You started your small business because you have a passion for the product you’re selling. In the past, I bet you’ve managed to convince a family member or friend that they need the product you’re selling, but in a relaxed, non-pushy sales way because you didn’t even realise you were doing it.
Now, if I said you need to do this but on camera to your social media following, how would you feel about it? To many, the thought of talking on camera makes them freeze instantly, so you’re not alone!
With this in mind, it’s not surprising that so many creators are hesitant to make video content featuring themselves- it’s pretty intimidating. However, video is increasingly important, especially for small businesses.
It’s a brilliant way to reach a whole new audience, as well as connecting to your existing followers on a more personal level.
You’ve probably seen small business owners talking to camera looking relaxed and confident - this can be you too! Here are the top tips for feeling more confident on camera.
PREPARATION IS KEY
Don’t be fooled by all the video content you see online! Those Tiktok dances take hours of practice to perfect and more than just one click of the record button. Please don’t put that kind of pressure on yourself, you don’t have to get it right the first, second or even third time…
Practice Makes Perfect
The best way to start building your confidence, as silly as it sounds, is to act like you’re talking to the camera when completing your daily tasks. Talk to your imaginary audience. Maybe it’s a haul whilst unpacking your food shop. Chat with them whilst washing the dishes or taking them through your morning routine. Anything really to get you talking is perfect! Write down what you want to say.
It’s always best to write a brief script outlining what you want to say. You don’t need to write it out word-for-word, but it will help you to stay more focused.
Knowing what you’re going to say on camera will be way less daunting. Trust us, that level of calm will translate on camera!
Get Ready To Film.
Set time aside before filming to make you feel your best, whether it’s getting into your favourite outfit or listening to a Spotify ‘confidence booster’ playlist. Treat it like you are psyching yourself up before a job interview. We promise this will make you more confident on camera.
The Power Of The Pose.
Social psychologist Amy Cuddy argues that "power posing" even when we don't feel confident, can boost feelings of confidence. This is the act in which people stand in a posture, usually, with their feet apart, hands on their hips, and their chin tilted upward so that they feel mentally more powerful. Apparently, it can even influence testosterone and cortisol levels in the brain - pretty impressive, isn’t it? And definitely a top tip to remember!
BE PRACTICAL
It’s time to be practical and think about your filming location - you can’t have someone in the background being noisy when you’re trying to film. The time of day, your backdrop and positioning all need to be considered before you start filming…
Light It Up.
Good - lighting - is - everything! Natural daylight when the sun is shining, just not so bright that it blinds you and you have to squint, is the best kind of lighting and especially that golden hour before sunset. You’ll be glowing on camera!
Top tip! Make sure your light source whether it be daylight or a ring light is in front of you. Avoid backlighting and overhead lighting, this can cause unflattering shadows. No one needs that knock to their confidence when trying to get the perfect shot.
Backdrop.
Use a neutral background when filming, and remove any distracting elements - remember you’re the main character in this you don’t want any distractions! But at the same time, a plain white wall is super boring and uninspiring! Your backdrop should be relatable to your audience and your business. If your business is catering, a clean, uncluttered kitchen is perfect - but not so much if you’re trying to sell sports equipment.
Position Yourself.
Top tip, if the lens starts to steam up you’re too close and if you look tiny on screen you’re too far away!
Position yourself so that you’re central on the screen, your face should be fully in the picture. Also, make sure there is a slight border that surrounds you - and then try not to move.
Can You Hear That?
There’s no point in talking if you can’t be heard, right? That’s why it’s so important to make sure your filming spot is quiet, with no background noise or risk of sudden noises. To avoid any dodgy audio, we recommend filming a test clip so that you know if you are close enough to the microphone or if you need to move in.
TIME TO FILM
Now you’re prepared, it’s time to take the leap and get in front of the lens.
Be Yourself.
Your ideal followers will connect with you, not with a fake version of yourself. So, just be yourself and act as if you are talking to a friend on the other side of the camera. This will resonate better with your audience and will come across a lot more naturally for you too.
Don’t worry about amping up parts of your personality for the camera, but it’s so important to embrace yourself! You never know, your personality could become a part of your USP.
Body Language.
First impressions count! It’s not just about the words that are coming out of your mouth, your body language matters too. Always look about two inches above the camera, this will look like you’re looking straight through the lens and will instantly make you look more confident.
