Direct to Consumer (D2C) is a great way for brands to penetrate the market without the involvement of a third party. Using this route Brands can directly communicate with their customers and understand their needs. Due to COVID-19, the D2C market has expanded and many brands are using this method.
Did you know the Indian e-commerce market will grow by 21.5% in 2022? The expected revenue by 2025 can be USD 188 billion. The market size of the online retail industry in India is expected to reach USD 73 Billion in 2022. This shows the potential of the D2C market in India. To stay ahead of the competition we have brought you effective strategies to expand your D2C brand worldwide.
Effective Strategies to Expand Your D2C Brand Worldwide:
If your customers are getting confused then it will impact your sales. Providing a large variety of products is a good thing, but you should simplify and categorise all your products properly. Eliminate all the unnecessary choices and focus on providing excellent products to your customers.
Understand what the majority of your customers want and make your products accordingly. You can also try combining some features of 2 products to deliver all in one product to your customers.
2. Use Social Media Effectively
Social media is very important in today’s world. According to research in 2020, 3.96 billion people are actively using social media in the world. This shows that if you use social media effectively, it will positively impact your brand. You should use the following social media strategies to skyrocket your sales:
Influencer Marketing:
Collaborating with influencers will increase your customer base. Influencers usually have a huge audience to whom they can convey about your product. If they give positive reviews about your product, people will consider buying it. If you are just starting, you may not have a huge budget for Influencers. In this case, you should collaborate with micro-influencers in your niche. Connect with the people who have a decent amount of followers and create brand awareness.
Use infographics and memes:
Memes have become a sensation and many people use Instagram just for scrolling memes. Delivering your brand purpose or your products in a meme format can increase your following. Users tag each other in memes, so if your memes are good, the reach of your brand will automatically increase.
Why are your products best? What benefits do you offer? Why should people buy only from you? We highly recommend you use infographics to answer these questions.
3. Provide Testimonials
You can ask your customers to speak about the brand. Instead of just you speaking, provide opportunities to other users as well. It is seen that people believe more what the other users say about the brand.
So, if a lot of people on social media and your website speak positive things about your brand, the goodwill of your company will increase. People will trust your brand more and your sales conversions would eventually increase.
4. Give Freebies to Your Customers
Would other users or your customers make content for your brand? Making content would only benefit your brand and not the customers. You need to provide incentives to your customers. You can conduct various contests, give shout-outs to your customers and give them prizes. You can follow this sharing strategy:
10 shares: Shout-out
25 shares: Discount Coupon
40 shares: Free Product
Like this, you can create different ways of rewarding your customers.
D2C Market in India
5. Offer Free Return Policy
Having a free returns policy ensures your customers that your brand is trustable and gives them the confidence to purchase from you. This strategy is adopted by many prominent e-commerce companies like Amazon, Flipkart, etc. If people are not familiar with your brand free and hassle-free returns will ensure that they will buy something from you. Ensure that you provide excellent customer support for exchanging or returning products.
6. Focus on Organic Growth
It is good to run paid campaigns but, you should essentially focus on maximising organic traffic. To increase organic traffic you should focus on providing a memorable experience to your customers. Give them a high-quality product. Make a unique website, and an engaging social media account to drive organic traffic.
You should opt for an omnichannel approach providing customers with a seamless shopping experience whether they are shopping from a desktop, mobile or any other platform.
7. Use an Effective SEO Strategy
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is still one of the most effective ways to generate traffic to a website. An effective SEO strategy will help you to rank higher in Google Search Results. If you rank number 1 on search results you will generate a lot of organic traffic.
Create an amazing user-friendly website with a good landing page to attract customers. Hire an experienced SEO Team or you can do SEO by yourself. This is one of the cost-effective solutions to expand your brand.
8. Provide a Memorable Experience to Your Customers
For any business, it is essential to maintain a good customer relationship. You should connect with your target audience and understand their needs. After understanding, it is important to uniquely fulfil them. Apart from providing them with a high-quality product, you must treat them well from start to end. Your after-sales service should be excellent.
Make sure that your team answers all the calls, if they miss any they should call them back. Answer all the emails within 24 hours and reply to all their queries politely. Take their feedback positively and work on your mistakes. Try to constantly improve your products or services. If you have made any mistake then apologize or explain to them why that particular thing went wrong. If they make positive memories with your brand then you will stay in this race for a long period.
Conclusion
As the D2C Market is growing rapidly you need to be alert and make changes to your business at the right time. The above strategies will surely help you to expand your D2C Brand. Add your creativity and come up with out of the box strategies. The Golden Rule is to connect with your target audience and provide them with a memorable experience.
FAQs
How do you market a D2C brand?
Hire micro-influencers, Leverage social media, try to simplify product choices, and focus on your customer’s pain points.
How do you build a D2C strategy?
Leverage technology, be up to date with the ongoing trends in the D2C market and employ different marketing strategies.
Starting a new business venture is always tedious. One has to understand different terminologies before embarking on a new journey. Moreover, you need to understand how the market functions, influences, and affects your business. In addition to all this, one needs to be familiar with the different strategies required to implement a successful business program.
This is because a successful business is a combination of different tactics and strategies working in absolute sync. And one of the key strategies is a customer referral program. Having an established customer referral program works as a catalyst for your businessā rapid growth. As an aspiring entrepreneur, you cannot afford to stay behind when it comes to customer referrals.
Therefore, this article will walk you through what a referral program is and show you how you can design a strong customer referral program.
As per the name, a referral program is a traditional word-of-mouth marketing tactic that gets customers to advertise and advocate your brand on your behalf. This is one of the oldest and most widely used marketing strategies used by brands worldwide to retain customers while simultaneously gaining new ones.
Instead of relying on customer reviews, online descriptions, or sharing feedback surveys, a referral program has the customers directly talking about how good your brand is with their colleagues, partners, and friends.
A referral program is designed explicitly for companies and businesses to acquire new customers and generate leads that are fit and valuable for your brand. This makes it easier for your sales and marketing team to develop, nurture, and design a plan to engage with the customers.
For example, a sporting goods company is more likely to have an athlete as its brand ambassador instead of an entrepreneur. An athlete holds the potential to inspire and encourage like-minded individuals to use the brand, making the brand more trustworthy.
Why Should Your Company Have A Customer Referral Program?
A referral program relies on word-of-mouth. This means every new customer has heard about your brand directly from someone who has used your brand and found it amazing.
With a strong referral program, you know that every new lead/customer has a reliable source that informs them about your company being trustworthy and delivering satisfying results.
Every business or company has a set of loyal customers that are very dear to the company. A referral program is built to incentivise those customers who largely admire your product and services by getting them to spread the word about your brand. Word-of-mouth from these customers results in increased awareness and sales for your business.
The clients who are already familiar and in love with your products/services act as an evangelist by indirectly becoming invested in the future of your business. In return, you have to present them with suitable rewards for each referral.
Benefits Of Having A Customer Referral Program
Most marketing surveys suggest that referral leads are 30% more than the leads generated using other marketing channels.
All referred signups tend to have a longer lifetime value than non-referrals
A strong referral program leads to stronger brand awareness, leading to an increased market share over time.
A referral program is one of the most cost-efficient platforms for marketing. It relies solely on word-of-mouth which is generally cheaper than other customer acquisition tactics.
Customers acquired via the referral program have a whopping 40% retention rate.
Companies with Referral programs
7 Steps To Design A Customer Referral Program
There are sizeable benefits associated with a customer referral program. For starters, it is a highly cost-efficient marketing technique that keeps you from spending valuable bucks on other marketing channels.
Moreover, leads generated via the customer referral program tend to have a higher lifetime value. As you can see, there are apparent advantages to a strong customer referral program followed by metrics that are ready to be calculated and measured.
Given everything it brings to the table, you cannot skip out on having a customer referral program. And if you donāt have one already, here is how you can build one using the given steps.
Set Your Goals
Everything planned has a few prerequisites that need to be fulfilled. Similarly, before you build a customer referral program, you need to set some goals first that you aim to achieve through the program. This primarily includes asking yourself:
What do you aim to achieve through this program?
Are you looking to generate more leads?
Are you looking to enhance growth?
