I buy companies, and I start by identifying what offer is going to be ideal to increase cash flow and have the company pay for itself.

4 Types of Offers Every Company Should Have (at a minimum)

Four different offers at four different price points.

1) Free Community with Highly Desirable Free Content (Education)

2) Core Offer (Do It Yourself or DIY)

3) Upsell (Done With You or DWY)

4) Upsell (Done For You or DFY)

Example: Paintbrushes

1) Join our community of painters
2) Buy our brushes
3) Join a paid group painting class
4) Let us Paint for you.

We Identify Each of the Offers With the Same Survey

We Identify Each Of The Offers With The Same Survey. do this with a simple 4 part survey that we build in Google Forms.

The survey can either:

Be sent to everyone on your mailing list once a quarter,

Or

Be sent to everyone who uses your product or service.

Format We’ve Found That Yields the Best Results Via a Survey

• Motivation
• Reason
• Time Commitment
• Email
• First and Last Name
• Phone Number
• Demographic Question
• Benefits Question
• Frustration Question
• Conversation Invitation

Motivation

A reason to fill in the survey. We’ve found the best thing to offer is a free draw for a giveaway for a new product or program you’re about to release.

Example: “Fill in this form to take part in our $7,000 giveaway! We’re giving away 7 copies of our latest $1,000 training that helps you (GET_SPECIFIC_RESULT) that we called [NAME_OF_PRODUCT].”

Reason

This is where you explain the significance of the survey and how ultimately the results help them.

Example: “We want to help YOU! This survey is going to let us know what sticking points or areas of frustration you have with regards to [NICHE]. “

Time Commitment

Here you want to let them know that the survey won’t take long to complete.

Example: “The survey only has 7 short questions and should be finished within 2 minutes max.”

Email

This is where we ask them for their email address to continue communicating with them in the future.

Example: “We’d like to offer you future giveaways, offers and tips in addition to having the most up to date contact information to notify you if you have won. Please share with us the best way to email you for these things”

First & Last Name

This is just to keep track of individual responses

Example: “What is your first and last name so we know who we are contacting if you win?”

Phone Number

Here you’re going to get a secondary form of contact information that also has a higher response rate.

Example: “In case we can’t reach you via email what’s the best phone number to reach you at via SMS?”

Demographic Question

This question lets you know something about your audience. Either geographical, income, competition, or something that is useful relevant information. It’s important that you create this as a multiple choice question.

Examples:

“So we know which languages to include in our product development, Where do you live in the world? Please select one of the following:”

“So we create a product that matches your needs the best, which best represents your yearly salary? Please select one of the following:”

“So we know your experience within [NICHE] which of the following companies have you purchased products or programs from? Please select one of the following:”

Benefits Question

This is where you create a list of Needs/ Wants or Benefits you think people may want. You want at least 20 of these, and you’re going to ask them to select 3.

This will give you a clear indication of the needs and wants of your audience… and will give you the next 3 products or programs to develop. Be sure you word them carefully and create variants of the benefits including do-it-yourself options and done-for-you options. You cannot really have too many of these. This is the most important part of the survey.

Example:

“Which of the following do you most want us to provide for you? (please select 3)”
Do say: “I’d like to have more energy”
Don’t say: “Energy”
Do say: “I want to build my own race track
And say: “I want someone to build me a race track
Don’t say: “I want to do racing”

Frustration Question

Here you’re going to learn the frustration holding them back from getting the results they want.

You’re going to want to list at least 10 common frustrations. Include F.E.N.C.E.

Combined with the previous answer this gives you the classic headline format: “How to get A,B,C without the frustration of X”

Example: “What have you found to be most frustrating when trying to get the results in the previous question? Please select one:”

Conversation Invitation

This last question is an invitation to have a deeper discussion about their results… and of course another chance for a conversation to make a sale of the new product. As a beta tester.

Example: “Would you be willing to jump on a 5-minute call to discuss the answers in full?”

Conclusion

Once this survey is a natural automatic part of what you do… you will constantly have feedback on new products to develop.

We typically recommend creating a new survey with new options every 3 months to follow trends you see in the industry you’re in.

This is one of the SOP’s I bring into a company when I first join.

