By Andrew Raso
“Don't put all your eggs in one basket.” That saying has been passed around for decades. It's smart advice, but often goes unheeded in the business world.
Due to time and budget constraints it's not uncommon for small business owners to lock onto a single marketing tactic and run with it for as long as possible, especially when it seems to be working. But what would happen if your sole means of generating customers suddenly disappeared? Would your small business be able to adapt quickly?
I recall one small business owner I worked with who was reluctant to diversify his marketing. His retail business had been doing quite well and business was growing rapidly, thanks to local radio spots that he had purchased. He didn't feel the need to do more because radio was working, so he continued to put his budget into that.
Sometime later he reached out to me because the radio station had changed formats and ownership. With it, the rates for his ad spots during drive time had gone up, and he was forced to cut his daily advertising down to just a few ad spots a week. He found himself with a dramatic drop in business and was struggling to get by.
Diversify or Die
This story is all too common with small business owners. Most businesses can sustain themselves with a 10 or 20 percent in business. Everyone has lean times. But an over 50 percent decrease can spell the end. That's why it's important to diversify your marketing.
With diversity in marketing you:
- Reach a broader audience, tapping into audience segments you would otherwise miss.
- Have more channels to produce fresh content.
- Create a more diverse and organic link profile which contributes to better search visibility.
- Free yourself from cost fluctuations that otherwise trap marketers using single-channel marketing (as in my example above).
- Are more prepared for changes in marketing, your industry, and consumer behaviors.
Diversity isn't about doing everything, though; it's smart deployment using marketing channels that most effectively help you communicate with and engage your audience.
Here's the approach I recommend for effectively diversifying your marketing:
Research your audience. Any decisions you make about the marketing channels you use, your messaging, the images, the timing–they're all based on your audience. You likely have a broad idea of who your customer is, and if you dig deeper you can create several targeted personas that represent real segments of your audience.
Understanding the demographics (who customers are) and psychographics (why they buy and behave the way they do) as well as their online behaviors you'll be able to see:
- Where they spend their time online (which social channels).
- What they like and dislike.
- What content formats they prefer to interact with (video, text, images).
- What their pain points are, and more.
This way you're not just picking a channel, like radio, because “everyone listens to radio.” You're basing your choice (blogging, video content, radio, community events, organic social or paid social ads) specifically on audience insights.
Examine the competition. Whenever I'm creating or refining a marketing strategy I always perform a SWOT analysis of my competitors:
- Strengths
- Weaknesses
- Opportunities
- Threats
A SWOT analysis will reveal opportunities for you to take what your competitors are doing and do it better. When you examine your competition, you'll also see how they engage your audience. What channels are they using? How effective is their outreach and do you see ways to do it better?
Choose your channels. Again, you don't have to do everything all at once. There are over 100 commonly used marketing channels you can use to engage your audience. Start by focusing on three, based on your research, that would be the most effective for engaging your audience.
The most common channels that will likely be at the top of your list are:
- Social media (organic engagement) on sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
- Secondary social sites for video content like Snapchat and Periscope
- Blogging
- Email marketing
- Video content posted to sites like YouTube and Vimeo
- Paid social (Facebook ads, Instagram ads)
- Community engagement (local events, social media groups, community sites like Reddit)
Don't just focus on this list, though. Go by what your research tells you.
Set goals and milestones. Don't jump immediately to promoting and content publishing on any channel you select until you've established your goals. You need to know what it is that you want from your efforts.
Create your overarching goals and define your key performance indicators (KPIs); these will help you define what success looks like. Break down goals into milestones to create a road map you can follow to your primary goal.
For example, if your goal is to increase your engagement on Facebook, a key performance indicator might be a certain percent gain in reach and engagement each week. Small goals to help reach the larger might be setting a number for daily number of posts–achieving that number, and responding to every comment.
Test everything. Even if your research says a certain marketing channel is ideal, you still want to test and measure everything you do. Track important metrics like customer conversions, traffic generated from certain channels, in-store purchases traced back to custom coupon codes online, etc.
Measuring your results is the only way to know how effective your efforts are. From your metrics you'll be able to determine if it's worth changing up the strategy on a certain channel to improve it, or dumping it if it's not working.
Revisit your strategy. You'll likely see success with your initial efforts, which is fantastic. I urge you to continue to revise your strategy, however. Once you have one or more successful marketing channels you should continue to build on them.
Conduct new research, improve your current channels, and add new marketing channels to further diversify your efforts. Like a small tree, your marketing and content strategy will eventually grow with a lot of branching channels, each contributing to a consistent influx of new and returning customers.
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