Are you tied between leads and growth?
Are you looking to add customer retention to the mix?
Is the customer-referral program a trust-building exercise for the industry?
The answers to all these questions will help you delve in a little further and see all the broader goals that can be accomplished on a much smaller scale. Irrespective of the growth or customer segment, numerous objectives can be established and achieved with the referral program. But all those objectives should be measurable so that you can easily measure your success against the target. The success of every customer referral program involves the engagement rate, participation rate, and conversion rate.
Define Your Message
Every referral program needs to have a set message behind it. Moreover, this message needs to be easily understood and perceived as it is by your target audience. If it isnāt, then the audience wonāt bother to give your brand a second thought. Make sure you clearly outline what your referral program aims to achieve.
For this, you will need to state how your program works, what is expected of the customers, how they can do it, and everything they can expect in return (incentives/rewards). In simple words, you will need to make sure your Call To Action (CTA) is clear, crisp, concise, and prominent.
Assess Where And How Referrals Come To Your Business
Research is an integral part of every business activity. Every business has referrals coming in one way or the other. Therefore, a critical step in building a customer referral program is research and assessing where and how referrals are coming to know about your business or if they know about your business.
This process should be a combined effort undertaken by everyone responsible for building customer relationships, such as marketing, sales, and support staff. The research includes assessing how the above three are dealing with referrals. An assessment will show your current position in terms of referrals while simultaneously mapping out the scope for improvement.
Moreover, this research shows you how much a customer is worth. Once you know where your referrals are coming from, you can spend the time monitoring and managing onboarding programs required to break these referrals even.
Create A Suitable Landing Page
A referral program comprises a suitable message. But the message is only important if it reaches the designated target audience. For this to happen, you need to have a place wherein your referral program will be available for the audience to read about. This is where you should create a relevant landing page that will explain every aspect of the referral program. Ensure that this landing page is easy to find and is easily accessible from your home page.
It is beneficial to include a landing page on the websiteās primary navigation tab. Up next, optimise your landing page by using SEO techniques such as targeted keywords which will help with the search results. The better you optimise your landing page for SEO, the higher will be the internet traffic on your page.
Finally, ensure your landing page covers all aspects of your referral program. In simple words, this landing page should explain how the referral program works, what is expected of the customers, how they can utilise the program, and what rewards they are liable to upon successful referrals. It is helpful to include a separate dedicated referral on either side of the page to make the process easier for the customers.
Choose Your Incentives
The loyal customers who genuinely like your product are likely to recommend your brand to others without expecting anything in return. However, to improve your customer retention rate, you will need to incentivise these customers, which is exactly where the referral program shines.
Merely asking your customers to refer your brand to others wonāt cut it at times. Therefore, you will need to sweeten the pot by offering some kinds of incentives. These could either be monetary incentives or early-bird discounts on all your product and services. Your incentives will usually rely on the line of work you are in. For example, Oyo Rooms offer a 30% discount on all their existing services for customers who refer other people to their services.
Incentives come in different forms and shapes. They can be paid out directly as cash, or you can be creative with it. You can opt to offer discount coupons, a rewards card, gift cards, exciting vouchers, or any other relevant items you deem fit.
All these can be sent out to your customers as a gesture of appreciation for their referrals. Know that these referral programs brought in the best results when the one sending out the referral and the referred both receive something.
Spread The Word About Your Program
Now is the time to let the people know about your program. The more people know about what your referral program has in store for them, the better it will be for your business. If you have a newly devised customer referral program, you will need to spread the word through emails, newsletters, and social media.
Moreover, all your customer interactions should have mentioned your referral program. Some of the prominent ways of letting people know about your referral program are,
CTA on all company banners and websites.
Mentions of your referral program are everywhere in your customer emails and company newsletters.
Direct your customers to the referral page every time they make a purchase.
You will need to spend a considerable amount of time at the start to spread the word. But once your program is up and running, you can cut back on the messaging. Note that mentions of your referral programs should always be active on your companyās website and should be included either in the emails or the newsletters.
Tracking And Monitoring The Programās Effectiveness
Once your referral program is up, then it is time to start monitoring from time to time. You must monitor every customer in your customer referral program. Ideally, these are things you need to monitor carefully,
Who is being referred?
Who is referring?
Has the referred customer taken advantage Of the program?
Has the referring customer received their respective incentive?
How long did it take for the referral to reach the referred person?
What more needs to be done to touch base with both the referred and referring customers?
There could be unexpected circumstances that can, at times, affect your program. Tracking your program from time to time will make you aware of such things. The longer your program runs, the larger data set you will have. All this data will eventually help you better understand your average customer. Moreover, it will also tell you which aspect of your program needs work.
Conclusion
Youāre more likely to trust a brand that has come in as a recommendation from your friend instead of as an advertisement. All research ultimately hints that people are most likely to trust their friends and family recommendations above all other marketing and advertising channels.
Every referral program has the potential to create a never-ending cycle of word-of-mouth marketing. Given the dynamics of marketing, the modern-day market demands an efficient marketing system, and this is where a strong customer referral program can lead to maximum lead generation.
FAQS
What is the strategy you use to increase customer referrals?
Provide exceptional customer service, offer incentives, and encourage your customers to share your referral program on social media.
What is the best referral program?
GetResponse ā $30 account credit per referral, Dropbox ā Up to 32 GB per referral, Fiverr ā Up to $100 per referral, and Chase Bank ā $50 per referral are some of the best referral programs.
How effective are referral programs?
The customers acquired through referral programs have a 37% retention rate.
44 million Americans have a side hustle, and why shouldn’t they? A side hustle is a popular approach to make an extra profit while maintaining the safety net, that is your full-time job. Despite popular belief, the extra credits you work for can be both highly fulfilling and financially rewarding. You can be your boss and extract profits out of projects you are genuinely passionate about.
On that note, starting an eCommerce business is the most sought way as a side hustle. Ecommerce is the buying or selling of goods and services via the internet. In today’s digital world, it has become pretty convenient and easy to set up an eCommerce store and kickstart your business.
Number of digital buyers worldwide from 2016 to 2021
Steps to Start Ecommerce as a Side Hustle
Setting up an online business might seem overwhelming at first, but it gets better with time, as said by Nelson Mandela, “It always seems impossible until it is done.”
The following are four easy steps that will help you to start eCommerce as your side hustle:
Decide The Product or Service To Sell and Your Target Audience
You must be wondering what exactly you should sell. There are tons of business structures, be it service-based businesses, physical products, digital products, or software. It is common for people to get stuck on this.
Here are a few things that you must bear in mind while selecting your product:
You must be genuinely passionate about it so that if it pays off well, you can continue to pursue it full-time in the future.
Consider the practical necessities of the product or service such as the competition and its demand in the market.
You can start this step by making a list of possible products that you would want to sell as inspiration is present everywhere. Think of the products or services your close ones or your target audience might want to buy. There are numerous product lists suggestions available on the internet that might help you with this. Lastly, search for your product on Google trends and verify whether a demand exists for the product. As this will help you to find your target audience.
A few more things that you should take into consideration at this step include:
Who is your target audience?
What are the pain points of your target audience?
How can your product help them?
All this will help you set a definite goal in advance, which ultimately makes the rest of the steps easy.
Once an idea about selling something pops in your head, you would be tempted to start your business right away. But at this point, it is important to control your impulse and rather take a calculative decision.
So, after you have decided on the product or service that you want to sell, you must conduct proper market research, watch out for your competitors, and, observe what they are doing, what is working, and what is not working for them. Here are a few things that you must consider while researching other businesses:
What is their business model?
Who is their target audience?
What are the social media platforms they are active on?
How do they generate leads (SEO, PPC, email)?
All this will help you create distinguished characteristics for your business and you will also get to know what to do and what not to. Thus, conducting research and analyzing your competitors will give you a better understanding of how you should start eCommerce as your side hustle.