The post 4 Types of Offers That Can Instantly Increase Revenue appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

This debate seems to be as old as the concept of sales…and many things in life, but we will keep it to sales and marketing for the purpose of this article.

Many I speak with will fall solidly in the “quality” camp. In fact, I guess that for many of you reading this, your answer might be quality. Some of you might answer “both” just because you know me and how I like to set up a topic.

But, deep down inside, we probably think about quality as the winner of the debate.

…and to a large extent, there is truth to this.

That said, if you’ve “grown-up” in any serious sales environment, you may sit on the other side of the equation. And while you may not agree with anything else he ever said, you might think that Joseph Stalin was onto something when he stated, “quantity has a quality of its own.” 

When I started my sales career 25 years ago, I worked for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. In that environment, you were handed a phone book, sat down in front of a phone, and told to start dialing—often with no training other than what you picked up during licensing. If you’ve ever seen the movie Boiler Room, you have a good sense of my early days. The premium was on quantity, not necessarily quality.

This, too, was a practical approach. That was then. What about now?

The Debate Is Wrong

The debate about quality versus quantity is wrong. You can’t possibly decide on one versus the other in the discussion. Ultimately, as you may have suspected, you need both—and one other element I’ll mention shortly.

So, why do you need both quantity and quality?

Many of you have worked with some sort of email marketing. How effective is it to send just one email to the database? Not very. What if it is a perfectly crafted email written by a resurrected Ogilvy or Collier? Still not very successful. And, realistically, how many of us consistently maintain an open rate of 100%? One immaculately constructed email simply isn’t going to reach everyone. 

You could say the same about our approach to content on social media. What are your chances of going viral with one post and suddenly putting yourself on the map? It could happen, but I wouldn’t bet on those odds, no matter how good the video is—even in a world where a 10-year old makes $55 million a year on YouTube. 

So, let’s apply this to your sales efforts. What if you were to reach out to a handful of people every few months with a top-quality value-laden message? Either you get lucky, or more likely, you end up with nothing. And yet, for many agency owners and solopreneurs I speak with, this is their “sales plan.”

Here is what I see frequently happen with salespeople and business owners alike. You put some effort into your prospecting or, more often, get a referral or two. You catch a few wins along the way, and then suddenly you are busy, and money is coming in. 

Are you still prospecting? Probably not.

And therein lies the issue with the debate about quantity over quality. You need both, and it is missing a critical factor in the equation—sustained effort.

There are few overnight successes. Many reading this article are familiar with Gary Vaynerchuk. We know him as a super-successful guy with a massive following on social media. But he regularly talks about the fact that it took hundreds of videos before he had any meaningful traction.

I ran a video series for a couple of years, RightMind Mashup, and I shot 22 straight weeks of video before someone mentioned they had seen any of them. It was my brother-in-law. And while I love him, he isn’t exactly my ideal customer. It wasn’t until week 36 that I closed a sale due to the videos. 

At this point, I’ve generated over $900,000 in sales from that series, but it took sustained effort and ultimately more than 70 videos. I had quality content. I needed quantity to start making a difference. But, the driving force for both elements was sustained effort.

Success Formula

Beyond needing both quantity and quality, you must give some thought to the ratio of each factor. It looks something like this:

Quality + (Quantity/X) x Sustained effort = Success

I know. Algebra might not be your favorite subject. Oddly, it was one of mine, but I digress.

The divisor, X, in the equation indicates that you need to adjust the quantity to sustain the quality. What do I mean by that?

There is no question that it is challenging to keep up a high volume of quality content over a sustained period. Unless you have a content team, it might be nearly impossible to produce content as you continue to run your business and manage clients. So, you have to adjust the quantity to sustain the quality.

When someone joins my mastermind group, they often talk about how they want to produce content every day to help boost their business. For most, this isn’t realistic. 

Writers know all about “writer’s block.” Musicians have similar issues. I would imagine that every “creative” out there suffers from this at times. Trying to go from zero to daily content on a social media platform is a recipe for frustration and burnout, or at a minimum, a reduction in quality.

So, adjust the quantity so you can sustain the quality.