Next, try your best not to fidget and before pressing play take a big deep breath and relax. If you’re nervously moving about a lot, it will distract the viewer from what you’re trying to say.
And don’t forget to smile! If you look disinterested, it will be hard for people to enjoy watching you.
Don’t Rush.
No need to add extra stress with a time limit on filming. Make sure you give yourself plenty of time to record and even re-record as many times as you feel you need to. Don’t be afraid of starting your sentence again, or even that whole section again - editing is your friend!
Speak slowly and clearly - nerves can make you speed up making it hard for you to be understood. The calmer you are, the more confident on camera you'll be.
Ok, I think you’re ready…
There’s no doubt that to truly be confident on camera will take time for you to feel comfortable in front of a camera, but the more practice you have the closer you’ll get each time! And, until then you have these tips to follow to make the prospect of filming slightly less daunting and more enjoyable.
Good Luck!
Social media is a brilliant way to promote your business with so many positive outcomes - complimentary comments, five-star reviews and being tagged in fab pics of your products is good for your ego but most importantly a fantastic way to attract new customers!
However, the bigger your brand presence online the more likely you are to receive negative comments or complaints - not all of them will be justified - but handling them the right way is crucial.
MAKE SURE YOUR MONITOR!
Bad social media days happen when you least expect it and sod's law it’ll be that one time you didn’t check your notifications that someone has posted a negative comment and it escalates before you even noticed it's happened!
The best way to avoid this is to make sure you monitor your channels throughout the day - ideally first thing in the morning, in the middle of the day and at the end of your working day. Negative comments or complaints are best dealt with swiftly to avoid a full-blown crisis. By responding quickly you have the best chance of turning things around and not letting it ruin your day.
Equally, positive comments/reviews need to be replied to and shared quickly too!
DON'T BURY YOUR HEAD IN THE SAND
Denial is NEVER the answer! Ignore negative comments at your peril - they won't go away and it will only eat away at you as you desperately try to pretend they're not there.
Deal with the problem as quickly as possible - even if you need some time to formulate a full response or you need to check the accuracy of the complaint - always acknowledge it and let them know you’ll be back in touch ASAP.
TAKE IT OFFLINE
Try to take the conversation off your feed, encourage them to message, email or call you to sort things out instead, this way they’ll know they’re speaking to a person and not a faceless organisation - which is more likely to get a vitriolic response.
Always respond to the public comment so that others can see that you are dealing with the situation professionally.
PERSONAL RESPONSE
Respond to negative comments by speaking directly to the customer - they want to be heard and so the same ‘copy and paste’ reply will not help to rebuild their trust.
Be empathetic, listen to their feedback and try to put yourselves in their shoes - this isn’t personal against you - customers don’t see the individual behind the business trying their best - they just want to vent to someone!
Don’t be defensive but instead thank them for bringing the matter to your attention - reassure them that you’ll look into the matter. Tell them your name and offer an email address and/or phone number so that they can contact you directly.
If you can’t solve the problem quickly, do your research and let the customer know when you’ll get back to them.
IGNORE THE TROLLS
Paradoxically, there are circumstances when you should ignore comments! If you are trolled by a ‘hater’ who is posting negative comments that are untrue or abusive then the best thing is to ignore them - they don’t do productive dialogue!
Comments with offensive language/swearing should be hidden or deleted.
RESPOND WITH HUMOUR, KINDNESS OR BOTH!
People are happy to complain or be negative more readily on social media compared to when they’re face-to-face with someone - language is likely to be more direct and hurtful as a result.
If they are simply being negative, expressing their point of view and not making a direct complaint, kill them with kindness or disarm them with a witty reply - if this fits with your brand image.
MOVE ON
Dealing with negativity can be exhausting and upsetting - especially when you’re dealing with other issues related to running your own business.
Tomorrow is another day! Issues and complaints can be a learning curve and help you to improve how you do things going forward. Always be confident in your brand values and focus on how you will do better in the future.
Having a special proposition is important. Knowing your audience is critical. Having a suite of great content is lovely. Failing to follow up consistently on all this, is terminal.
Dramatic? Maybe. But marketing is all about consistency, otherwise, you are constantly restarting and wasting time and money. There is nothing ruthlessly efficient in wasting time and money, so how do we avoid this?
Different Forms Of Consistency
Being consistent can mean a few things and they are ALL important.