Set Up Your Online Store
Set up your online store – Shopify, eBay
The next step is to set up your online store from where your customers would be able to buy the products or services you are offering. You can choose eCommerce platforms like Shopify, Woocommerce, eBay, and more. They provide ready-to-use templates and easy-to-use store-building tools. With so many options available, it might be confusing to choose one platform from where you want to sell. Here are a few points that you should consider before selecting a platform:
Loading speed
Features and tools
Compatibility with payment getaways
SEO-friendly features Ā
Make sure your store’s theme matches the theme of your business. Give your business a memorable name and be as creative yet clear with the logo. That’s what differentiates other businesses from yours. Also, try to make the buying process as smooth as possible, remove any additional steps and only ask for the information that is necessary to make the checkout process convenient for the customers.
Also, nowadays, a platform that is gaining huge popularity for eCommerce setups and marketing is Instagram. It is easy to use as all you have to do is open an account, post pictures, think of a payment mode and start selling. Since people are getting more comfortable with Instagram shopping, it is definitely an option worth exploring.
Deciding on what to sell and where to sell is not the end of the process for starting an eCommerce side hustle. Ā No business becomes successful without great sales. Lead generation and sales are the most important part of any business. So, it is important that you spend your heart and soul on promoting it.
The secret to a successful eCommerce business is to perfect your marketing strategy and channel it to the right platforms. Closely follow your competitors, and look for how they are generating leads, or which platforms they are investing in. Focusing on your marketing and making sure that you have a regular inflow of clients should be your priority.
Tips To Make Your Ecommerce Side Hustle Successful
Tips to make your eCommerce successful
If you are establishing a full-fledged eCommerce business or just starting with your side hustle, certain tips will help you make your business successful:
Provide an Exceptional Customer Service
A survey conducted by Greenwich states that “India loses around ā¹11,640 Crore every year in revenue due to poor customer service.” Great customer service is essential for your business’s long-term growth.
You should go the extra mile to meet the expectations of your customers and keep them satisfied. This will ensure that such customers keep coming back to you.
Work on Store Optimization
Once you’ve laid the foundation of your business, the next step is to work on your store optimization. Here are some things that you can do to optimize your store:
Make your store mobile-friendly
Increase the loading speed
Improve your navigation bar
Improvise your search button
Create impressive product pages
Add a section of related items
Keep Updating Your Inventory
It won’t take a long time before your existing products start losing their thunder in the market. You need to keep on improvising and adding new products or services to your business to keep it relevant. Offering new and improved products and services from time to time will help you to retain your customers and also attract new ones.
Conclusion
A side hustle is a new trend that everyone seems to like, be it young children from school, college students, or even working professionals. It might seem tough in the beginning but with time, it pays off well both in terms of money and experience. So, it is indeed possible to handle a side hustle alongside your full-time job, college, and social life. All you need is strategic planning and a bit of patience. Thus, deciding to start an eCommerce side hustle is a great first step in itself and once you have set the foundation of your business, it will be ready to fly to newer heights.
FAQs
Is starting eCommerce as a side hustle profitable?
The eCommerce industry is full of competition, but if you know what the market wants and have a plan in hand, it can be very profitable. However, the profit will depend upon the type of products or services you are selling and also your business model.
At a time when there are a plethora of eCommerce platforms for the customers, it is all the way more important to keep your existing customers abreast and gain more of them. At a time of oversupply of options like this, every firm has to find ways to keep their memory fresh in the minds of their customers. Not only that, but it is also necessary to inform them why they have to purchase from a particular platform and not from their competitors.
Marketing emails is one of the best ways in which all of these requirements can be achieved. Each mail becomes a golden opportunity for the firms to connect with their customers or even know about their needs through their email responses.
This article will look at certain kinds of emails that can be used to enhance customer engagement and retention.
It is a fact that everybody likes to be acknowledged for their efforts and actions. Being an e-commerce platform, a newsletter that is circulated through a common mailing list is usual.
Whenever there is a new subscription, be sure to send them a welcome email. The content and creativity that will brim in this email will help the consumer gain a first impression of the firm and its quality.
In this email, you can start by thanking them and then highlighting one aspect of the firm. It can be about an upcoming sale, a special discount or a cue towards when all to checkout for the newsletter.
Since this email will go immediately after they subscribe, it is more likely to be seen and read by the customers than any other email later. Hence, make sure that the welcome email is the best that it could be.
Promotional Email
The prime intention of these emails is to keep customers up-to-date with the events of the firm. These emails can be used to drive sales for your business. To increase the impact of these promotional emails, they can be curated based on the recent purchases of the customer.
Upselling can be done by offering the customer something of higher value depending on their engagement with the platform. Alternatively, through the promotional emails, customers can be introduced to complementary products to cross-sell. It will help in increasing the overall sales of the organisation. Ā
While making these promotional emails, note that they should be engaging with the audience without pressurising them. While it is a good idea to give them a deadline for the discount or a sale, it should not come out as a compulsion. Rather, the email should elicit a curiosity that will make the customers search and make the purchase.
Customised Email
The best way to retain customer loyalty is to make them feel special. A mail wishing them a birthday or letting them know that the organisation appreciates them can go a long way. Ā
Emails that pose as a first-hand reminder of an upcoming sale are a good example of a mail that would make the customer feel valued. Along with these mails, the firms can offer small discounts that will ensure better engagement.
A lot of companies make use of these emails to ensure that their customers come back to them without fail. Cultfit through their efficient notification management can be an excellent example in this regard although they are only notifications and not emails.
Re-engagement Email
Considering the options that customers have in this digital age, it is very likely that they might remain dormant after one or two purchases. In these situations, eCommerce platforms can make use of re-engagement emails that invite customers back to their fold.
It will not only generate a connection with the customer but also ensure better chances for their come back. During these emails, it will be ideal to offer the customers certain benefits or discounts that can boost their interest.
Reference Email
The key idea that drives any eCommerce venture forward is the expanding consumer base. There is no better way than word of mouth to increase the reach of any product.
emails encouraging the customers to refer more people into their fold is an excellent idea. These emails have to be curated in such a way that a reason why the customer should refer someone else has to be clearly stated. The idea of offering a freebie or extra points in return for a reference never gets old.
Review Email
Customer engagement is a two-way process. While commerce platforms constantly try to earn the trust and loyalty of the customer, it is equally important to learn and evolve according to the customer’s suggestion as well. Apart from the growth prospect that this process offers, it will also help to create an impression that the customers are heard and valued.
emails that contain feedback and review links can be circulated periodically. Depending on the availability of data and the nature of business, eCommerce platforms can circulate these emails with every order or from time to time inquiring about the overall experience of the user.
Stock Update Email
Every customer has unique needs that they want to be met by the eCommerce businesses every time they use these platforms. It can happen that they cannot deliver what the customer needs at a particular point in time due to the unavailability of stocks. It is a very important and impactful gesture when the company reverts back to the customer when the restocking happens.
While chances are high that the customer would have gone for some other options, such a mail can prove extremely useful to the firmās commitment to the customers. If the company has its standards maintained when it comes to the quality of the products, then there is absolutely no doubt that such a mailing practice will make the customer wait until the product is restocked.
Conclusion
Keeping up with customers through emails is a great way of ensuring and expanding a good customer base. While the contents of these emails have to be reworked depending on the needs and visions of the respective commerce businesses, the purpose of these emails remains as the ones mentioned above.
There are still more different kinds of email templates that can be used to send to the customers. However, too much of it can be tiring for both parties. A respectable number of emails say two or three every week are largely appreciated. Making use of this great opportunity through emails can be a great way of building commerce businesses.
FAQs
What is a transactional email?
A transactional email is an email sent to an individual when the user performs an action, for example subscribing to a newsletter.
What is transactional email? Give detailed examples.
Some examples of transactional emails are sending an email when a new user signs up, confirmation of purchase or forgotten password email.
When it comes to Facebook, no one knows how the algorithm might change, what will be promoted to users, and what will be lost forever in the millions of posts made by Facebook users every day. Businesses and influencers spend a lot of money to get their posts sponsored so that it gets promoted to their targeted demographic but still sometimes the result is not quite satisfying or what they expected it to be.
But there are some ways people can improve their reach and promote their services on Facebook, as it is one of the most profitable platforms because of the number of users it has. It has more than 2.8 billion active monthly users and the number keeps on increasing, so you know that it is quite beneficial to promote a business, especially new ones that need extra reach and attention.