The same formula holds for your sales efforts. Keeping up a high volume of quality sales calls (applies to all communications: email, messenger, texts, etc.) over time is challenging if you don’t have a salesperson. As an aside, I caution business owners against hiring a salesperson too soon. They are expensive, and unless you have a rock-solid, documented sales process, you are throwing good money after bad results.

When referring to quality in your sales calls, this involves more than what you say. While that is important, most of your success depends on your consistent follow-up with prospects. Pre-pandemic, the average salesperson—and, if you are a business owner, you are a salesperson—followed up with prospects twice. In 2021? Once.

According to Hubspot, the number of calls needed to reach a prospect increased from 8 pre-pandemic to at least 18 calls since 2021.

Conclusion

In short, the quality of your sales depends on the quantity and sustainability of your follow-up. The third element, sustained effort, is the multiplier that defines the length of your success in the market. 

As buyer behavior continues to evolve, our sales efforts must adapt. As a young investment guy, I could get away with the quantity approach because this is how everyone did it, and no one had Caller ID. Buyers today educate themselves online, screen calls on their mobile devices, and work from home. These circumstances change everything about how we approach prospects today.

Rather than engaging in a debate of quality over quantity, continue to maintain quality with forward sustainability —this is the key to your long-term success in business.

Rather than engaging in a debate of quality over quantity, understand that you need both in a way that you can sustain long-term. This becomes the formula for future success.

Dominic Cummins

Founder of RightMind, Inc. Dominic helps leaders and entrepreneurs find and fulfill their purpose. At RightMind, we believe you started your business with a great purpose in mind. The challenge can be helping your clients “get it.”

Learn More About Dominic

The post The Answer to the Quality vs. Quantity Marketing Question appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

With the rise of social media and digital technologies, marketers and businesses were expected to evolve from email marketing. 

However, email marketing is still a reliable tool. Various researches show that email will become some of the most widely used and popular communication platforms in the future.

But before you utilize these free email marketing tools, find out how email marketing is used to interact with users and if it will remain a viable strategy in 2022.

The Data Behind Email Marketing

Here are a few stats to prove email marketing’s dominance in marketing strategies globally:

• In 2021 alone, the number of worldwide email users was about 4 billion, which is expected to increase to 4.6B users worldwide in 2025
• More than 300B emails are forecasted to be received and sent every day in 2022

But if you want to derive maximum benefits from email marketing campaigns, you have to take an all-inclusive approach towards making the right and fitting email marketing strategies. 

Luckily, there is a range of credible, effective, and free email marketing tools you can use to organize and schedule various email campaigns. 

What’s more, they even provide analytics to ensure success. 

GET CERTIFIED. Discover the proven plan for effortless, automated email marketing. Click Here

5 Reasons Why Email Marketing Is Still Vital In 2022 

And if you needed more convincing, here is why you should stick with email marketing:

1. Email Marketing Allows for Personalization

Email marketing enables marketers to create customized content for customers according to their buying patterns, journeys, behaviors, and other factors. 

Utilize data trackers and analytics to know what interests consumers have. Plus, what sort of products or content do they like most. 

For instance, if your consumers like a particular clothing design from your catalog, you can personalize emails by including related products. 

Essentially, you can use email automation software tools to view where your consumers lie in a sales funnel stage and create content accordingly. 

2. It Produces Better Outcomes Than Most Other Marketing Channels

Believe it or not, email marketing gives the highest ROI (return-on-investment) than several other marketing means. 

So for every one dollar spent, email marketing produces more than $40 in ROI. 

In addition to that, it provides improved conversion rates. Various studies show email generates 66% of conversions. It’s 40-times more efficient and successful than other social media channels.  

To get the best results, regularly monitor the metrics of your email marketing campaign, such as click-through rates, engagements, bounce rates, etc. 

3. Email Marketing Cuts Costs

Compared to conventional marketing approaches, email is both cost-effective and straightforward. 

To begin with, you don’t require a huge budget to advertise, produce, or print the ad. Therefore, it avoids the associated expense of hiring a digital and video production crew. 

In email marketing, all you’ve got to do is hire a professional graphic designer to create appealing visuals along with excellent content, and you’re all set. 