- Delivering a consistent message, so you are well known for something
- Putting out content consistency, so people expect and want your content
- Interacting with different platforms consistently, so you are recognised and for the algorithm gods to like you
Stop Being All Things To All People
We’ve talked a lot in the past about knowing your customer, understanding your niche and really focusing your messaging. That’s where a consistent message is so important to your marketing.
People have to understand what you stand for, what you believe in, why you are special. If you talk about a different subject every other day, you won’t appeal to anyone.
People always panic that narrowing down their focus restricts the people they can appeal to. This is the wrong way round, by trying to talk to everyone, you end up talking to no one. You worry about a narrow message only appealing to a small number of people, but an engaged smaller audience is 1,000% better for your business than an unengaged large audience.
If you are an accountancy firm and are looking for new clients, you have multiple niches you could look at. Maybe it’s a location thing as people like supporting another local business; it could be you work best with startups and solopreneurs’; maybe you are brilliant with service-based business rather than brick and mortar retail.
Whatever your niche, if you talk to them directly, they will want to work with you. If you talked generically about helping all businesses, you won’t stand out. Taking another example, if I’m opening a new restaurant and looking for someone to build me a website, which of these two messages will I go for?
- Business A says they ‘build lovely websites on WordPress and Wix’
- Business B says they ‘specialise in high-converting websites for restaurants’
I want an expert in my field, so I approach business B. It’s a smaller set of people, but I will attract them. Option A appeals to more but will get selected by none.
Build Expectation And Delivery On It
A key part of content marketing is about delivering content on a regular basis, so people come to expect it from you. If you are doing your job well, then people will know when to expect your content and actively look for it. This won’t happen if you produce content in an ad hoc fashion.
You need to deliver content at a consistent pace - that might be something daily, something weekly or even monthly - the frequency is not as important as following through on it. It is also likely that different forms of content will have a different frequency. You’ll tweet daily but maybe write a blog weekly or monthly. You’ll run a Q&A live on Facebook once a week, at the same time.
This builds momentum and recognition from your audience. If you fail to deliver on that, then they will very quickly tune you out and you’ll become just another account they follow, alongside 500 others. You stop standing out.
One technique to help with this consistency is having regular slots for specific themes. The classic is #throwbackthursday but you can come up with anything that fits your business. At Thirty Three Percent, we have a #mondaystories on LinkedIn about our journey setting up this business or each Wednesday we have a theme of efficiency. They are both special to us and we know what is expected each week. By having these in the diary, we will know when something is needed and what to write.
Engagement Is God
The final element of a consistent approach happens to be the most important. Whichever platforms you have selected to focus on (and these should be those that your ideal customer hangs out in), you need to spend time engaged in them, dropping in and out when you can find the time will not work.
And we understand that’s not easy. You are busy running a business, but if you are taking responsibility for growing your business, then you need to engage consistently where your audience is. This is why we are so adamant you focus on just a few platforms, hence why we always talk about knowing your customer like your best friend. If you try and engage with 10 different platforms, you’ll never have the time to truly engage people.
Once you have that focus, then it’s about a routine to allow you to interact and engage, with the minimum time you can afford. To help get your mind around it, let me explain how we engaged with LinkedIn to quadruple our audience but spent less than 30 minutes a day doing it.
Step 1 - Ensure your personal profile is optimised. Have a picture of you smiling. Have a banner (not the generic LinkedIn backdrop), treat this like a business card. Have a title that is more like a headline, don’t waste it with job titles or company names. Fill in your About Us section with information on the problems you solve.
Step 2 - Focus on engaging with other people’s posts. This is more important at the start than posting yourself. Genuine engagement is key. Comment on posts that matter to you and interest you. Put more than “thanks for sharing” or “that’s pretty”. You want to write something that causes the author to respond and potentially others as well
Step 3 - Start posting about interesting things that your ideal customers will care about. That doesn’t have to be all work-related. Mix up the content but when talking about work, focus on the theme you want to be known for. Ask questions that people can respond to. Have an opinion, bland and generic statements get ignored. Add images and videos on occasion. Work on the 4-1-1 rule. 4 pieces about interesting subjects; 1 piece on an interesting topic that specifically talks about your business; 1 post about a service/product you offer. If they are all sales focused, people quickly check out
And if you are worried this will take up hours a day, it won’t. Go in twice a day, for 10 minutes each time. Spend 5 minutes scrolling through your timeline and find 3-5 posts of interest and comment on them. Spend the next 5 minutes responding to connection requests, messages and notifications. Job done. 10 minutes in the morning, another 10 in the afternoon and you’ll have a consistent presence, build your customer base and grow your business.
