The Holistic Approach To Use Analytics To Craft A Winning Marketing Strategy

Many small businesses struggle with measuring marketing performance. How do you know what you are doing right? What are you doing wrong? Analyzing these issues often requires time and resources that most small businesses simply can’t spare.

Luckily you don’t have to be left out. I’m demystifying the analytics for you!

What is Marketing Analytics Precisely?

The practice of analyzing and measuring marketing performance to improve ROI and overall marketing performance is referred to as marketing analytics.

It allows you to look at your business’s marketing efforts with an objective lens. Once you gauge the efforts, you get a better idea of utilizing the company’s marketing budget.

From SEO rankings to email marketing metrics, marketing analytics apply to virtually every aspect of your business. For instance, social media marketing can be a distraction without marketing analytics.

There’s a good chance you have a “love and hate” relationship with analytics and perhaps it’s because you see insights from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, your CRM, Google, Website, but you can’t get to sync all of it to understand what’s happening in your business. Let alone the fact that most of those metrics won’t measure the performance you need to measure to grow your business, so they are vanity metrics.

Marketing Strategies Are Only As Good As the Results They Produce

Many business owners I work with tell me flat “if marketing pays on its own, I’m in”. Whereas it’s a big challenge, I show them exactly where is the profitable zone and how can we get there quicker.

According to research conducted by LeadPages and Infusionsoft, 47% of the small business owners surveyed handle the marketing efforts on their own, struggling to track their return on investment to understand whether their marketing activities are effective.

This number might be even bigger when we consider that a significant amount of small business owners are solopreneurs. 😰 So it’s not that their marketing efforts are not working; it’s just that they can’t see it.

A successful marketing strategy only needs 2 things:

A defined path to achieve visibility in front of future buyers and
Actionable metrics to measure performance.

It’s that simple.

Part 1: Your Path To Visibility: Customer Journey

Your marketing strategy needs to have a clear path to achieve visibility in front of future buyers. Keep this in mind. You don’t need to reach millions of users; just users that will find value in what you offer.

Start your path by becoming clear about who is your future buyer. Imagine just ONE person and think about as many details as possible about them. Keep in mind, their journey can start in different places:

They could search online and find you
They could have a conversation with a friend and a friend referred them to you
They were scrolling on a social media channel and saw you, and decided to learn more about you

Never assume that all users start at the same marketing channel. That’s the beauty of following the onmichannel marketing approach. We can consolidate information for all the stages of the user in just one place.

For example, on Instagram, you can use story highlights to feature content that you want your future users to watch. This is a great place to organize your content strategically. Think about your categories, reviews, and promotions. Again, think like Amazon!

Understanding metrics will be your next step! Marketing analytics play a big role at this stage of your marketing strategy. I believe most business owners go with their gut and this is the beginning of chaos.

Take the time to do market research, meaning your future users. I am a big fan of creating blueprints, in particular, the future buyer’s journey. In this way, you can have a thought path to achieve visibility.

Some of the best practices to utilize marketing analytics in the best possible way to map your future customer’s journey:

1- Establish the void you are trying to fill. For e.g. keyword density, keyword analysis, competition analysis etc. Let’s say for instance, that your client had an excellent month in May, but things have not been going so smooth after that. Try to calculate the gap between the current day and the client’s best month. It should be enough for you to determine the first benchmark.

2- Think about your future users’ emotions during each stage of their decision-making process.

As a forensic marketer, I’ve always been fascinated with blueprints, maps, and algorithms, which is the reason why user webflow is one of the favorite things I do.

3- I recommend using Empathy Maps to visualize your audience. This is a simple, visual and effective tool for discovering insights about customers. It is great for understanding audiences, including users, customers, and other players in any business ecosystem.

Part 2: Performance Goals: Tracking and Measuring

Remember what I said above, a successful marketing strategy only needs 2 things:

A defined path to achieve visibility in front of future buyers and
Actionable metrics to measure performance.