WIDGET: leadform | CAMPAIGN: Link Building
Now the question is how to do that? How to increase your Facebook reach when the platform is overly saturated and populated? Following are some tips and tricks to improve your Facebook reach and gather the audience you desire.
These days, short videos are ruling social media and are the most consumed form of entertainment by users. This happened after the extreme success of TikTok, and from there, every major social media platform created its own short video option for its users. It is quite effective as it catches the attention of the user in a very short time and it is easy to make.
So the platform wants you to make more videos as they are getting more clicks and people love to watch short videos. So if you make original videos on the Facebook platform, it is going to promote them more and they will reach thousands and millions of new people who might be interested in what you have to say or offer, and this will result in getting new followers for your account.
Do Livestreams
One more video format that you can do is a live stream. People love to stop by and interact sometimes, and it is proven by a lot of studies that it increases the reach and number of followers. If you want to create a more personal bond with your audience, you can do live streams about sharing some of your experiences or you can cover some topics close to your heart that your audience will be able to relate to and connect to. These days, Q&As are getting really popular.
In this format, the audience asks questions to the person, and this creates a great conversation and a connecting moment for both the creator and the audience. If your audience finds the interactions interesting and entertaining, they might come again, which will increase your number of followers.
Keep Mixing Your Post Feed
If you want to keep the audience interested in your account, you have to mix up the content. You canāt just do the live streams all the time or only post pictures or videos. You have to mix things up. It is important to keep your feed interesting and attractive for new visitors and for those who are already following your page.
So you can post a picture, share a nice quote with your audience, or post a video sometimes. It is all about making your feed and content diverse so that different types of people can tune in and can interact with your content.
Make a Perfect Posting Schedule
Even if your posts are very interesting or the memes you are posting are really funny, if your publishing timing is not good, then it is all in vain. It is important to post your content when most of your audience is online and will be able to see the content, like, and share it. This is something you have to figure out by posting frequently and regularly and understanding the reaction you are getting from your followers.
Do Not Use Click Baits
One thing people do not like on the internet is clickbait. The internet is already full of clickbait, so if you also use clickbait to attract your audience, it might work in the beginning, but as time passes, the audience will stop clicking on your posts or stop following you because of the reputation of you posting clickbaity stuff. So try not to feed into it. It seems lucrative, but the people on the internet know what they want, and if you keep on disappointing them with clickbait, they will stop following your account.
Share Your Content on Facebook Groups
Facebook groups have over 400 million members, providing a tremendous chance for businesses or individuals to market their content or services to the group’s like-minded members. It’s a fantastic way to spread your message while also gaining new followers for your account. You can also start your own group and invite your friends and followers to join. This makes following you more enjoyable, and as more people join your group, more people will learn about your company or anything you have to offer.
Make the Most of Popular Topics
Things are always changing on the internet, especially the trends. Anything can be a trend on the internet. Try to be with the times keep track of the trends and post accordingly. So that your audience is never bored with your content and you are always on the cutting edge. If you want to attract a new audience, especially from the younger generation, you should always keep tabs on what is trending and how you can use that to create new content for your feed.
Humanize Your Brand
If you give more humanized and personal responses to the comments on your posts and share real-life experiences and stories, then more people will feel connected to your account. Authenticity is what attracts people on the internet. If your posts and interactions feel more human and thoughtful, then it will attract more people to your account, and they will promote your account to others too.
Learn From Your Competitors
One of your best teachers is your competitor. You can learn a lot from them. Check out the ads that your competitors are showing on Facebook. Three are several ad spying that you can take the help from. One of the Ad Spying tools is AdSpyder, which provides insight into the SEO strategy of your competitors. After this, you can implement these strategies on your own Facebook Page.
Try to Respond Quickly to Comments
If your followers or viewers have any questions or remarks, it’s a good chance to make a solid first impression. However, if you do not answer soon, it may be too late and you will be unable to engage in meaningful conversation with the commenter. If you get a query or comment, attempt to react within 30 minutes. After that, the commenter may forget that they asked you a question, or they may believe that their query is unimportant to you. And this is not a nice first impression for a new company.
Set up a Facebook Contest
It is always a good idea to run a competition for your audience. You can give a prize to a winner, or a “shoutout” will also do. And you can make your audience vote for the winner, so the competition is fair and everyone has a chance to win. The competition can be about anything related to your brand, anything creative, like “best quote” or “best caption for your picture”.
Conclusion
Sometimes you donāt have to pay a ton of money to promote your Facebook account and increase your reach, but it does require a lot of hard work and planning. It can be a little tricky sometimes as the platform keeps on changing its terms and algorithms, but there are some steps you can follow to improve your reach and create a loyal fanbase. Being consistent with your postings and keeping them genuine and humanised will help you a lot, especially if the account is a startup.
FAQs
What is Organic reach on Facebook?
The number of individuals who saw content that wasn’t promoted with advertising money is known as organic reach.
How does Facebook calculate organic reach?
The number of times a post appears on a person’s screen is used by Facebook to determine reach.
With the increasing number of options that are available to people on a product, competition has been on the rise since the last century. To gain an upper hand in the tussle between demand and supply, every company tries to understand the strategies of their competitors to prepare ahead of them and get a lead in the market.
This kind of spying has become a very common part of any company that today there are people assigned to analyse the activities of their competitors. Spying over a company is easier said than done.
It requires a collation of a lot of small but important things. In this article a few very important methods and spy tools that anybody who wants to understand what your competitor is doing are discussed.
Let’s look at the 10 ways on how you can Spy on your Competition.
Here literature means any kind of text that they release on their behalf. These can be blogs, articles on papers, newsletters, surveys etc. It is obvious that they wonāt share any information with their competitors, but following the above-mentioned one will help. You will get to know their ventures and campaigns before they actually happen. It is important to follow them judiciously and more important to analyse and elucidate the inner meanings if any.
Following on Social Media
There is no better campaigning alternative for a brand other than popular social media platforms to connect with customers and share their plans efficiently. The activities and engagements of your competitors on social media platforms tells a lot about the future plans.
Not only that, it also tells a great deal about their digital marketing strategy as well. It is a great way to understand a significant part of your competitors’ ways of doing business.
Look Out for Keywords
As mentioned earlier, one of the most popular ways of setting a brand’s name is through social media campaigns. And here the importance of choosing the right keywords cannot be stressed enough. Hence, one of the best ways to check on your competitor is by trying to understand the keywords that they use to increase the traffic into their website. You can use various tools available online like SEMrush, Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, and Google Keyword Planner etc. to see the keywords used by your competitors rather than trying to understand each keyword.
Focus On SEO
Finding the keywords brings us to another important thing to be done. That is, checking theirSEO tools. You might wonder what it is that makes your competitor have an edge over you despite selling the same kind of products, the answer might be in their SEO techniques. You can also understand the techniques that will bring organic traffic. There are tools like Positionly (now Unamo) which will really help in getting real time comparative data on website traffic.
Follow the Ads
Advertisements are a great way to entice customers and increase business. Ads will play a big role if they are formed correctly and placed rightly. The websites and platforms on which these ads come up is also very important. It tells a lot about their campaigns. You can track and spy on the websites and platforms on which their ads are displayed and plan accordingly.
There are Ad Spying tools that give an insight into your competitor’s ads. One of the tools that can be used is AdSpyder. AdSpyder gives you an insight into the SEO strategy used by your competitors on different platforms. With the help of this tool, you can understand the secrets of your competitors and make them useful for your own ads.
Check Up on the Products They Promote
Promotion is a very important part of any marketing campaign. The nature of products and the way of promotion will tell you a lot of their strategies. It can be a great way to adapt better things and reject things that are unnecessary.
Tracking Indexed Websites
Indexing in Google is one of the most important things that any brands would do to increase their reach. Rather than going after all the websites of your competitor, track the websites that are indexed in Google. It will help you organise the work in a more efficient manner. Google in itself is a good tool to do it.
Checking Google Ranks
Checking Google ranks is a great way to know where you and your competitor stands as far as traffic is concerned. You should understand where your competitor is ranked for every relevant keyword that will be searched. Finding a competitor’s ranking alone is not enough. You should also analyse their growth over a period of time. It will help you get an idea of their pattern of growth.