Small And Often
Marketing doesn’t have to be time-consuming, by being consistent you can spend less time, not more. The danger with lacking consistency is you have to build up that audience again.
If you spent a whole day talking in Facebook groups, you’d start to build a good reputation and people would be open to your sales messages, but then you drop out of circulation for 2 weeks and have to start all over again building up that reputation. If you took a different approach of going in 5 days a week for 30 minutes, you’d build that reputation and maintain it. It would take about half the time of blitzing the platform for a day and would return better and more consistent results.
And ultimately, consistent results and new clients is the single most important ‘consistency’ in marketing that every business should target.
Many start-up businesses have the same experience. They start out doing projects for friends or connections that they know. This leads to a couple of more jobs and one or two people then refer them to a friend. Some businesses go several years with this being their sole source of growth.
I know for a fact this is how my business partner grew his successful marketing agency initially. The best clients we ever had a RedEye came from this approach. So it’s fine to rely on a strategy that assumes all clients come from referrals right? Wrong.
“It won’t last. It is not a growth strategy.”
It is definitely PART of a strategy and all businesses should do more to grow referrals and never be afraid to see how they can help people they know. But if you rely solely on that, most businesses will eventually stagnate and then they will enter a period of sales & marketing desperation. Better to avoid this and actually start a proactive sales & marketing strategy whilst you are still succeeding with the referral led approach.
It’s Worked So Far
I can already hear many of you saying the same thing - it’s worked so far, why would that change? The short answer is simple - nothing lasts forever! There is a lot more to it, but that is the best way to explain it to people. But for those who want a longer explanation, let me explain a number of reasons why it is not a stand-alone, long term strategy.
1. However good you are, you will eventually lose clients
Sorry to say it, but very few clients last forever. As you lose them, referrals are great for filling in those gaps, but to truly grow, you will need to find new clients outside of your referrals, otherwise, you will stand still.
2. However popular you are, you only have so many friends
Again, I hate to sound like the grumpy bloke you met in the pub, but your list of friends is finite. You’ll get a few friends as clients and maybe a few of their friends as clients. But that list will not carry on forever. Some of those friends of friends will be lonely people without many friends or their friends are already part of your friends - are you still following me? Without making this too complex, let's just say that relying on an ever-increasing set of friends is not a sustainable business strategy.
3. However good your connection range is, it will eventually need to grow
As with your friends, your work network (for most people, known as LinkedIn!) is not unlimited. It definitely has better potential but ultimately to maximise it, you’ll actually need to do some networking and, wait for it, marketing. Yes, to expand the size of your network, which you will have to do, you will need to do marketing. It might not be your traditional view of marketing, but it is marketing. Keep reading and I’ll explain what it is and how it’s not scary.
4. However well connected you are, eventually, you’ll need to find people outside your network
So, this is the slightly contentious one, as I don’t 100% believe it’s true!
For some people and some business types, it might well be possible to rely solely on your network - as long as you are using marketing to continually increase your network (more on that below). But for many businesses, you need to find new networks of people outside your traditional set of contacts and for this, you’ll need to start promoting yourself or your business for others to take notice - otherwise known as marketing!
How To Make More Of Your Referrals
I promised I’d share ideas on how to grow your referrals. Warning - it involves marketing and networking, a couple of words that scare many business owners. It shouldn’t, it is basically about talking about yourself and your business to other people. There is literally no one better in the world to do that than you!
Let’s keep it simple and focus on just a couple of things, LinkedIn and other networking opportunities. It will feel less like ‘marketing’, so you might embrace it more...
Making LinkedIn Work For You
LinkedIn requires you to interact with people, make virtual small talk and offer value to people in your network. Anyone can do this, so let's look at quick and easy ways of doing this.
- You need to talk to people - you can do that!
That’s right, the first thing you need to do is start commenting on other people’s posts. Doesn’t have to be just people you know, in fact, it’s encouraged to comment on posts of people you don’t know. They will appear in your timeline because your connections have liked their posts. But you can also seek them out, use the keywords that matter to your business and look for hashtags. For example, I often search on #smallbusinessowner for interesting posts to read and comment on.
Benefits of this approach - 1) You’ll attract the attention of the author of the post, increasing your network. 2) You’ll look great to the LinkedIn algorithm gods, who love people that engage in others' posts, meaning they will spread your posts to a wider group of contacts.