Additionally, as people increasingly rely on mobile phones now, email is an effective way to connect with potential customers. 

4. It Creates Brand Loyalty & Connection

Email marketing campaigns are among the most effective ways to boost brand awareness among customers. 

For example, you could send informational content regarding brands’ mission, products, values and interact in a much healthy debate with your targeted groups. 

When your potential customers better understand what your business stands for, chances are, they can engage and connect with it much better. 

So to form a steady connection with users, create consistent, long-term email marketing strategies to keep consumers anxious for your next email. 

5. Email Marketing Amalgamates with Other Marketing Means Seamlessly

One of the best things about email is that you can integrate it seamlessly with various other social channels such as:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• LinkedIn 

For instance, businesses can put social platform icons in emails and request readers to follow. 

In addition to that, you could display a collage of Instagram posts in your emails to show consumers a sneak peek of your business’s Instagram profile. 

Many marketers place “Pin it” options in emails to enable consumers to directly save images to their accounts. 

Related Articles

• How Standardizing Your Sales Process Boosts Overall Conversion

• 2 Ways to Take Back the Power in Your Business: Part 2

• 2 Ways to Take Back the Power in Your Business: Part 1

Takeaway

Email marketing strategies are a winning way to communicate with potential customers and collect valuable insights.

And these resources will help you create a cohesive buyer journey and build brand awareness among the audience. 

The techniques mentioned above will help you create robust email marketing strategies that compel new customers to engage with the brand.

The post Why Email Marketing Is Still Crucial In 2022 appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Every marketing position requires a different skill set. While some of these skills overlap with other marketing positions, understanding each skill specific to the type of marketing you’re interested in is foundational for becoming a successful marketer.

Social media marketers understand engagement entirely differently than email marketers. Social media marketing defines engagements as likes, comments, shares, impressions, and follows. But, email marketing looks at engagement through the metrics of open rates and click-through rates.

To figure out what skills you need for the marketing position you desire, you want to look at how that marketer spends their time and define success. 

But, before we go into the skills you need for each marketing position, we first have to talk about the 3 foundational skills every marketer needs (regardless of what type of marketing they specialize in). 

These 3 foundational marketing skills are:

Understanding the customer avatar: Marketers need to research customer avatars and turn that information into campaigns and strategies that convert. If you’re not showing the right message to the right person…your campaigns are doomed.

Knowing the customer journey: The customer journey is the 8-step process that starts at awareness, leads to conversion, and ends with a customer becoming a brand ambassador. Marketing is showing the right message to the right person at the right time.

Figuring out customer optimization: Businesses rarely rely on selling a product one time and acquiring a new customer immediately after—customer optimization is essential to create customer lifetime value (LTV) and a successful, sustainable business.

Once you’ve mastered these skills, you can start to build your marketing knowledge empire on top of them. Based on the marketing position you desire, here are the skills you need.

Content Marketers

Content marketers market…content. Their job is to turn ideas into high-quality articles, podcasts, emails, and social content. Content cultivates relationships with prospects, leads, and customers (increasing LTV!), making this type of marketing essential for brand longevity.

The skills every content marketer needs are:

How to create high-quality content: Publishing content that doesn’t stand out from the competition is like throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping a noodle sticks. Content marketers have to understand the content landscape of their industry and how they can write, create, or record content that makes their customer avatar engage with the brand.

SEO: Search engine optimization is a big part of content marketing because if people can’t find your content…they can’t buy your products. You don’t necessarily need to rank first for every article or video you publish, but getting a few of those top-ranking spots is important for driving organic traffic.

Organic reach: SEO can drive organic traffic, social media, partnerships, and collaborations. Great content marketers build a strategy that uses organic reach to increase their brand awareness while turning viewers into subscribers (and customers down the line).

Promotional content vs. organic content: Even as a marketer, you don’t want to follow a brand that’s just constantly promoting itself. You want to engage with brands who teach or entertain you. Content marketers need to understand this balance, posting some promotional and organic content only designed to nurture the relationship with their readers, viewers, subscribers, or followers.

Copywriting: What’s a great piece of content with a call-to-action? Most of your content should have some type of call-to-action written with copywriting strategies (but this doesn’t mean it’s always promoting your products or services). Call-to-actions can range from reading an article, listening to a podcast, filling out a worksheet, subscribing to your newsletter, buying a product, etc. 