Finding Backlinks
Backlinks are very important to maintain good rankings for your website. That makes it clear how important it is to find the backlink strategy of your competitor. It will help you get a better clarity on their marketing strategy. You will also have an idea on how to effectively use your backlinks to reap the best outcomes.
Going Through the Reviews
All the campaigns that brands do, boils down to one thing – customer satisfaction. It is the key to increasing business. Analysing the customer reviews is a great way to spy on your competitor although it might sound direct. While the review of the customer gives an idea about their reception of the campaign, the reply of the competitor tells a lot about their strategies. If the reviews are negative, it will be an insight to correct your mistakes before it gets out.
Conclusion
It is true that competition has increased significantly in recent times. But it also means that there is more scope for improvement and learning from mistakes without actually making mistakes now than ever before. Understanding your competitors’ marketing will really help you in getting an idea about consumer requirements and expectations.
The above-mentioned steps are an integral part of this understanding and it is not an exhaustive list. These pointers are not to spy on your competitor but to serve as an opportunity to reflect upon your strategies and initiatives.
FAQs
Is spying on competitors illegal?
It is not illegal to spy on your competitors unless you break laws, like hacking into the security of your competitor’s database.
How can I see what keywords your competitors are using?
BuzzSumo, SEM Rush, SpyFu, and Ahrefs’ are some of the top keyword research tools you can use to spy on your competitors.
Why is it important to do competitor analysis?
The purpose of a competitor analysis is to understand your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses in comparison to your own and to find a gap in the market. A competitor analysis is important because: It will help you recognise how you can enhance your own business strategy.
Every good marketing technique requires a strategy and content forms the core of this strategy. The leading goal of using content marketing is to create brand awareness. Using the content wisely would not only help you get more customers but also in reviving and strengthening the trust of older ones.
Today, most brands including the big ones like Microsoft, P&G, Google, etc. are using content marketing. But, do you really need content marketing for a successful business?
The answer is yes. If you are still asking why we have listed below the areas where content marketing will help your business to grow:
By creating awareness about your products & services.
By building a strong and loyal relationship with your customers.
By reaching your target audience with solutions.
By developing a community around your brand.
By boosting your conversion rates.
Owing to all these reasons content marketing has emerged to be not just important rather mandatory for the success of any brand across the globe.
There are several tips and tricks that will help you master the art of content marketing. For example, posting fresh content regularly would help you to earn links, rank on SERPs, and also in driving social engagement. However, to get the desired results a good content marketing strategy is as crucial as good content itself. This means the right content must reach the right audience at the right time for the right reasons.
This has become especially important in post COVID times when most companies have to cut down the cost of marketing owing to the future uncertainties. As per the studies, the overall revenue spent on marketing has declined from 11% in 2020 to 6.4% in 2021.
This has resulted in businesses rapidly moving towards online forms of marketing resulting in a sudden boost in demand for compelling and valuable online content. Owing to this the revenue for content marketing has increased several folds worldwide.
As per statistics, the overall worldwide revenue for content marketing which was around the U.S. $42.2 billion in 2018 has increased to the U.S. $76.09 billion in 2022. Moreover, this revenue is expected to increase to the U.S. $137.2 billion by 2026.
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So if you are struggling to develop a perfect content marketing strategy for your business, you have ended up at the right place. In this blog, we will share the best content marketing strategies for 2022.
Before you begin devising your strategy, we must first understand what all will we require for it i.e. the key elements of a content marketing strategy.
There are five key elements that must be clear in your mind before you begin your planning. These elements will help you come up with the perfect strategy and take your business to new heights. They are:
Audience Persona
Before you feed them, you must know what they like. For a successful content marketing strategy, you should know the persona of your target audience. Their choices, preferences, expectations, etc. everything should be clear.
This is also sometimes called buyer person. It will enable you to bond with your target audience through effective communication.
There are a number of ways to do this:
Review the analytics of your website: Make category-wise notes on your audience includes. Divide them into groups like customers, potential customers, visitors, etc. This way you can identify your target audience as well as their pickings.
Conduct surveys: The best way to know what they like is to directly ask them. This would save you from making assumptions. Leave small one-word or one-sentence answer-type questions for your visitors. Review the poles to get a clear picture.
Analyze the latest trends: Whatever your business is everything changes with time. To sell better you must always remain updated. Explore the market regularly to know what your customers might be expecting from you. Keep revising your products as per the need.
Track your competitors: āKeep your friends close and enemies closer.ā This might sound dramatic but is true for any business person. If you wish to stay ahead keeping track of your competitors is imperative. See what makes them desirable to the customers.
Overall knowing the challenges, preferences, and priorities of your audience would help increase your conversion rate.
Positioning & Brand Storytelling
The story of your brand and the positions of your products should be clear. This will help in providing a consistent experience to the audience even when they visit you through different content channels. Moreover, as multiple individuals are involved in developing content a clear story will also help them create the right image of the product.
Knowing your existing and potential customers as well as your top competitors is very important. Further, knowing the unique value of your brand, and the challenges it is helping to resolve would be very useful in creating your brand story. All this together will aid in bringing your brand forward as a better and preferable choice for your customers, over your competitors.
Content Marketing Mission
It is actually a statement meant to answer all your questions regarding content marketing. This describes the target you wish to accomplish using content marketing.
This may include questions like āwhy to create content, who is your target audience, how to reach them, what goal will you accomplish through this?ā etc.
This must also focus on the unique value you wish to provide your audience through your content as well as your detailed business model. Doing this will help you identify the right format for your content.
Business Case
The ultimate aim of your content marketing strategy is to get more business. Therefore, documenting a well-defined business case is highly crucial. The business case will assist you in identifying your business goals and how your content marketing strategy will help you in achieving them.
Moreover, it will also recognize the resources that need to be invested in your strategy to generate desired results. Benefits, costs, and risks related to a content marketing strategy can be easily figured out using the business case.
Action Plan
Finally, you will need an action plan that covers all your goals. This should include everything starting from the format and language of your content, content topics and campaigns, channels for promotion and distribution, as well as publishing and managing your content. Creating an editorial calendar can also help you with your plan.
7 Steps for Creating the Best Content Marketing Strategy
In this section, we will share with you the 7 most powerful steps to craft the best content marketing strategy for your brand. So letās begin.
Categorize Your Audience and Content
As described in the earlier section, you must have your audience persona handy and segregated it into different categories. However, an important piece of advice here is to not consider any of these categories useless.
The visitors of today may turn into your loyal customers tomorrow it all depends on what you have in offer for them. So, observe the activities of every kind of audience you have.
Usually, an individual connects with the brand slowly. They may just scroll down through your websites for months before they finally decide to take an action. It takes time for people to trust a brand and its products.
Moreover, remember that you would buy a product on the advice of a friend, not a salesperson. So, try to be a caring friend to your audience whom they can trust. The best way to do this is to provide them with the right information. For example, if you are a skincare brand, tell them about the skin requirements and basic skincare tips before you actually introduce them to your product.
Having said that donāt forget that your ultimate goal is to increase conversion rate and that will only happen if your audience remembers your product. Integrate your brand with every story you tell your audience. They should get comfortably aware of everything you are providing.
The customer must feel that you genuinely care for their needs. Once they start trusting you try to resolve their problems by extending your relevant product. A clear call to action is extremely important at this point.
Another important thing to remember here is that no customer will buy every product. Each of them has different requirements. Hence, you must serve them accordingly.
The book āBusiness model generationā written by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur talks about the Empathy map based on a comprehensive approach. They describe it as a collaborative tool that will help you understand and connect with your audience better. It actually promotes walking in the shoes of your customers.
This concept focuses on adopting the audienceās perspective to understand their needs. This will provide you with an overview of what they think and feel. Also, you can decipher the factors that will encourage them to develop a strong relationship with you.
The audience is looking for the solutions to various problems they have and your responsibility, as a marketer, is to fit your product into their requirements.
Setting Your Content Marketing Goals
Your content marketing goals must comprehend the overall goals of your company. By looking at the wider scenario you will be able to make a better analysis of how can you actually make every content count.
