clients. If you want to create more promoters, make sure that you’re doing everything that you can as a marketer to ensure that you’re marketing great products so you can see great results. 

How can our example companies accomplish this?

For Hazel & Hems, they can add an ambassador program to grow their instagram following and increase credibility with viral posts. 

Ambassadors can earn affiliate commissions, additional boutique reward points, and get the chance to build a greater following by leveraging the Hazel & Hems brand.

For Cyrus & Clark, they can offer discounted rates to their existing clients if those clients are willing to refer them to their strategic partners. 

For construction companies, this could be a home builder recommending Cyrus & Clark services to the landscapers, real estate developers, and interior designers that they work with to serve their customers.

…

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Service Business 101: Impress and Score Your Next Client 18&63,h=A>>12&63,n=A>>6&63,o=63&A,u[l++]=i.charAt(a)+i.charAt(h)+i.charAt(n)+i.charAt(o);while(d { /** * Displays toast message from storage, it is used when the user is redirected after login */ if ( window.sessionStorage ) { $( window ).on( ‘tcb_after_dom_ready’, () => { let message = sessionStorage.getItem( ‘tcb_toast_message’ ); if ( message ) { tcbToast( sessionStorage.getItem( ‘tcb_toast_message’ ), false ); sessionStorage.removeItem( ‘tcb_toast_message’ ); } } ); } /** * Displays toast message */ function tcbToast( message, error, callback ) { /* Also allow “message” objects */ if ( typeof message !== ‘string’ ) { message = message.message || message.error || message.success; } if ( ! error ) { error = false; } TCB_Front.notificationElement.toggle( message, error ? ‘error’ : ‘success’, callback ); } } )( typeof ThriveGlobal === ‘undefined’ ? jQuery : ThriveGlobal.$j ); ]]> ‘ + data.settings.title + ” : ” }}} ]]>

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Do businesses email their customers too often? According to a recent article on Business Insider, the answer is yes. But not for the reason you may think.

It’s not because customers loathe getting emails from companies. Or because frequent emails are considered spam. It’s actually because most brands nowadays email like this:

They use discounts as their main strategy to persuade customers to buy. But what happens when your customer’s whole inbox looks like the picture above? The inevitable: they stop paying attention to your emails.

Because here’s the thing.

Why would they open your emails if they can already predict the content inside? Why would they buy now when they can clearly see you’ve got discounts all the time? And, most importantly, why would they pick your brand over your competitors?

If you want to stand out in someone’s crowded inbox, you need to do the one thing that everybody else avoids doing: building strong relationships with your email subscribers. Here’s how:

Storytelling is the most effective way to communicate. That’s not me saying it. It’s the countless studies (such as this one, this one, and this one) that prove it, time and time again. Why?

Because storytelling helps you form positive emotional associations with you and your brand. The emotions you evoke with your stories go a long way in defining how people perceive you, creating a stronger connection in your audience’s mind between you and the problem you solve for them. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. 

The truth is, writing story-based emails makes you more than just a brand that sells a solution to their pain: it makes you an entertainer, too. And as a marketer, being able to entertain while selling is like having a superpower. People hate being sold to. But they love being entertained (ever binge-watched a Netflix show? I know I have). 

Plus, with story-based emails, you can easily add more variability to your email calendar. As a result, customers will no longer be able to predict what your next email will be about: a fun story? A new product? Maybe even a discount? Curiosity translates to increased engagement. And increased engagement translates to stronger relationships with your customers. 

So by choosing the right stories to tell in your emails (which we’ll discuss in a bit) and by writing them in an engaging way, you’re guaranteed to keep your audience hooked and excited to read your next email. As opposed to adding yet another sales email to their already crowded inbox.

1. Pick the Right Story 

The storytelling approach will give you little to no results if the stories you’re telling are flat to begin with. No matter how engaging your writing is. 

So the first thing you need to do is to make sure you…

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When the economy is making all of us nervous, we start looking for ways to make the most of every click and every lead.

Here are the tools that help you close more sales by utilizing your current tricks and contacts, i.e. without investing more in marketing:

1. Walnut.io: Make the Most of Your Product Demos

Product demos are the most powerful sales tools. But they are also the most challenging tools because they often require design skills and live presentations. The result is often unpredictable making it difficult to identify what went wrong with different prospects and how to improve your process.

Walnut is an innovative tool that helps sales reps create personalized and interactive product demos that close deals.

Its key features include:

• Create personalized and engaging product demonstrations for each prospect.
• Put together ready-to-go product demo templates by use case that are quick to reuse and publicize.
• Guide prospects easily with interactive annotations.
• Use built-in analytics to identify what works well and where you are losing sales.
• Work faster by integrating all your demo data with your CRM.