Defining each step of the decision-making process is crucial to measure your performance. Especially at the very beginning.

For instance, I just finished a mastermind call with my Business Accelerator members and today the topic was “How do I know that my content is working if I don’t get any subscribers or comments?”. This is a very valid question that I am sure you might have.

During our session, we discussed the user explorer section from Google Analytics and she was surprised to see that users were actually reading her content and coming back for more! Below is an example of how the user explorer report looks like. You can open each transaction and will see all the steps each user has taken.

We identified the goals she needed to set up within her Google Analytics to she could see what her users liked and simply do more of it.

According to Google’s research study conducted with Greenberg Strategy, 88% of consumers favor brands that provide helpful information along every stage of their journey, from research to purchase. Despite that clear preference, only 47% of brands customize and serve information across the customer journey.

Google Analytics is like gasoline for your content marketing strategy. But it’s not the only one. We recommend to also set up Google Search Console to make sure your website is always visible.

Monitoring Performance To Define Your Marketing Plan

Many business owners request a “marketing plan” when we start working. I sort of scratch my head because I can’t just spill a plan without walking your future buyers’ journey. Marketing doesn’t start from the seller’s point of view. It starts from the other way around your end-users.

You can’t create a path to visibility using your intuition. I mean, you could, which is what a lot of business owners do. They just follow role models and copy what they are doing (which sometimes it ends not being effective).

1- Review your Google Analytics at least once a week but don’t make decisions on performance before seeing at least a 90-day period. Once you have at least 90 days of data, you can make decisions. But data alone won’t tell you what you need.

2- Dig deeper!

3- A holistic approach is the only way to make marketing analytics work in your favor. Keep in mind that marketing analytics does not merely constitute of Google analytics. Sure, you should use Google analytics for extracting data and making optimizations but do not solely rely on it.

4- Marketing analytics requires us to gather data from various channels of marketing, including email, social media, online advertising, and SEO.

Unfortunately, I found that not too many business owners have set up data-driven systems. They kind of go by revenue. If sales are happening, they assume that marketing is working.

5- You can delegate! Sure you can learn how to read reports but, is this a profitable task for you? What takes you 5 hours will take an expert 20 minutes.

Seek advice from experienced professionals. They can help you simplify digital marketing analytics practice with ease. It will make you feel at ease and you prevent the overwhelming feeling that tempts people to abandon ship before they give a holistic analytics approach even a try.

Part 3: Using Insights to Craft a Winning Strategy

As many experienced marketers claim, several marketers limit their data’s potential by using it for supporting decisions they made already, instead of driving action. Most of us are familiar with the plan where we can find stats for backing up virtually every argument that comes in front of us. It is only a matter of what stats you have, how you use them, and your way of presenting them.

The same goes for marketing analytics. If you start searching data to support your decisions, chances are that you will certainly come across some. However, in order to create a strategy that really capitalizes on available insights; you need to allow the data to lead your planning and decision-making.

To form a strategy based around analytics, follow the tips mentioned below:

1. Accept Your Mistakes: A significant part of allowing data to determine your plan is to leave behind the initiatives that do not do the trick anymore.

2. Approaching Data from Various Angles: No one is infallible in the field of marketing. There are several ways of interpreting marketing data, therefore, have a partner or someone to help you make sense of everything. It is useful for ensuring that you do not miss some key perspectives.

3. Test, and Test Again: There is nothing better than marketing analytics to let you determine how things could potentially be just by looking at the current state of things. You will need to put your theories and tactics to the test to succeed.

4. Listening Is Your Best Friend: The biggest mistake that you can make in your analytics efforts is ignoring important information that the analytics are providing you. Keep your eyes and ears open and let the data do the talking.

Allowing Analytics to Steer Your Marketing Strategy

Some marketers do not know how valuable resource analytics are. It would even be fair to say that they are a gold mine to take your business to the next level. If you use them correctly, your business will generate more revenue than you ever imagined.