You must also identify suitable content marketing metrics for your business. They might be primary, for example, the direct revenue generated by content marketing, or secondary, for example, organic traffic, SERP rankings, etc.
Further, consider the resources that are available to you. This will let you set motivating yet practical goals that are specific, measurable, and achievable. Setting the timeline and using realistic benchmarks to assess the goals is also very crucial.
There are a number of frameworks that will help you through the entire process of goal setting and tracking. Key Performance Indicators can be of great help if you are trying to set higher goals for your business. However, if you are worried about the complexities or intricacies of most frameworks as a beginner, we would advise you to go for OKRs. Objective and Key Results will help you set agile goals and track your performance through key results.
As a leader make sure to involve your team in every discussion. Ask for their opinion, and see how some of them may surprise you. Allow them to set separate goals individually or for the teams. This will make them feel more independent and important. Also, it will encourage them to work more efficiently towards the goals.
Analyze Your Existing Content
There are almost 1.17 million websites on the internet that produce around 70 million blog posts every month. This data is enough to bring your attention to the quantity of content available for your audience. Hence, if you want to have more engagement with your audience focus on quality. It is important to remain active but, it is equally important to maintain eminence.
This is why you must analyze the content that already exists on your website. Also known as content audit it is done by most successful companies annually or half-yearly. The basic idea here is to analyze the existing content to identify the best-performing topics and keywords. Also, it will help you recognize the communication channel most preferred by your audience.
When implemented correctly it can help in generating more organic traffic, securing better ranks on SERPs, as well as in boosting the engagement of your content.
Editorial Plan and Content Calendar
To create an editorial plan and content calendar is to allocate your resources and recognize your limitations. You should be absolutely clear about your content marketing goals at the beginning of the year.
After your goals are set it is extremely important to prioritize them. At this stage, you can actually identify opportunities to experiment and at the same time create a plan that will save you from making blunders.
Your entire plan should be based on what services or products you are offering, renewing, or launching for your audience. The plan will include the roadmap for the product campaign and recognize the resources needed to implement it. It should also be able to estimate the potential gains.
Creating an excellent editorial plan starts with finding relevant topics. You can use various paid and unpaid tools available for this purpose depending on your budget. These topics must be in the interest of your target audience. Try looking for content that is evergreen. This means that your content should be sustainable yet fresh for the readers.
Topic Selection
It should always top your priority list. Majorly there are two factors that help you in topic selection. First, whether it will sound attractive to your target audience, and second, does it have the ability to achieve conversions.
If you have a problem finding a large number of topics try to create topic clusters. These are several inter-related topics that share the same central term with other relevant subtopics. This will help you establish yourself as a pioneer of that particular topic amongst your readers making them trust you even more.
Also, before you finalize your list of topics do not forget to dive into the content of your competitors. It might prove really useful in finding relevant topics, formats, or keywords. For more ideas you can also visit the other content publishers, for example, influencers, online magazines, etc., that share the same area of expertise.
Your content plan should be such that it covers all the aspects of the customerās journey. This is highly important as you will have a variety of audiences visiting your site for a variety of purposes, this is known as the customer journey. You must have content for each of their need.
The different aspects of a customerās journey include:
Recognition: Recognition is when an individual recognizes you as a brand and begins interacting with you.
Contemplation: Contemplation is when they start considering you for their needs.
Selection: Selection is when they select you to help them with their issues.
Retention: Retention is when they start relying on your product for their requirements.
Endorsement: Endorsement, is when they start recommending your products to their nearby people.
Prepare a list of your topics based on these factors. Once you have the list in hand, decide a deadline for each topic and put the schedule on your content calendar. This will keep the information handy and organized. You can also track the progress of a project at any point in time and not miss a deadline.
Content Development
The entire process of content marketing revolves around the content. You cannot afford to make mistakes in this area. Even when you want to speed up the entire process and reach your goal with rocket speed, you cannot compromise the quality of your content.
The originality of the content is most important. No matter how well you write if the content isnāt original neither the audience nor Google will give weightage to it. For good quality content apart from reading the resources online also include your personal opinion, knowledge, and experience while writing.
Do not just focus on specific areas rather include diversity in your topics. More diversity means more engagement for a variety of people. Use graphics and images to keep your readers engaged. Whenever possible provide statistics for better understanding and acceptance of your content.
Repurpose your content into different styles to make it reach a wider audience. For example, you can create podcasts, infographics, or even videos out of a blog after publishing it.
You can also include User Generated content for your website. The top positive comments you received, or videos or photos shared by your customers, share all on your website. This will attract a lot of positive attention to your product.
Content Distribution Plan
As discussed in the earlier section, good content is only valuable if you can make it reach the right audience at the right time. Even the best content becomes worthless without proper recognition. For this, you need an excellent content distribution plan.
There are majorly three channels for content distribution. They are:
Owned media channels: Includes blog posts, landing pages, newsletters, social media profiles, etc.
Paid media channels: Includes social media ads, influencer campaigns, sponsored content, etc.
Earned media channels: Comments, shares, mentions, guest posts, etc.
Basically, the purpose of all of these channels is to publish your content and promote your products. While you plan your content distribution analyze all the channels. Use past performance and experiences to identify the best suitable channel for your audience. Also, look for other new alternatives available in the market.
Align your messages and goals across all the channels to provide a clear picture of your brand and products. The omnichannel approach is considered the best to bring your product to the attention of your audience.
Focus on content optimization and content quality to get desired results. The main target while developing any kind of content should be to improve user experience. The readability of the text, the tone, and format, everything should be as per the convenience of your users.
Regular Update & Analysis
Content marketing is a regularly evolving process. Therefore, the evolution of your content is also mandatory. Analyze the performances of your previous content to understand where the audience connects the most and where they donāt. These are the signboards for the success of your content.
Identify the content with the best engagement and conversion rates, and develop more similar content that intrigues them. There are four essential metrics of content marketing that decide whether your content is valuable or not.
User behaviour: See how users react to a particular type of content. How much time they spend on that page or the number of new or returning visitors. Identify your top-performing pages.
Engagement: The comments, reviews, and shares are all signs of engagement. Look at them to know the worth of your content.
SEO outcomes: The dwell times, backlinks, organic traffic as well as keyword rankings will define how often you will appear in searches.
Company revenue: Nurturing old leads, generating new leads, cost per acquisition, conversion rates, etc. will help you identify the best and worst content on your site.
Examine your content based on the above factors to decide upon the future course of action in your content marketing plan.
Conclusion
Like any other industry, the trends in content marketing also keep changing with time. However, if you understand the basic principle your brand will sustain all the changes and still stand strong.
Understanding your customer and winning their trust is the ultimate key to becoming a master of content marketing.
P.S. Special advice for beginners: Donāt jump into the rat race immediately as a single wrong decision can ruin your goodwill forever. Keep optimum pace and take time to establish yourself amongst your audience. Build trust as well as brand value. Soon the audience will start engaging with your content.
FAQs
What is a content marketing strategy?
Content marketing is a marketing strategy that is built to attract more visitors, create high-quality content and rank higher on Google.
What are the 4 pillars of content marketing?
The four pillars of content creation are originality, relevance, engagement, and relevancy.
You must have heard of the popular marketing strategy called āinvite-onlyā. In the invite only marketing strategy, new users can join your website only when they are invited by any current users on the site. Invite only events can be very risky as you are launching and not letting everyone use your product. Because you bet on the fact that people will remember you and come back later.
The invite only strategy is generally done with the goal of getting early feedback to prepare for a later marketing launch. Some popular invite only platform were Facebook which was limited to Harvard students only, Quora to influencers and Gmail with their Google+ social network. To date, Dribbble, Behance, Clubhouse are among several other invite only platforms.
One such example is Pinterest. When Pinterest was first getting started, it was among the few invite only websites but allowed users to request an invitation if they wanted to join. After requesting an invitation, Pinterest sent out an email to prospective users explaining that the waiting list was quite long, but that eventually, they would be accepted to join.
Not only internet-based startups but also China-based Mobile Phone company Oneplus launched its new products with the OnePlus invite only strategy. Ā
āThe reason we created an invite-only system is that we want to control the risks the best we can, to control production, quality, quantity. Itās not like normal marketing; if you have a good product, youāll want to introduce it to a friend. So the OnePlus 2 is like a product based on friends saying, āCome on, thatās good, go buy it.ā This approach throws tradition away.ā told founder Pete Lau.