In a nutshell, Walnut allows you to increase product demo conversions. It makes your tool more productive by allowing them to reuse demos and focus on what works. It also makes it easier to convince larger decision making units because you can send all your prospects a link to an interactive demo that will help them understand your product value proposition.

2. DealHub: Make the Most of Every Lead or Prospect

DealHub is a deal acceleration platform that helps sales teams sell more with the help of smart technology. It offers tools that make it easier to generate proposals and quotes, and helps teams stay organized and connected, all while syncing data with your Salesforce or HubSpot CRM. 

While other Configure Price Quote (CPQ) solutions require extensive coding and ongoing maintenance, GealHub can be easily configured using code-free settings, to ensure everyone on your sales team gets what they need out of it. The platform also includes tools to help teams analyze and understand the sales process and customer behavior. 

All of this is designed to help teams be more efficient and productive, and to give buyers a better experience.

DealHub’s key features are:

• Guided Selling Playbooks are tools that help salespeople create accurate quotes, sales materials, and legal contracts. 
• Contract Lifecycle Management helps manage contracts, their progress, as well as handle electronic signatures and storage. 
• DealRooms are virtual spaces where buyers and sellers can work on deals, and see each other’s actions in real-time. 
• The Sales Workspace is a place where sales teams can see their own completed and outstanding tasks, as well as analytics (what works well and what yields no results) all in one place. 
• The Open Data Platform makes it easy to connect with…

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How to Become Self-Employed: 5 Key Moves for New Freelancers 18&63,h=A>>12&63,n=A>>6&63,o=63&A,u[l++]=i.charAt(a)+i.charAt(h)+i.charAt(n)+i.charAt(o);while(d { /** * Displays toast message from storage, it is used when the user is redirected after login */ if ( window.sessionStorage ) { $( window ).on( ‘tcb_after_dom_ready’, () => { let message = sessionStorage.getItem( ‘tcb_toast_message’ ); if ( message ) { tcbToast( sessionStorage.getItem( ‘tcb_toast_message’ ), false ); sessionStorage.removeItem( ‘tcb_toast_message’ ); } } ); } /** * Displays toast message */ function tcbToast( message, error, callback ) { /* Also allow “message” objects */ if ( typeof message !== ‘string’ ) { message = message.message || message.error || message.success; } if ( ! error ) { error = false; } TCB_Front.notificationElement.toggle( message, error ? ‘error’ : ‘success’, callback ); } } )( typeof ThriveGlobal === ‘undefined’ ? jQuery : ThriveGlobal.$j ); ]]> ‘ + data.settings.title + ” : ” }}} ]]>

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Understanding and tracking the performance of your marketing efforts is essential in order to grow your business. While there are dozens of metrics you can use to measure the success of your campaigns, some are more important than others. In this article, we’ll provide an overview of the ten most important marketing metrics that everyone should be aware of, and most likely tracking on a weekly basis.

(Before we dive in, if you want a shortcut to building your growth marketing scorecard that tracks all of your most important metrics in one place, you can steal our growth marketing scorecard here >>)

Unique Pageviews

Unique pageviews measure how many times a webpage has been visited by individual users over the course of a designated period. This metric helps you understand which content resonates with your audience and how often they view it. It also provides insight into user engagement and helps inform decisions about what kind of content to prioritize in future campaigns.

% New Visitors

% new visitors measures how many unique visitors have come to your website for the first time during a given period. This metric is helpful in understanding whether or not you’re successfully reaching new audiences with each campaign and can help inform decisions about where to allocate resources for maximum impact.

Video Watch %

Video watch % measures how often people watch a video all the way through, as opposed to how many times it’s been viewed or clicked on. This metric gives you an indication of user interest and helps inform decisions about whether or not your audience is finding value in your videos or if they’re being ignored.

Click Through Rate (CTR)

CTR measures the number of clicks on a particular link compared to the number of impressions (how many times that link was seen). A high CTR indicates that users find the link interesting enough to click on it while low CTR numbers suggest there might be improvements needed within the content itself or its placement within a webpage or email message.

Open Rate

Open rate measures how often people who receive an email open it, as opposed to leaving it unread in their inboxes, also known as “opens” vs “bounces” rate. Understanding this metric helps marketers decide whether their messages are engaging enough for readers to take action on them and can help inform decisions about subject line wording, email length, and other aspects related to emails sent out through campaigns.

Leads Generated

Leads generated measures how many individuals expressed interest in learning more about a product or service by taking an action such as filling out a form or signing up for an event. Tracking this metric is important for evaluating the effectiveness of various channels and campaigns used for lead-generation activities.