Try to draw reliable insights and use them for improving your marketing efforts. Using those insights in the right times and places will improve your efforts by tenfold.

Holistic Is the Way to Go

We are lucky to live in an age where we have advanced tools to gauge the performance of our marketing efforts. When you have tons of metrics at your disposal, just looking at one of them simply does not do the trick anymore. You have to approach it holistically. Only then will you be able to attain optimum results.

December 3, 2019December 3, 2019

Why Is User Experience (UX) the New Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Have you updated your website yet? Have you noticed a drop in your visibility or got a notification from Google that your website needs to get fixed? Need marketing tips for your website?

It is no secret that SEO’s entire landscape is going through a radical change. Local listings are going through massive changes as well along with regular algorithm updates, so much so that keeping up with them can get quite tricky at times. No need to worry, however, as I will discuss with you in detail how you relieve the burden.

Users First, Aesthetics Second

A common mistake I have noticed people making are that they tend to become overly obsesses with how Google works to bring users to their website. What they seem to ignore is that the platform favors people who create great content, and outstanding experience. This is measured by the time users spend on your website and other factors including your Google reviews

Wait, Google reviews affect my SEO? Yes.

When you focus on creating the best user experience is far more beneficial in the long run in comparison to stuffing keywords and attempting to trick Google to improve your website’s ranking.

Google is no longer the keyword rewarding haven that it used to be. Now it cares more about providing users with excellent user experience. Don’t believe me? Check Google’s webmaster guidelines. Google’s ultimate goal is to give users the best possible search engine experience, letting them find the exact content or website they are searching.

Quite often, you will find people hiring web designers to improve their website’s appearance and visibility. In most cases, web designers have little to no knowledge regarding SEO strategy. Some of them don’t even have the slightest idea of attracting paying customers online.

So what do they end up doing?

Well, most of them usually install a lackluster template and ask their client to give them some relevant keywords to create their website. Essentially, there is no marketing strategy or planning whatsoever.

For most of my clients, I lead development and web design for their websites. The first aim I have for every website is improving its user experience and visibility, and second, it’s to add long tail keywords to conform to Google search. This isn’t a process based on what I think. Luckily we have access to data that allows us to create a solid content marketing strategy that brings profits. Remember, SEO is not about choosing keywords.

Some of you might not know this, but user experience and SEO sometimes go hand in hand. Incorporating inorganic keywords with a subpar design is a disaster waiting to happen. So yes, optimize the design for SEO, just like I do. Also incorporate all the basics of UX for improved marketing.

What Is UX (Think Amazon)

For those who do not know what user experience is, let me explain it to you in the simplest and most relatable way I can. In a lot of cases, I have seen people use UX interchangeably with “Usability” and “User Interface Design”. Although both of them are crucial aspects of user experience design, they are merely its subsets. UX covers a wide array of several other areas as well. A UX designer who is worth his or her salt concerns themselves with the total process of integrating and acquiring a product including function, usability, design, branding, and various other aspects. UX’s story begins way before the users even hold the device in their hands.

Let us use Amazon’s UX as an example. The company was not in the best of places initially. It had its fair share of ups and downs. So what changed? Well, the company started focusing on its UX. We can learn a lot from the UX of the world’s biggest online seller.

See the image below. Amazon adds categories that are friendly. You don’t even need to click. Just swipe and find what you want!

Since the company improved its UX, its revenue entered the Billion Dollars club. In 2018 alone, the company bought in around 260 billion in retail sales, which is close to 50 percent of the United States’ online expenditure for the year. The crazy part about that it was not just a one and done thing. Amazon has been on the up and up since then, and is responsible for half of United States’ retail sales for the last couple of years. What’s the reason behind this success, well; it’s the user friendly experience.

Everything you need to make your decision is right there! Again, no need to click!

You might be wondering what’s so great about Amazon’s UX that led it to become a giant in the online retail industry. Well, let us look at some noticeable strong points from its UX.

