Your business was born out of your passion and interest in an industry where you are an expert. Whether you are serving a new yoga studio, doctor’s office or restaurant, it was similarly launched because of the owner’s love and expertise for exercise, medicine or food. If someone mentioned online marketing to these business owners, the typical response might be “Where do I start?”
Today, any business owner needs to know about marketing. Better yet, they need to partner with a professional who can help provide a better online presence. Online marketing is no longer a topic that can be brushed aside or left to your second cousin to oversee. It’s too complex, and the competition can be next door or half-way around the world.
Change your strategy
How can a small to midsize reseller expect to compete in such an environment?
If you’ve been implementing the same reseller marketing strategies for clients over the past 10, five or even two years, it’s time to freshen up your offerings!
Collect and organize data
Keeping track of customers’ buying habits, how they like to interact (email, phone, etc.), and how to cross-sell or up-sell them based on previous purchases. As a GoDaddy reseller, you have access to a control panel that allows the reseller and website owner to track customer purchases and remarket to customers based on previous purchases. It is easier to cross-sell and upsell if you already know how your customers’ purchases trend. There are several additional tools you can use to organize your data and leverage that data to create more targeted outreach, including:
- Workflow automation (e.g., the mundane items such as task reminders)
- Reporting tools for your email campaigns
- Customization for contact fields
- Categorization and tagging to make it easier to find certain segments of your customer base (e.g., buyers of certain products/services)
Your CRM database will be the foundation for your marketing machine. Done correctly, it will help you deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time.
Set goals for your marketing efforts and adjust
As a reseller, if you want to successfully engage your customers and prospects, you must understand their business needs and goals. Different industry segments seek marketing services with different and unique goals.
- Branding that makes them look fresh
- Increased website traffic
- More calls or location visits
- Better reporting
- Automation integration
- Online sales options or increased online
Your messaging can be crafted to answer several client needs. For some clients, convenience is king. When it comes to messaging, do not underestimate the effectiveness of conveying how your services can help guide the way their target market buys/uses their products and services. If a segment of your clients and prospect prioritize quality, highlight the unique, high-quality features of your products and services, but make sure you tie in the benefits. Your clients and prospects need to quickly understand what you are doing for them, not how you help them. As Harvard professor and economist Theodore Levitt often told his students, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”
Goal tracking ia essential to show online marketing value
Once your reseller marketing campaign is up and running, it is imperative to review and change your messages based on results and customer feedback. For example, if you sent out an email blast with a specific discount code (e.g., Discount10—10% off your next purchase of a specific product).
- How many people used the promo code in a week or month?
- Did the discount code meet or exceed your goals?
- What customer segments responded—were they from specific industries or demographics?
- Did the campaign hit the most relevant audience for your client?
It’s critical to set up objectives for a marketing campaign to know whether it was a success. In the Discount10 example, you might have set a goal of 50 purchases and had only 20 people use it. The low number could be the result of:
- Not enough emails sent
- Not promoting the discount on social media and through other channels besides email
- Another company ran a competing promotion at the same time with a better offer
- The email campaign could have been targeted better to be seen by an audience that is more likely to purchase.
Follow-up with a survey
Ask customers why they did (or didn’t) participate in a marketing program. There are plenty of solid survey programs available online to small businesses for a small monthly fee. It is worth investigating to see which one is best for your company. If the campaign wasn’t a success, use the feedback to tweak the program for better results next time. An easy way to get quick feedback is through a survey that you can send to customers via email or text message, as well as post on social media.
Share your expertise
Help your marketing clients leverage social media. It’s no secret that their potential customers use social media to gather information on products and services they may be considering before connecting with companies to make their purchases.
Encourage your clients to:
- Have a social media presence that links back to the website
- Encourage online reviews and respond to both positive and negative reviews
- Get involved in discussions with industry related content and position themselves as the expert
- Answer questions about their products or services
- Help and support their partners, vendors and current customers by sharing relevant content
- Ask your customers and prospects what social platform they use and focus your efforts on the most popular responses. Then find out how they gather information, and how they would like to interact with your company. Use social platforms to see what your competitors are doing online.
You don’t need 100k followers on social media to use it successfully; you do need to follow the people and companies that will help you achieve your goals. Finding ways to target a more relevant audience for your clients will help them meet their goals, and in turn, they will help you through positive reviews and referrals for marketing services.
If you follow these suggestions, you will better position your company for success in 2019 and beyond.
Image by: Image via CC0 on Pixabay