Email Marketers

Email marketers spend most of their day inside Klaviyo (for all you agency or ecommerce business owners!), ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, Mailchimp, or your other preferred email marketing platform. They understand content and the metrics that can lead to a predictable selling system, making email marketers an essential part of any business.

Funnels: Funnels start during the awareness stage of the Customer Value Journey and end once a customer has become a brand ambassador (well, kind of). Technically that customer continues into another Customer Value Journey since they’ve already ascended their way through the first one. With funnels, email marketers can turn content viewers into subscribers and subscribers into customers. They can also ascend those customers into higher-tier products. 

Landing pages: Landing pages take viewers and turn them into subscribers or customers using strategic copywriting. Every landing page has one goal and one call-to-action, and email marketers are proficient at making sure their landing pages are converting. (These are a big part of marketing funnels!).

Automations: Welcome email sequences, post-purchase sequences, and abandoned cart series are examples of automations email marketers are very familiar with. These automations are essential for building a relationship with subscribers by telling them what to expect from your emails and following up with them when they show interest in a product or service. Email marketers are all about automations (and optimizing them as time goes on!).

Copywriting: Email marketing involves lots of campaigns that are directly asking the subscribers to buy. This means copywriting practices, like the PADS formula, are an essential skill set for email marketers. Even if you’re not writing the copy, you still have to know if it’s following the right formula to turn subscribers into customers. 

Promotion calendars vs. organic content: Like content marketers, email marketers can’t only send promotional emails. That leads to decreased open rates and minimal click-through rates. Even an email list of 100,000 subscribers can’t come back from that. Organic content (like newsletters, free trainings, entertainment, etc.) is essential to cultivating a healthy relationship with your subscribers—and ensuring they keep opening your emails.

Data and Analytics Marketers

You don’t have to tell us—we know you spend your spare time in Excel. That’s what data and analytics marketers do. They love to let the numbers tell a story. Then, they use that story to create a predictable launch or campaign for their employer or clients. All hail the data and analytics marketers who make our marketing worlds go ‘round.

Metrics: Data and analytics marketers are professionals when figuring out which metrics are most important to a business. They also know how to use those metrics to figure out predictable ways to reach their goals. If you ask them, the answers are in the metrics.

Tools: If you’re looking for the tool junkie of your team, it’s probably this marketer. Data and analytics marketers, with good reason, know the best tools to compile the necessary information. Consider spreadsheets their best friends.

Visuals: A great data and analytics marketer knows that a spreadsheet of numbers doesn’t make sense to everybody. They take the time to create visuals (graphs and charts) that help the business owner or company leaders figure out what’s going on behind the scenes.

Strategy: Not only do these marketers figure out what story the numbers are telling them, but they also use that information to figure out a business’s North Star. They’re not just there to present numbers and pretty graphs. Their job is to show you what’s working well, what’s not working well, and where the best place to spend time, money, and resources is for the next quarter. 

Scorecards: Scorecards ensure a company is on track. KPIs and goals are great, but if you don’t have a weekly report telling you if you’re hitting them—what’s the point? Your data and analytics marketers can set this up.

Paid Media Marketers

Paid media marketers deal with all marketing related to advertising platforms. They’re the person who’s setting up your Facebook Ads Manager or building out your Google Smart Shopping. When you’re ready to put ad dollars behind your marketing strategy—this is your marketer.

Account management: Paid media marketers are experts at advertising platforms. They’re not always experts at every platform (for example a Facebook media marketer has a different skill set than a Google media marketer). They’ll be up-to-date on the latest changes (ahem, we’re watching you iOS!), understand what success means on that platform, and ensure you stay compliant with ad and privacy regulations.

Ad testing (A/B testing): As advertising platforms have matured, they’ve become good at figuring out which ads perform best with your target audience. You can test variations of headlines, call to action, and graphics and let the ad account AI figure out which is performing best and decide how much of your budget you want to put behind that ad. 