1. It is a Search Engine Marketing Driven UX

This company’s UX is specifically designed for increasing the chances of visitors buying something whenever they visit their website or app. Prominent search bars on every single page is a huge reason why people often end up buying something when they go to Amazon. In addition, the platform also refines and filters every search result in a comprehensible and open fashion.

The company’s state of the art search function benefits from an algorithm that personalizes content according to all stages of the buyer. It gives them relevant recommendations, which makes their current and future purchases quite convenient. I’m sure most of you have seen the Amazon’s home page (if not, what are you even doing). Most of its elements have the influence of search functions, which includes:

– Shopping carts

– New products

– Recent browsing history

– Personalized recommendations

When users come across relevant products, they find a clear path to purchase without any hassles or second guessing. Because Amazon’s UX focuses on personalization, visitors not only get a tremendous site experience, they also become loyal customers. Essentially, the reason behind Amazon’s UX success is that everyone knows how to do basic online searching. It does not matter whether visitors open Amazon with a specific product to purchase. But, the sites easy usability and first rate user experience caters to everyone.

The best part about Amazon’s UX is that it caters to both younger and older generations. Those who do not know how to follow online visual cues just have to click the product boxes present on the home page. The boxes appear as the product image as well as a blue hyperlink, which helps to convert and accommodate all users. The company’s text oriented and linear UX approach runs on usability and personalization.

2. Amazon’s UX Reassures Buyers

In order to improve their conversion rate, Amazon conducts regular split tests on its product pages. The adjust page elements to increase trustworthiness, value, and convenience. It reduces buying friction and increases sales by tenfold. Take a closer look at product pages on Amazon, and you will notice that there is lots of whitespaces to emphasize on the key selling points of the product. You will also see that the product rating is directly underneath the product to highlight social proof and guarantee visibility for validating the quality of purchase the user will most likely make. The product’s benefits are just adjacent to its image, which makes it look more credible.

When you go to the order detail side, you will see bold black text that says “Free Delivery,” and “Free Shipping.” Amazon is well aware that their customers want their products delivered fast and for cheap. The company incorporates these power phrases in its platform’s UX to prompt action, while also reassuring people speedy delivery with savings.

In situations, when an item is expensive, signing up for the company’s reward Visa program allows shoppers to avail a 50 Dollar discount on their purchase. So, it is quite clear that every element on Amazon’s page is there to reinforce positive sentiments for every purchase no matter how pricey or cheap. Amazon also highlights key benefits on its product pages to reassure shoppers, essentially optimizing their conversion rates.

The UX Essentials in Website Design

We spend hours and hours online using web apps, navigating websites, and reading news online. In several cases, you do not get the best online experience. Why does that happen?

Well, it is because of poor designs that do not take user experience into account. Sure, you can spot design errors from afar; however, things get slightly trickier when the person handling the project is yourself. I have found myself in such situations more than I’d care to admit.

Be that as it may, designers are responsible for creating an excellent design to improve user experience no matter how difficult it is.

Let us look at some UX best practices that you can incorporate in your website:

1. User-Centric Design

Just forget what the website has to say for a bit and redirect your attention towards user experience.

Put yourself in the shoes of a future buyer that is in the awareness stage (they don’t know anything about your products or services) Can your website inspire them?

Then, think about the future buyer that is in the consideration stage (they know they have a problem but they are not looking to buy today) Is your website engaging? What can we offer them to motivate them to come back?

Put yourself in the shoes of a future buyer that is in the decision stage. They are looking to solve a problem. Can your website educate them so they can make the decision faster?

Then, Text, layout, graphics, and other interactive elements work synergistically for presenting users with first-rate experience rather than information. If you focus on making your page unique in the face of tons and tons of information and websites on the internet, you will most likely have excellent conversion rates.

Most modern websites these days contain interactive and visual qualities that seek emotional responses to stand out in an utterly competitive online world. Just make sure you select a website that gives your future users the experience they expect.