Revenue

Tracking total revenue generated from campaigns provides insight into overall performance and ROI from those efforts. It also helps marketers understand which channel offers more significant returns so they can adjust their strategy accordingly.

…

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If you’re thinking about getting a degree at any age, it makes sense to think about the value of that degree. Is the qualification needed for the career you want? Are there alternative paths to that career? Can you develop better skills by gaining experience in work? 

All of these are perfectly valid questions. After all, getting a degree requires a pretty large investment of both time and money. You want to know that you’ll get enough return on that investment to make it worthwhile.

Why marketing?

When it comes to marketing, a lot of entry-level jobs list a bachelor’s degree as a requirement. That doesn’t mean there aren’t alternate ways to get into marketing but having a relevant degree certainly makes your resume more competitive. 

Growth industry

Marketing skills are in demand in the current jobs market. According to a recent report from LinkedIn, marketing job posts grew 63% in just six months last year. Half of those jobs were in the digital and media sectors, meaning digital and content marketing skills are highly valued. 

Personal Development & Career Path

The reason for this increased demand for marketers is tied to the rise in digital marketing. New methods of marketing have continued to develop out of the digital sector. This means that marketers capable of creating engaging content or managing social media accounts are needed.

This leaves a lot of room for personal development. Young graduates who are well-versed in social media and community management can hit the ground running in digital marketing. Getting on this path early can lead to content strategist and marketing management positions.    

What are the Types of Marketing Degrees?

When we say marketing degree, the term is a bit too general. There are a lot of degree paths that focus on marketing in major or minor ways. The level of degree available will depend on your current education history, but the specific course will be down to your personal choice. 

Associate, Bachelor’s, or Master’s?

Recent statistics suggest that 74% of US marketing professionals hold a bachelor’s degree. 9% have an associate degree and 8% have a master’s degree. Here’s a quick overview of the differences. 

Associate degrees – 2-year courses that cover marketing and business in a more basic way than bachelor’s qualifications. They’re designed to give students the basic skills needed to apply for entry-level marketing jobs.   

Bachelor’s degrees – 3/4-year courses that cover business and economics. There is a range of bachelor’s courses with marketing at their core, but you’ll also cover wider business topics like management, communication, and administration. 

Master’s degrees – 2-year courses, usually only available if you’ve already completed a bachelor’s degree. MA or MBA courses are designed to develop a deep understanding of complex business topics. They are highly specific, covering areas like strategic marketing or…

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Did you know that misaligned teams can cost businesses trillions of dollarseach year? Yes, you read that right.

When sales and marketing teams don’t work together cohesively, it’s sort of like having a pilot and a copilot that don’t communicate—it becomes difficult to accomplish goals and stay on the right course!

Although the key to well-aligned sales and marketing teams lies in communication, that’s not the only way to keep these two departments working together. 

Here are five ways to seamlessly align your sales and marketing teams in order to achieve business objectives.

1. Make a Plan Involving Both Teams

Roughly 48% of leaders spend less than a day on strategic planning for their projects. The trouble here is that with so little planning, it’s hard for companies to iron out the details and get both sales and marketing teams aligned. As a result, it’s difficult for teams to bring those plans to fruition. 

When you utilize strategic planning that involves both teams, you can drive success by:

• Creating a single vision that aligns your stakeholders and the entire company
• Justifying your reasoning and avoiding biases and flaws
• Tracking your brand’s progress because of shared and more specific goals

What should the plan constitute? More than a schedule of your upcoming marketing activities – it should also outline your future sales promotions. 

Planning should always be a two-way street, and communication is key. Both departments need to share their goals and benchmarks so that they can be on the same page.

One way to achieve this is to ensure your marketing team is up to date with how your sales team is performing and whether or not they’re meeting company goals. This can help show marketing if their strategies are actually working or if it’s time for adjustments.

2. Get Management Involved

A lack of upper management involvement can cause a whole slew of problems in your business, such as low productivity and getting past tough hurdles. To make sure your marketing and sales teams are successful, it’s crucial to have upper management of both teams working together. That way, both teams can complement each other’s goals: 

• The marketing team can look for potential leads to boost sales
• The sales team can help marketing understand buyer personas and adjust the team’s marketing campaigns
• Effective marketing strategies can also help cold leads become sure buyers

In addition, team members can get inspired watching their leaders work together cohesively. This can lead to better inter-team collaboration overall.

Get the Digital Marketing Blueprint…

With a Customer Value Journey that strategically builds a relationship with new prospects and converts them into loyal, repeat customers.

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