In my struggle to convince companies of the need to define a marketing strategy to achieve better results, I have addressed the issue from several points.To avoid that the methodology to define it, its phases or more important deliverables, I like to give it closer approaches, more of common sense. I think they are a much more effective way of making things understand.If we take two steps back, we realize that online marketing consists of doing all of life, but through digital channels. There are no secret formulas, shortcuts, or anything similar. Chief Operating Officer Email List
We have to accompany our audience throughout the purchase decision process to try to convince them to become our customers.
What are the bases of this accompaniment? What makes our audience end up opting for our offer? What motivates you to make the final purchase decision? If we approach it from common sense (outside of any theory), what is the most important?
The most logical things would be:
The first thing is to have the right product or service, which covers all or part of the needs of our audience.
Knowing our audience will allow us to sell them better.
Make our communication relevant to them. That is, we know how to transmit at all times what the client needs to hear in order to move forward with the purchase decision.
But what is it that makes them decide for our offer? The trust.
The combination of everything we do (product, communication, customer service …), has the ultimate goal of winning the trust of our customers to buy our products.
Building trust is the key to selling online
And, how do we generate that much-needed confidence to achieve the company’s objectives?
Just as the relevance of communication must be part of any message we want to reach our audience, trust must be built at each point of contact, from start to finish. The sum of many few causes confidence to be generated, it is not a matter of a single factor.
Five factors that help build trust
If we go down to the tactical level, the list of factors that help to generate confidence would be too long and would end up not contributing value.
Instead, I’m going to group the factors into concepts that I think are advisable.
- Brand
Although in reality it should be the last factor, since it summarizes all the attributes that the company wants to transmit, it is so important that it must go first.
The branding and positioning of the brand that supports it mean that, in addition to having a clear idea about the company, we have a better image.
A good brand strategy, adds that extra to the motivation of the audience to buy our products, is what makes you not mind paying an overprice in order to buy a product of our brand. - Consistency in communication
Our audience receives different impacts through different channels and for these to be effective they must be consistent with each other and relevant to the audience. That is, not only must we maintain the same line of communication, but in each channel we must get the message, product, moment and audience profile right. - Good practices
In this section we could include dozens of examples, but we can summarize it in doing things well, in thinking before acting.
In avoiding things like: excessive advertising pressure, low value content, unfulfilled promises, spam in email marketing, publications with deceptive headlines to generate clicks (clickbaiting), attempts to force engagement to achieve greater reach in social networks, … everything we know is wrong, but that many companies do continuously.
All this affects in a very negative way the trust that our clients may have.
4 people
I was going to talk about customer-focused organizations, etc. etc., but I think we can summarize that we should not forget that we talk to people, not numbers.
It seems that, when implementing a marketing strategy, we forget that on the other side there are people like us.
People who need a real time and arguments to make their purchase decision, people who expect personal treatment (if in their head they have an excellent image of your company and you treat them badly, how do you think that will affect their confidence?), etc.
Obviously, the higher the volume of customers, the greater the difficulty of maintaining the level of service. But, besides that there are ways to improve it, we not only have to take it into account in customer service, but in the strategy itself (with many of the arguments I have explained in the previous points).