For example, if you are an Eye Care Doctor, you won’t have a website that looks like a Fashion Boutique. If will distract your users from reading your content.

2. The Fine Line between Creativity and Common Designing Elements

The last things you want for your website are reinvented design elements. It causes users difficulty in figuring out the UI interface. Instead, focus on having an interface that looks familiar and eye-catching at the same time. Do not relocate or change elements like login access, link placement or other standardized components.

Sure, going for a non-traditional design does seem like a cool idea, but ultimately, it falls flat on its face because most users do not have the slightest idea of what to do with it. Therefore, try to strike a balance between usability and creativity. Less is more.

To show you how big of a misunderstanding there is, I’ll ask you this question: which pop-up do you think was more successful?

Guess what?

The first pop-up performs over 30% better!

You might think the bottom one should’ve won. It follows all the common pop-up best practices. It has:

An image that serves as a CTA
A provoking headline
Bright colors
A great giveaway.

Why the first pop-up won? It has four words and a button that says “Submit”. You must make it easy for your users if you want them to take action!

3. People Prefer Scannable Websites

Although having readable content is well and good, not everyone has the time or energy to go through every word written on your website. Especially your home page.

According to an interesting study involving eye-movement conducted by Nielsen, the theory that internet users are prone to read content in the form of chunks is supported. The pattern which our eyes follow in this attempt is an F-shaped pattern. This pattern can also appear to be E-shaped at times.

This naturally means that a web design loaded with tons of content is a big No-No.

If you want your users to ‘read’ your services rather than skim through them, make sure to follow this tested pattern.

4. The Importance of Establishing Visual Hierarchy

Your visual design should highlight essential interface elements in a way that attract the user’s focus. When it comes to design, there are various ways to highlight these things.

Using a single color and changing the font size to emphasize or highlight any particular service induces a welcoming effect on the user.

5. Users Value Simplicity and Clarity

It takes no more than half a second for users to evaluate a website’s design. Therefore, it is important that you determine what will catch their eye at first glance. Make action buttons easy to find instead of placing them at awkward areas.

Also, keep making constant reevaluations to see whether there are other improvements you can bring to your site or app. Website designs should always be easily usable for users while adding extra functionality according to a user’s needs. Do not make extra functions appear all at once as it can be quite distracting. Everything should be consistent, simple, and clear. A website’s visual aesthetics can make navigation quite easy for users as it allows them to figure out colors relevant to specific areas of the interface.

6. Knowing What the Audience Wants

Sounds like obvious, but your website development should start with defining your audience. You should be well aware of the audience you are creating the website for as it helps to incorporate relevant functions and content to attract the user.

Once there is a clear picture of the audience, designing the site will become remarkably more straightforward. You can also take some inspiration from your competition; however, make sure that your identity is unique. It would also be wise to incorporate user feedback in your web or app design. Considering actionable feedback from the end-user is extremely valuable.

7. UX Qualities for Your Consideration

At its core, user experience is what you provide to your consumers. Focusing on the basics will help you accomplish your goal of improving your website’s user experience. Let us look at some key points that will help you get started:

– Make sure that your content is original and useful. It should be there to assist the users and fulfill their needs.

– Your system should perform smoothly, page load time should be quick, especially when users interact with it. Make sure that everything in your site flows smoothly and does not have hindrances.

– Improve your site’s efficiency. Users should be able to accomplish repetitive tasks easily and quickly, without any worries.

– Everything on the website should be there to delight the user. It should establish an emotional connection with them that eventually leads them to investing in the product.

– Make your websites content and interaction moves seamlessly moves through the product. Users should find no difficulty or hindrances when it comes to learning about the product. Users should be able to accomplish their goals on subsequent visits.

– Make the site easily discoverable; users should be able to achieve their task on their first visit.

– Do not make the website seem distant and robotic. Try to make it as humanly relatable as possible. Be approachable, transparent, and trustworthy. Also, opt for human interaction over machines.