Graphic design: Paid media marketers don’t need to be expert graphic designers, but they need to understand what ad creatives are working best right now. They need to tell their design team the graphic variations they want to test out (and not let the design team creatively figure it out on their own). Design is just as much of a formula as copywriting.

Copywriting: Just like you don’t need to be an expert graphic designer, you also don’t have to be an expert copywriter. But, paid media marketers need a thorough understanding of copywriting best practices. They need to spot mistakes that decrease conversions and know where paint points and benefits should be placed on ads.

User-generated content: UGC is a huge part of marketing, not just because it means your team doesn’t have to create content but because it gets higher conversions than brand-created content. This makes sense considering we all trust recommendations from friends, family, and (thanks to the internet) strangers over a brand telling us how great their products are. Paid media marketers know how to utilize UGC in their ads to get the clicks they’re looking for. 

Search Marketers

Search marketers love Google. Or, maybe it’s best to say it’s a love-hate relationship. These marketers focus on search intent instead of interruption-intent (like paid ads). Their job is to get clicks from Google, Bing, and other search engines.

Ranking: The number one skill set of a search marketer is a deep understanding of ranking. Ranking is everything in the search marketing world. It’s the difference between page 1 and page 25—and we all know how many cobwebs are on the page 5 websites.

Keywords (and keywords by volume): Keywords tell search engines what your content is about and who to show it to. They’re essential to a healthy SEO strategy—but they’re not everything. Knowing which keywords to target to fill in gaps in missed opportunities is a search marketers’ jam.

Content for humans vs. content for SEO bots: Content can’t be created just for the SEO bots. If it is, all the humans that land on your content are going to bounce right off (and that will make you rank lower!). Content has to have a balance of optimization for humans and bots.

Copywriting: Search marketers are looking for conversion, and usually, that conversion is the click. They need a search engine user to click on THEIR page, not the competition. That makes copywriting an important part of a search marketer’s skillset.

Traffic: Search marketers are all about traffic. Either organic or paid, they’re looking to get more views on landing pages, sales pages, and product pages. They’re knee-deep in the traffic ocean looking for any opportunities they can find to boost their numbers.

Social Media Marketers

Social media marketers are not interns. Phew, glad we cleared that up. Social media marketing takes a lot of work and generally requires a team of people. These marketers are savvy in content trends and know just what to post to increase following, engagement, and, most importantly—conversions.

Organic content: Organic content is a huge part of a social media marketing strategy because it’s not focused on promotion. It’s just content to entertain or educate and build a relationship with followers. Social media marketers know exactly what content to post (thanks to the Customer Avatar Worksheet).

Engagement: Likes, comments, and shares are social media marketers’ ideal metrics of success. They’re looking for proof their customer avatar likes their content and an understanding of how to present promotions in a way that drives conversions.

Analytics (impressions, engagement, follows): Social media marketers are constantly in the backend of their accounts. They’re comparing what posts helped them get more followers and which flopped in engagement. These metrics are crucial to creating content their audience genuinely cares about.

Influencers, partnerships, collaborations: Trying to build a social media presence alone takes years. Collaborating with influencers and brands who already have an audience of your customer avatar takes a few weeks. This is like the cheat code of social media and why social media marketers are always looking for a partnership, collaboration, or influencer marketing opportunities.

Copywriting: Copywriting shows how well a brand knows their customer’s pain points and the after state they desire to be in. Social media marketers create strategic content that shows how well their brand understands their customer avatar, so their audience chooses their products. 

Ecommerce Marketers

Ecommerce marketers know their stuff. They understand the entire Customer Value Journey and don’t mess around when it comes to customer optimization. They know their success is in customer lifetime value—and they’re prepared to do what it takes to increase it.

Google Shopping: Ecommerce marketers understand intent-based marketing (when someone searches specifically for a product or solution). They know that Google Shopping is an essential part of their marketing strategy because it makes their products appear in the search results—ready to purchase. 

SEO: If you’re not ranking as an ecommerce brand, how will your customers find you? That’s why ecommerce marketers have a thorough understanding of SEO and make sure to read a few articles every time there are new algorithm changes. They have to know what they can do to increase their ranking because a higher ranking means more views.