- Post engaging content - rarely about your business
Sorry to be captain downer again, but people generally don’t want to read 10 posts a day about your business or what you do. Follow a simple 4-1-1 policy. 4 pieces of interesting content that have nothing to do with your company, 1 piece of content on your business that is not selling and finally one piece of soft-selling about your business.
People will engage with this approach. Make the posts open questions, give people a reason to comment on them. Even the most interesting article in the world is pointless if it doesn’t then encourage someone to comment on the post.
Benefits of this - 1) People will look at your content and form a positive opinion of you, increasing the chances of a connection and ultimately a sale 2) Those algorithm gods again - they love it when people engage with your post...
Networking Groups
LinkedIn is the largest business networking site in the world, but the world is full of other networks that are great for expanding your network.
You’ll find specific groups online, on social media platforms like Facebook or even (whisper it quietly) ones where people meet face to face. Just remember these couple of strategies when looking at the ones that are right for you and how to interact with them.
- Marketing agencies don’t hire marketing agencies
What? If you are a marketing agency, a network dedicated to marketing agencies is not going to get you referrals. If you are a plumber, a network filled only by other plumbers is not going to get you plumping jobs. This doesn’t mean these networks or groups are not useful, they are invaluable for asking questions, but if your aim is referrals, then generally you are better looking for networks filled with your ideal customers. And if you don’t know who your ideal customer is, then go download this free eBook and come back in an hour...
- Add value, it always pays back
Networking is about offering others help. It is not about arriving and telling everyone how amazing you are and that your business/product/service is the best thing since the final season of The West Wing. Focus on what you can do for others. People soon spot someone that’s only in the group to generate leads, which is rarely appreciated. Contribute to the conversations, offer free advice, offer free content to the group (see below) and generally get a reputation as someone that people like and trust.
Guess what? When someone needs help that your business can offer to do, they will be 100% more likely to listen and choose you.
Strategies To Work Alongside Referrals
I mentioned at the top that the key is running marketing activities alongside your referral strategy. Without going into detail, here are some examples that complement that approach really well.
- Social media groups/hashtags/trends
Slightly cheating, as this is another form of networking, but try and join forums or follow hashtags that are relevant to your business and become part of those communities. Then use content marketing (read below) and your best offers to engage with people and generate interest and leads.
- Paid ads
Whether it’s on Google, Facebook or even within a trade website, doing some paid advertising is a nice place to start with your marketing when looking to find people outside of your current network, complimenting your current referral strategy.
- Grow a marketing database
If someone told you that you could send your sales message directly to a group of people and they would receive it, you’d think that was too good to be true right? Welcome to email marketing. Give people a reason to give you an email address (see below) and then you are able to communicate with them regularly and unlike social media, LinkedIn, advertising etc… you know it's going to be in front of them.
- Content marketing
This is the single most important element, as it will not just help you grow your business outside of your current network, but it will massively help you sell within your network. Good content marketing helps increase your credibility and give you tools to grow a database of leads because people will give you their details for your valuable content.
Go and watch our free webinar about how to never run out of content to get you started.
Having referrals should be a massive part of any business's growth strategy, but it’s important to have a variety if you truly want to grow and move your business forward. And, as a bonus, it makes it more exciting! I promise you’ll find marketing isn’t that scary and talking to people about what a great business you have is really rather fun, plus you get to help people and who doesn’t enjoy that.
History Of Blame
Throughout my career, one of the first conversations I have with almost every new client is; “We worked with an agency before and they didn’t deliver.”. A client has had a negative experience that has tainted their view of marketing, caused them to distrust suppliers or outright decry an entire channel as a pointless exercise.
There are, of course, agencies that don’t deliver on their promises. Businesses that make outrageous claims that ultimately they cannot deliver in order to win a new piece of business. Speaking as someone who has been client and agency side (and now sits firmly in the middle) in truth there is often blame on both sides. Agencies for not asking the right questions and clients for not knowing the answers.
Mistake One: Brief The Output But Measure Success On Results
The first mistake businesses make is skipping the brief entirely. They have a view of the thing they want, be it a website, a social campaign or content marketing and they just want to get it done. The focus is on the output, the thing that needs to be produced rather than the purpose of the thing itself. The goal isn’t a new website, it’s to improve brand perception or increase conversion. The purpose isn’t to send out some tweets, the purpose of those tweets is to engage an audience, gain sign-ups or sell products.