However invite-only strategy doesnāt work all the time. Simply put, an invite-only marketing strategy is a double-edged sword. With many benefits, it also comes with disadvantages and could backfire if not done properly.
There are many benefits of launching an invite-only platform, the main being that it makes your startup brand itself as being exclusive, top quality, private, etc. The invite only strategy makes the users feel that theyāre a part of something special.
Get Feedback
Getting Customer Feedback in invite-only Marketing Strategy
The invite-only marketing strategycan be effective when it comes to improving a product or service. Users acquired in beta stages are a lot more engaged with the service and also help in future development. These are the users who are willing to give you appropriate feedback on the application as well as to monitor their usage to test whether you have created a product that people want and achieve product fit.
Create a Buzz
Scarcity has a nice effect on increasing demand. With the help of an invite-only marketing strategy, you might get your product in front of more eyeballs than otherwise because they feel a stronger desire to see it. The invitation strategysparks the interest and curiosity of outsiders and drives product hype.
Filter Spam Users
Invite only appshelps you to make sure these are your authentic users. Your first few users will be very important in helping you to determine your product roadmap. Especially useful if you have limited resources and can only work on certain important features. This will help you prioritizing and pivot quickly if needed. So instead of focusing your attention on the content, you can more focus on the product.
Create a Degree of connectivity
Especially if you are launching something with a social feature it allows your invitees to send out their own invitations to their network, the new users will already have a connection on the network. A brand or app launch invitation will help foster in-application social connections between groups of pre-existing friends.
Invite-only marketing strategy works quite well for website launch. A website launch invitation helps in getting users which may not have come otherwise – new members who are referred by others tend to give products a longer trial run and have a higher likelihood of converting into long-term users than any other means of marketing.
A product launch invitation email is a popular way of limiting the number of people at launch events, especially during the time of the Covid 19 pandemic.
Disadvantages of Invite-Only Marketing Strategy
The platform using Invite Only Marketing Strategy
There might be a severe disadvantage of the invite only marketing strategy. The worst is that even your early users will leave and forget your site. If you invite a bunch of people and they all join but post low-quality information or just donāt post at all, they wonāt find it interesting to ask their friends to join too.
Negative Buzz can Kill your Startup
An invite only strategy will lead to the negative buzz that can quickly damage the product reputation and stop new users from accepting invites and steer others away from inviting friends to use the product. One way to combat invite only marketing strategy is to game the system – populate the site with your own content or relevant curated content, have your friends and associates participate, call in favours in the form of engaging posts, etc.
Fewer Users
Why would you like to limit the number of users who can sign up? Ā Let it be completely open and available to all and find other ways, such as using algorithms and user feedback systems, to deal with low-quality users and their low-quality content. After all, what proof is there invite-only websites thatproduce all the potential benefits Iāve speculated on above?
Less Feedback and Sharing
More users will also result in more feedback and more word of mouth. By invite only, you restrict people from using your product and they would not know more about you even if they want to.
Itās Harder
Invite only means more programming than not going invitation only, all other things being equal. Do you really want to spend any of your valuable startup time creating a user-management system that allows you to specify who can and canāt sign up?
Do let us know if you going for an invite-only marketing strategy for your startup!
FAQs
What does invite-only marketing strategy mean?
In the invite-only marketing strategy, new users can join your website only when they are invited by any current users on the site.
What are some invite-only platforms?
Some apps using Invite-Only marketing strategy are:
Dribble
Behance
Was Facebook invite-only?
Yes, initially in 2004 when Facebook was launched it was invite-only and available to only Harvard students before expanding to other Ivy Leagues colleges and then gradually anyone could sign up to the website. This invite-only marketing strategy helped Facebook grow in its initial stages.
Is Clubhouse invite-only?
Clubhouse is no more Invite-Only App since July 2021. Earlier it used Invite Only marketing strategy.
Which startups should use invite only marketing strategy?
Invite only marketing strategy works well with luxury brands.
When you decide to begin with your own startup, there are a few things that cannot be avoided. You must have heard that there is a lot of competition when you thought of starting up your own business in that field. This is the time you need to realize that, you need to build up a new skill to land your startup in success.
One of the skills is Analysis of your competitorās marketing strategy is a skill which is extremely useful for any sort of business you might have entered. On the other hand, analysis of your competitorās marketing strategy is a crucial step which if once analyzed, brings you halfway to your success. You need to make sure that you look outside the window and analyze what others are doing and know their strengths and weaknesses. In this article, we will provide you with a guideline on how to analyse your competitor’s marketing strategy. So let’s get started.
What Is Competitorās Marketing Strategy Analysis?
Competitive analysis in simple words refers toā a well-structured evaluation of your business environment that includes the competitorās company, it’s offering, and most importantly its marketing strategy. It is the art of knowing how well the other players of that particular field are doing in the market. Most importantly look for the spaces they are creating for you to grab the opportunity to dive into and come up better than them by providing something more valuable.
What All Does This Analysis Comprise?
Competitorās marketing strategy analysis involves qualitative and quantitative data that is very crucial. The goals and missions of an organization depend upon it. Most importantly, how will the goals be achieved, i.e., what will be the strategy to effectively and efficiently achieve those goals is also formulated in accordance with the data collected. It involves answers to various questions like-
What are the competitors good at?
Where do the competitors lack?
How to make sure that they donāt steal away your customers?
Benefits of Competitorās Marketing Strategy Analysis
Analysis of competitorās marketing strategy is a crucial step for all businesses big or small. It must be done cautiously. As, it deals in the collection of the most important data, upon which the organizationās strategies are based upon. If done appropriately, it gives out plenty of qualitative and quantitative data that will help your own crucial business decisions. Analysis of Competitorās Marketing strategy is important in many ways.
Identify Opportunities
Why choose your brand? This question plays a significant role in separating you from your competitors. A good analysis of a competitorās marketing strategy gives you an insight into what unique would customers find in you. So that, they choose you over your competitors.
Competitorās marketing strategy analysis creates a significant opportunity to identify gaps through analyzing data. Create a new product category to bridge the gap between what your competitors offer and what the customers need.
Know Strengths and Weaknesses
You have a great opportunity to find out, where do the competitors lack by analyzing the collected data. Improve your product by capitalizing on competitorsā weaknesses customers complain about. It helps you create your own Unique Selling Proposition. You must learn from their mistakes and make sure that you do not repeat them at any cost. The focus must be on consistent learning and improvement simultaneously. By this, you can easily come up with a distinguishing identity in the market.
Position of Your Business in the Long-Run
As your brand expands, the expectations of your customers from you also increase. This opens up an opportunity for you to position your business in the long run. When you create a distinguishing identity. Through competitor marketing strategy analysis, you get a chance to get to know all their weaknesses of them, which is an edge for you over your competitors. You need to overcome all their mistakes that will help you position your business in the long run by creating a faithful image in the mind of the customers.
Uncover Market Trends
You get to know what is going on in the market. It, therefore, helps you to keep with the pace and follow contemporary methods. You must eliminate the usage of obsolete and traditional marketing strategies. It helps you uncover market segments that arenāt fully served by competitors. You need to focus on that and work upon the loopholes of the competitors.
Motivation
By analyzing what your competitors are doing, you get to know their position in the market. They set a benchmark that helps you measure your standards and take corrective action wherever required. The presence of competition in the market gives the inspiration to work consistently. It gives a thrust to keep on striving to do better.
What Is the Process of Analyzing Competitorās Marketing Strategy?
This guide on analyzing competitorās marketing strategy works well for startup founders, entrepreneurs, business owners, marketers, etc. Including certain tips on where to look for data that isnāt publicly available, this guide consists of a step by step process of how to go about analyzing your competitorās marketing strategy-
Identify Competitors of Your Industry
The first and foremost step is to determine who your competitors are. You need to pick the right competitors who are pitching similar products or services targeting a similar category of customers. To simplify, divide your competitors into two categories: direct and indirect.