– You must provide users with context so that they know where they are in the interface

– Credibility is of extreme importance. You have to make users trust and believe what you say.

– Make your content as easily accessible as possible, especially for people who have specific disabilities. Don’t forget your “contact us” page!

– The website’s usability should be simple and easy. Also, users should be able to find it easily.

– All of the content on the website should be easily navigable and locatable onsite as well as offsite.

– The website’s design elements should bring about appreciation and emotion.

8. A Common SEO Myth

There is a colossal myth associated with SEO that irks me to no end. I want to bring an end to this. People think that SEO backlinks, meta tags, and keywords are surefire ways to lure in profitable users. That is not the case! In fact, there are no guarantees whatsoever.

It is entirely possible that the hits you are getting from your website are from various countries where you do not even have clients. A large number of people use mobile devices to conduct their searches.

It is glaringly evident that the online mobile market has taken over in the past few years. Therefore, you need to optimize your website for mobile browsers if you want to improve your site’s visibility on search engines. If you are not confident on how the website will measure up, go to Google and enter the URL of your website in its mobile friendly test.

9. Using Marketing Analytics to Optimize User Experience

Pay attention to analytics. Hey can make or break your website’s success. User explorer from Google Analytics, in particular, provides in-depth information regarding every user’s engagement with your website. As soon as you lay your eyes on this data, you will instantly know what your audience likes and what it does not like.

Pay attention to creating consistent, qualified traffic. Five hundred users for every month should be your goal. However, before you start, generate tons of clickable pages and banner ads to attract users.

The more metrics you have at your disposal, the more data you have regarding your content. It will be of tremendous help in reaching your 5000 users goal.

Now that you know everything you need to know about excellent UX, there should not be anything stopping you from making a world-beater of a website.

Want to discuss in detail your website’s UX and SEO? Schedule a call!

October 5, 2019October 5, 2019

Everything You Need To Know About Experiential Marketing

If you’re a business owner, no matter if it’s small or big, you crave 1 thing: brand loyalty. A strong brand loyalty transfers into repeated customers who buy your products or services, regardless of changes in price or convenience.

Brand loyalty isn’t about likes and followers. You can’t deposit likes in your banking account! So we need to make sure your marketing & sales efforts translate into steady cash flow and profit, of course. Make no mistake, your focus needs to be on building a strong brand, followed by developing brand loyalty.

Does that make sense?

If so, experiential marketing should be part of your next marketing strategy. What is experiential marketing and how can you start running some experiential marketing campaigns? Keep reading, because I’m covering it all.

What Is Considered A Strong Brand

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos defined brand very simply as “what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”

Seth Godin, a popular entrepreneur and blogger, gives a longer definition:

“A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another. If the consumer (whether it’s a business, a buyer, a voter, or a donor) doesn’t pay a premium, make a selection, or spread the word, then no brand value exists for that consumer.”

Your brand gets represented through in pretty much everything that your business does on a regular basis, including the following four areas:

> Visual Brand Identity, such as your logo, website, and color scheme

> Brand Voice, such as your blog posts, mission statement, social content, and website copy

> Brand Values, such as the types of causes your company supports

> Brand Personality, such as your company’s culture and customer service philosophy

The path to build a strong brand doesn’t need to be complicated. Many marketers make the mistake of narrowing their efforts to customer acquisition. If this has been your approach, you’re doing exactly what your competitor is doing. How can you stand out?

The way you overcome this obstacle is simple. Build something money or products can’t get you: a genuine connection with your customers, or community.

A strong brand is a result of connection and community. You can have the most beautiful website or write the perfect sales page, but you won’t build a strong brand or reach your revenue goals effortlessly until you build a strong connection and community.

Kendra Scott – A Strong Brand Example

When I think of a strong brand, I like to think about Kendra Scott, for example. If you know of her jewelry, chances are you know about her story. How she went from a $500 project in the spare bedroom of her home to a billion dollar fashion brand loved globally.

If you have visited one of her stores, chances are that you have a memorable experience.