To avoid this issue, it’s vital that both parties understand the goal of the campaign or activity. A written brief is vital (it can be written by the client or the agency) but it must exist and detail what the intended outcome is. If there is any doubt in the ‘why’ of the project, then a step back needs to be taken in order to understand the purpose properly before moving forward.
Mistake Two: Letting The Output Pick The Partner
To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you go to a web agency, there’s a pretty reasonable chance that the solution to your problem is going to be a new website. To a social media agency, it’s likely to be a social campaign. In reality, they may both be viable solutions, but in not thinking strategically and instead of trying to tick marketing boxes, it’s easy to be driven down the wrong path.
That’s not to say that a full-service agency is better than a dedicated one, indeed there are pros and cons to both but a truly great agency will be honest enough to tell you when their services are not right for you. We have on many occasions turned down work because we didn’t feel like the right fit for that business or our services wouldn’t supply them with the solution they needed. Nine times out of ten, this has resulted in a referral or a future piece of work that was a better fit for that client. Honesty is valued above all else.
Mistake Three: Skipping The Strategy
Strategy sits behind every project, sometimes it feels like an obstacle or something that’s getting in the way, but time spent on strategy is an investment in the quality of the output. This is probably the mistake that causes the most damage and is the reason most campaigns fail. If there isn’t a properly thought-through marketing strategy in place you won’t know where you’re trying to get to, you won’t know who you should be speaking to and you won’t know what you should be saying.
A great marketing strategy will ultimately save you a huge amount of time. Any client that comes to an agency or freelancer with a marketing strategy in place, knows who their ideal customer is and understands the tone and style best suited to engaging them will be greeted with open arms. It ensures the campaign or tactic is designed completely in service of the goals of your business.
We always encourage the strategy to be something that is created by the business, possibly with the support of an external organisation or individual that is completely independent. The advantage of engaging someone with no motivation other than to serve the business is that you don’t end up with a strategy that is designed to create work for the agency.
Mistake Four: Focussing On Value Not Values
There are many factors that you may use in selecting an agency to work with; recommendation, quality of work, expertise and of course, price. However, we would always encourage you to look closely at the values of the business. How well do they align with yours? Ultimately you’re looking for a partner on your project, not a service delivered by the lowest bidder.
Avoiding The Blame Game
It is sometimes too easy to blame an agency or freelancer for a poor performing campaign, and whilst there are certainly organisations out there that don’t deliver on their promises, we believe that by following these four guidelines, you are massively increasing your chances of delivering a great campaign.
That said, there will always be times when the campaign doesn’t work out - however, when you are working alongside a partner, rather than a ‘supplier’, you’ll always find something to learn from, develop, adjust and ultimately move you closer to your ultimate goal.
121 marketing is the dream of all businesses and whilst even the big brands cannot realistically achieve this, with the tools and data now available, they can get closer than ever before. But do you know the secret to how they do it?
It’s not massive marketing budgets, it’s not expensive software or even working with big-ticket agencies.
The Answer Is Segmentation.
Segmentation in a marketing sense dates back to the 1920s, as the market size increased and businesses started to differentiate products to sell to different groups of the population. In the last 30 years, its become a lot more sophisticated due to the data the internet has given us and the systems available to access and maximise that data.
But again, this isn’t a great secret that small businesses cannot hope to achieve. In fact, segmentation and the use of data are great levellers in modern marketing.
As a small business, you can utilise segmentation in two key ways — Understanding your customers’ lifecycle through segmentation and then segmenting down those lifecycle stages so you can create campaigns that deliver the right messages to the right people at the right time.
Let’s look at some examples of these segments, the data they utilise and the campaigns you can deliver.
Segmenting The Customer Lifecycle
This is the absolute bedrock of a segmentation strategy and will improve your marketing tenfold. Everyone has a different flavour on lifecycle stages but they all come back to a similar theme.
Prospect; Customer; Advocate; Lapsed; Lost
Prospects are leads, potential customers, maybe signed up to a newsletter but have not made that first purchase, they might just be site visitors that you have not yet engaged fully.
Customers are exactly that, someone that has taken the key action. Remember that for some businesses this might be downloading an article, it isn’t always about a purchase.