Direct competitors are those, who offer a product or service similar to that of yours who works as a substitute for yours operating in your same geographic area. Whereas, Indirect Competitors are those who provide dissimilar products that can be used as an alternative to satisfy the needs of the customer. You need to realize that Direct Competitors are to be paid more focused.
Wondering how to identify direct competition? Here are the steps to follow-
Have a check on who is sourcing products from the same suppliers/wholesalers as per your plan.
Keep a note of brands that use your target buyers the most.
Determine What They Offer
Product or services offered is where the heart of any business lies. Therefore, it is the best place to start with. A deep analysis of the competitorās complete product line or services offered must be done. Along with this, there must be an eye upon attractive benefits that they offer along with the product and service which tends to attract their customers.
Analyze Their Tactics
Existence in this competitive market is quite difficult. Certain tactics are used by market leaders to achieve heights. Therefore, the focus must lie on the following questions-
Ā· What does the sale procedure look like?
Ā· What are the channels of distribution used by them?
Ā· What are the tactics that earn them the most advantages?
Ā· What are their customer relationship management techniques?
Ā· What are the lucrative offers they offer to their customers?
Ā· How do they manage interpersonal relations?
These are a few helpful pieces of information that give you an idea of the tactics that the competitors apply. By knowing this, you can get an idea about how to go about to form own strategies.
Analyze Their Pricing Strategy
Price is the most important element. It is the value that the customer pays for the product or service. Pricing must be done very carefully as it depends upon certain major factors. Due care must be taken upon how the competitors tackle those factors and price the offerings.
Determine Their Marketing Strategy
The productivity of businesses depends upon the marketing strategy that is used. There must be knowledge of marketing strategies being applied by other players in the market. With the advent of technology, most businesses use the internet for marketing. The online world opens up the doors to meet a vast audience. Observe the competitorās website, the way of content marketing, social media marketing, etc.
Use Spying Tools to Know Your Competitorās Strategies
Various online tools and methods are available online which help you be aware of your competitor’s strategies. Spying tools can be of great help for this. One of the popular spying tools is AdSpyder. It helps you spy on your competitor’s ad strategies on different platforms. The platforms include Facebook Google, Youtube, and Instagram, and also search engines like Yahoo and Bing.
AdSpyder – Spying Tool
Perform a SWOT Analysis
SWOT Analysis is a great tool to envision how to get an edge over other businesses. SWOT stands for Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. When you have an overview from all these perspectives, you are on the right path to success. The analysis must comprise of following areas which are not exhaustive-
Ā· Customer experience
Ā· Online marketing strategies
Ā· Pricing strategy
Ā· Content strategy
Ā· Promotion strategy
Conclusion
The main objective of this article is to pay attention to the opportunities that the competitors are missing. One must learn to take advantage of the competitorās weaknesses through the strengths of own. The market is highly dynamic which demands routine running of the competitorās marketing strategy analysis. Competitorās analysis is a multi-facet process, which if well-executed can land you towards productivity.
FAQs
What is Competitor’s Marketing Strategy Analysis?
It is the art of knowing how well the other players of that particular field are doing in the market.
What is the importance of Competitor’s Marketing Strategy Analysis?
Analysis of competitorās marketing strategy is a crucial step for all businesses big or small. It is important in many ways.
How to Position a business in the long run?
Business need to overcome all their competitor’s mistakes that will help you position your business in the long run by creating a faithful image in the mind of the customers.
Being involved in a business means being a competitor among several others. Value and appeal are always at the top of people’s minds. Whether youāre the biggest fish in the ocean or not, you must know how your competitors work. Want to know their secrets? Marketing analysis is where you study and identify information about a business or product while assessing its individual qualities and drawbacks.
Analysis and studying your competitors can reveal a lot of information that you may have overlooked. This information can help your business grow tremendously and bring in new customers. Getting to know your competitors not only helps you be prepared but also helps you learn from their mistakes. That being said, let’s look into how to analyze your competitor.
Before you head on to analyze your competitors and take in information, there are a few questions you have to ask yourself. These may be according to your preferences depending on the business. These questions when answered should help you gain an advantage over your competitors. You will be more focused and organized once you have an overview. Some of these questions can be:
What about my competitorās business do I want to know the most?
These questions will help enhance the speed of your analysis process.Having a vision is crucial as it can be overwhelming to process all the information together. Once thatās done you can begin analyzing your competitor.
How to Analyse Your Competitor?
You might be surprised how a simple and easy-to-do analysis can reveal a lot about your competitors. This information can help you gain an advantage over them and improve your own business. Here weāll look at 5 simple steps to analyze your competitor. The tools and methodology will also be explained for each of the steps below:
1. Identify and Evaluate
The first step is to identify your competitor. This means that you need to collect more statistical information rather than the company name and description. Finding out exactly where they rank up and how dominating they are will help you to evaluate their threat to your business. There are several free tools available to help you assess your rival.
SimilarWeb is a web traffic and analysis tool used by several businesses. It allows you to get the SEO rank of a website and details such as engagements, traffic by countries, the sources of traffic, etc. It even shows you a list of similar websites and competitors. This data can reveal their source of customers and a general idea of how good their website is. You must evaluate your results and understand your competitor before moving on to the next step.
SimilarWeb results (Identifying your competitor)
2. Tracking and Spying
Observation is key when performing an analysis. Toknow exactly what your competitor does to maintain their position you must observe and track their actions. This is rather an easy thing to do in this digital era where nothing goes unnoticed. Observe them for a specific period. This could be anything from a week to an entire month depending on the kind of results you get. Try to visit their website often. What changes are they making concerning the industry? This could be the information that your business is lacking or something you could improve at.
Tracking Your Competitors
Some tools make this process much easier. Google Alerts and Brandwatch can track your competitor and give you alerts when certain events are triggered. These events can be when their traffic goes up a certain number, a certain page gets more visits or a social media post on trending. Tools like BuiltWith help you track the technologies used. Once you get these alerts, you can personally read the posts and know exactly what they did to get the extra attention. Progressive tracking can give you valuable insight into an organization.
Spying on Your Competitors
While on the other hand, one of the tricks that can be used in getting hold of trending advertisements of your competitors and their their ad strategies is Ad Spying. Ad spying tools like AdSpyder help in spying on the competitors’ ads on all the major social media platforms like Facebook, Google, Youtube, and Instagram, and also on search engines like Yahoo and Bing.
3. Find Out What Makes Them Unique
Every business has something about them that makes them different. When it comes to marketing it’s not just the product that makes a difference. Look into their socials, try to find out exactly how they advertise besides their website. How are the targeted customers drawn to them? Why would someone pick them over your business? Find out these factors and use them to boost your business. Although this doesnāt mean you should steal ideas from your rivals. It means that you can gain insight and use it as inspiration when you do your marketing.
4. Analyze Customer Ratings
Look at the business from a customerās point of view. What seems appealing to the customers may be what drives their business. Check the rating and reviews of the product or business using platforms like Trustpilot and Sitejabber. Knowing what the customers think about a service can help you get a direct overview of the company. You can also use surveys and analytical tools for this purpose. Customers fuel the business. Knowing the customer mindset can help you understand the business marketing efficiently. This also helps you test the positive and negative aspects of the business.
Sitejabber reviews (analyzing customer ratings of a competitor)
5. Evaluate Strengths and Weaknesses
No business is perfect at what they do. Yet they are successful because theyāre good at certain things. These are defined as the strengths of any business. While analyzing your competitor it’s important that you know and accepts their strengths. Learning from your competitor and getting better is a huge benefit for any business. There are also weaknesses. These could be anything from a flawed marketing strategy to bad customer service. Knowing the weaknesses of your competitor allows you to exploit them by doing the deed better yourself. You not only have a chance of converting customers to your side but also improve in the long run.
FAQs
What is Marketing analysis?
Marketing analysis is where you study and identify information about a business or product while assessing its individual qualities and drawbacks.
What are the 5 steps to analyse your competitor?
Identify and evaluate, Tracking and spying, What makes them unique, Analyse customer ratings, and Evaluate strengths and weaknesses.
Why must one track the actions of competitors?
To know exactly what your competitor does to maintain their position you must observe and track their actions.