And just in case you still haven’t heard about Kendra, let me give you some context. She’s one of the top America’s richest self-made women and she ranked higher than Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Donna Karan and Diane Von Furstenberg. It’s amazing when you think that beading classes and $500 we all she needed to start a business.

There’s a reason why Kendra Scott’s locations are flourishing in the middle of the retailpocalypse. She’s been able to create a connection and a strong community, using experiential marketing.

What Is Experiential Marketing

Experiential marketing, also called “engagement marketing,” is a marketing strategy that invites an audience to interact with a business in a real-world situation. Using participatory, hands-on, and tangible branding material, the business can show its customers not just what the company offers, but what it stands for. Source: Hubspot.

Research conducted by McKinsey shows that word-of-mouth recommendations drive 20% to 50% of all purchase decisions, and experiential word-of-mouth recommendations account for 50% to 80% of all those recommendations.

Experiential Marketing Examples

Experiential marketing is all about facilitating consumer interaction so they can have a brand experience. And this can be achieved when consumers can meaningfully connect with your brand, and, of course, can also meet and mingle with each other.

Let’s not forget the 2 important elements of a strong brand that lead to brand loyalty: meaningful connections and community.

Here are some of the experiential marketing examples:

✔️Classes or workshops
✔️Product testing or tasting
✔️Factory or headquarter tours
✔️Giveaways and competitions
✔️One-time phenomenon like street art, installations, pop-up concerts, and even pranks.

How To Build Successful Experiential Marketing Strategy

In order to have success in your experiential marketing efforts, you need to see it as a strategy, not a tactic.

The terms tactic and strategy are often confused: tactics are the actual means used to gain an objective, while strategy is the overall campaign plan, which may involve complex operational patterns, activity, and decision-making that govern tactical execution.

A tactic is something you do a few times, but there is no repeatable system that can be duplicated. A strategy consists of a series of steps, all connected, aligned with a main goal, that can be duplicated.

Now let’s discuss the key elements for a successful experiential marketing strategy.

Design Your Experience

How do people feel about our brand? is a fundamental question that every product or service creator must answer.

Without getting too technical, there are some basic UX principles that can be applied in order to plan your experiential marketing strategy more efficiently.

User journey mapping is an excellent exercise that can shed light on that. User journey map is a visualization of an individual’s relationships with a product/brand over time and across different stages of their journey.

Below is a map of the user experience journey that we designed to enhance the experience of our Networking Events for our Austin Networking Community.

Our map traced the different stages of the users, from their first contact with our community, all the way up to brand loyalty. Then, on each step, we map the user’s mindset and identify opportunities to make a better experience for them.

Make sure you keep your map visible so you build your experiential marketing strategy according to your design.

Purpose Driven Instead Of Revenue Driven

Have you been invited you to a party and you ended at a business presentation? This is exactly what not to do!

When you’re opening your doors to receive people, you can’t do it with the sole idea of turning everyone into a client. Your goal is to build connections.

A connection can give you introductions, ideas, and can also turn into a client. But don’t just focus on the third one.

The most successful experiential marketing campaigns leave attendees with a great story to tell.

Kendra’s brand leverage charity events to bring their customers together at their location.

Take a look at their invitation and note how their message is all about giving back. This makes consumers coming for a reason beyond than buying an accessory they want.

If you adopt a purpose-driven strategy instead of a revenue-driven, you will be able to serve others, have fun, and create a much pleasant experience. Just trust the process. You are building your brand. Users will help you build revenue. It will happen!

Narrow Audience Over Broad Audience

Since you will bring people together, you want to think about an audience that actually blends well.

Think about their interests, behaviors, demographics, and location.

Facebook Ads are a great resource to find your target audience. Using the saved audience feature, you can target your audience. However, you don’t always need ads to find your target audience.

Let’s explore briefly the 4 categories:

Interests: People’s hobbies, favorite activities, and favorite sources of entertainment. For example, if you’re hosting a beer festival, you might include people who list beer brands in their interests.