Advocate, otherwise known as a VIP to big brands, but advocate is a much better term when it comes to small businesses because it is advocates that tell the rest of the internet about you and grow your business. Identifying them and treating them differently is critically important to any campaign. This is all about segmenting your repeat customers, those that buy as frequently as is sensible to expect for the product you are selling. For example, if you sell bread, then you can expect an advocate to buy weekly, so anything that is at least weekly or better would be classed as an advocate.
Lapsed customers MUST have purchased at least once previously and have not purchased in what’s a sensible period to have expected them to purchase, for example, with our bread business above, it’s reasonable to say if they have not purchased in over a month, they are likely to have lapsed and will need a targeted message to get them back.
Lost customers have moved past the point of being classed as lapsed and moved to the stage where it’s reasonable to assume they have made the decision not to purchase from you again. With a lapsed customer, reminding them of your product/service can help return them to your site, but when they are lost, you will only succeed in annoying them and lead to them complaining, junking your emails or maybe even moaning about you online, the exact opposite of the advocate. It takes a lot to put someone into this segment, but it is important to be aware of them.
One thing to not confuse is the difference between the lifecycle and the level of engagement you have with the individual. As I’ll explain next, it is possible to be engaged with a brand but not buy anything. It’s also possible to be disengaged with all marketing but still be an advocate.
Demographic Segments
The simplest form of segmentation, where most small businesses start with segmentation is using types of demographic data that can enable you to tailor your campaigns and messaging towards the individual. Certainly, before the advancement of behavioural data, it was the best way to get close to 121 marketing.
- Gender — Not quite the same level of use as in the early days of direct mail, but clearly men and women look at different products and thus campaigns can be targeted accordingly. It’s key nowadays not to assume too much about gender and market in a stereotypical fashion, for example using pink colours for woman
- Age — The most common form of segmentation, due to the ease of data collection (Date of Birth) and how useful an age range is. Over time people’s buying habits and needs change, so understanding the age group they fall into really does inform your messaging
- Income — knowing the buying power of your audience can help you change the nature of a campaign or in fact if you target people with some specific products
- Family — information like if they have kids are great ways of changing a message or selecting product ranges to highlight
Behavioural Segments
The best modern example of segmentation that refines and gets you closer to 121 marketing is the use of behavioural data. The bigger your business, the more complex this can get and over the years I’ve built some pretty complex and successful segmentation plans this way, BUT the majority of success comes from absolute basics that businesses of all sizes can exploit. Let me explain some of the simpler forms of behavioural data
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- Pages/categories viewed — pretty simple but powerful stuff. If you know what someone has been viewing on the site, then you really can use that data to personalise your campaign
- Sales funnel stage — The most powerful modern campaign is basket abandonment, but in fact, understanding where people get to throughout the buying process is great to target them and try and drive them back to the site
- Campaign engagement — understand if they have interacted with a Facebook ad, if they have opened or clicked on an email. These are simple but powerful examples of campaign engagement and tell you a lot about how engaged a user is with your brand and its marketing
- Preference data — A bit of a catch-all for things like preference centres and microsites, when you ask for information about a user, normally under the banner of wanting to make the email you send more meaningful. You will traditionally have a smaller set of data but it can be incredibly powerful
There are other sets of data that deliver different segments but for the small business, if you can master just the examples above, you’ll transform your marketing success, as the following campaigns prove.
Utilising These Segments In Campaigns
All these segments are meaningless if we don’t use them and the most powerful use for any business, especially small businesses, is using them in campaigns.
With just those few segments we’ve mentioned above, we have hundreds of potential campaigns. Let me highlight a few of the simpler ones that any small business could make great use of.
- Basket abandonment — The classic campaign driven by behavioural segments, where you identify all people that added to a basket but didn’t complete a purchase. It’s possible to further refine the campaign by looking at the pages seen before adding to the basket, plus understanding if they are an existing customer
- Lapsed campaign — Taking the segment of customers that have lapsed and then using the information you have on previous browsing behaviour or product preferences to tailor the campaign towards encouraging them back
- Product interest — A programme often aimed at subscribers that have looked at a product but not gone through the buying funnel
- Welcome programme — This style of campaign is normally reserved for post-purchase or maybe after a sign-up. Whilst the customers’ lifecycle stage is well known by their action, the campaign can be further refined by understanding what they have viewed or potentially, in the case of the subscriber, some preference data obtained when they signed up
The above should give you a flavour for the importance of segmentation. If you want to understand more or need help understanding your segments and how to use them, please do sign up for one of our courses, designed to give small businesses the secrets and techniques that the big brands use, but without the costs.