Behaviors: Device usage and purchase behaviors. If you’re hosting a tech conference, you might target people who have the latest models of devices or complex purchasing behaviors.

Demographics: Traits like age, gender, relationship status, education, and job titles. A leadership workshop might want to target individuals who have “manager” or “director” in their job title.

Location: Where people live (for example, your event’s city or neighboring cities). If you host an event in Austin, you can easily target anyone in the Austin city + 25 miles around it.

Research! Don’t just rely on what you believe. Take some time to research the audience. One of my favorite tools for audience research is Facebook Audience Insights.

How to use Audience Insights to find your target audience, free?

Let’s say you want to attract women who are into holistic health from ages 25-40 who live in Texas.

Using Audience Insights you will be able to see the communities or pages they already like. Take your time to explore each of these recommendations. You will be able to get an idea of the kind of experience this audience is used to.

Audience Insights also reveals your audience’s digital behavior. How do they consume digital content, what things they like, comment, and share.

Knowing their behavior will allow you to make smarter decisions of what channels to use and even the format of content you should create to get their attention.

Narrow Your Channels

You don’t need to have a campaign all over social media. The more channels you have, the harder it will be to create meaningful connections.

In other words: less is more.

I’ve been hosting networking events for professionals & entrepreneurs of Austin for over 2 years now. Our key channel is our Facebook Group. We build meaningful connections and invite our members. We get sold out 100% and it’s all organic.

If you notice our experience journey map below, we only planned to use 4 channels to attract users: Facebook Group, Facebook Ads LinkedIn, Eventbrite.

As a matter of fact, we haven’t needed any Facebook Ads at all.

Our community grows by 30-40% each month, organic.

Take the time to identify which of your current channels can bring you more opportunities.

The best efforts are those who can be implemented effortlessly.

Always Lead With Authenticity

The more virtual our lives get, the more we hunger after something genuine.

Gone are the days when you could succeed with flashing big checks, luxury cars, and a picture-perfect lifestyle.

Simply put, being authentic means staying true to who you are, what you do and who you serve. In an environment in which more human elements matter it creates value and benefits for your connections as well as improving your business.

Authenticity works because…

It elevates your business above the competition

It builds your identity and image into something influential

It gives substance to your business, services and products

It enables people to relate to your business

It helps people understand how what you offer is of benefit to them

It tells people that what you offer is of high quality

It marks you out as a reliable, trustworthy company

It encourages engagement and can turn audiences into advocates

When you lead with authenticity, you will find that your users will feel free to take your brand as it belongs to them. They feel connected. It’s because they are part of it.

Kendra Scott now opened a Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Institute. Make no mistake, this has been possible because of her strong community. It goes beyond a product. It’s a mission that every Kendra’s jewelry user feels like it belongs to them.

To Recap

You will design an experiential marketing strategy because you want to develop a strong brand and brand loyalty. You want acommunity.

Some of the experiential marketing activities can be:

✔️Classes or workshops
✔️Product testing or tasting
✔️Factory or headquarter tours
✔️Giveaways and competitions
✔️One-time phenomenon like street art, installations, pop-up concerts, and even pranks.

The first step to a successful experiential marketing strategy is design. Start with a basic user experience journey map so you can craft the user experience with all the details in mind.

I hope you get inspired to adopt experiential marketing to build your brand. It’s one of my favorite strategies.

Just in case you want to learn more about me, here’s part of my BIO.

Jessica Campos, JD, BBA is an educator, author, forensic digital marketing expert & strategist who is passionate about UX. She traded in her law career in order to pursue her passion: helping entrepreneurs build wealth by taking advantage of the thriving content economy.

Jessica‘s 15+ years of experience in entrepreneurship, background in law and business, tracked online sales record, and her network, represent a wealth of resources for professionals and entrepreneurs that want to attain success.

Want to discuss your future experience marketing strategy?

Request an appointment here.