Social media: Ecommerce and social media are two best friends. Social media can drive traffic to your ecommerce website (or you can set up shopping directly on the apps). Ecommerce marketers work closely with the content marketing team to publish high-quality content that promotes their products and cultivates brand relationships.

Email marketing: What’s an ecommerce brand without an email funnel? Non-existent. Email funnels turn followers and viewers into customers, but they also turn them into repeat customers. Email funnels are an essential part of increasing customer lifetime value. 

Metrics: And we’re back to the spreadsheets. Ecommerce marketers know success is in the numbers. They have to keep a close eye on their ROAS and LTV to make sure their client’s business or their business is profitable.

Do you have the skills you need for your desired marketing position?

Even though every marketing position requires a different skill set, you can see how much overlap between skill sets and positions. (It might be extremely clear that you should have a really solid understanding of copywriting to find success as a marketer).

Regardless of the marketing expertise you choose, remember that your skillset has to build on top of the 3 foundational marketing skills: 

1. Understanding the customer avatar
2. Knowing the customer journey
3. Figuring out customer optimization

Once you’ve mastered these skills, you can start to build your marketing knowledge empire on top of them. And that empire starts with knowing where to get your marketing education from. You want to be taught by the best marketers in the world, not the people who strategically placed a Lamborghini in the back of their Instagram post.

Learn from the world’s top marketers with proven track records of multi-million dollar campaigns and expertise in different marketing positions. Inside DigitalMarketer Lab, you’ll get access to Workshops and Insider Trainings from these top marketers, as well as Playbooks and Certifications. 

Join DigitalMarketer Lab to start building your marketing knowledge empire—so you can become a world-class marketer in whatever position you choose. 

The post The 5 Skills You Need Based On Your Desired Marketing Position appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Analyzing and monitoring your competition is fundamental to business success.

From Fortune 500 companies to startups—businesses need an idea of where they stand in the marketplace. Most importantly, they need to know how to use that information to help them stand out.

That’s why competitive reports are such a huge part of business success. It’s a roadmap telling you what to do, what to avoid, and what to try. Without it, you’re attempting to get from Point A to Point B with a blindfold on. With it, you’ve got supervision.

Competitive reports look at competitive benchmarking, competition overview, SEO strategies, and more. Ecommerce businesses, SaaS businesses, and marketing agencies can use them to figure out their short-term and long-term plans.

Every business owner has two options:

1. Know what the future can hold for their business
2. Guess and hope the future is bright

We’ll take the first option—and we’ll bet you will too.

What should a good competitive report include and how do you take what you’ve learned and apply it?

Why Does My Business Need a Competitive Report?

Businesses need competitive reports for 4 reasons:

• To better understand your target audience by research how they find and engage with your more established competitor
• For market research: Understand what is currently available on the market and where your business fits in
• To get an estimate of your future marketing budget
• To identify effective marketing tactics, etc.

Competitive reports are much more than copying your successful competitor’s marketing tactics. It’s actually nothing close to that because copying would never bring you ahead. (If you need marketing ideas, check out DigitalMarketer Lab!).

Competitive research is about understanding your target market and distinguishing your unique value proposition and consequently your unique marketing strategy to conquer it.

Competitive Research = How are your competitors doing and where you do stand in comparison?

Your Brand’s Unique Identity = What’s your USP (and how does it differ from the competition)?

Original Marketing Ideas = Your brand’s unique identity strategically creating awareness, engagement, and conversions using competitive research to know how to stand out from the competition!

Every competitive report needs 6 parts for a holistic understanding of your competitors, how your brand identity makes you unique, and what original marketing ideas come from it.

Competitive Benchmarking

Competitive benchmarking means collecting the performance data of your competitors and comparing it to your business. You can use these metrics to measure and monitor your business performance against your competitors. For example, if your competitors are ranking for the 3 top spots on search engines, you want to see where you’re ranking for those same topics. Are you slightly below them or on no-mans-land page 2?

You can choose your own performance indicators to track and compare. These may include:

• Public traffic data (from tools like Ahrefs, Alexa and Similar Web)
• Organic rankings
• Brand awareness and sentiment (based on brand mentions), etc.

These performance indicators are your KPIs. They’re a fundamental part of your competitive report, but don’t consider your competitive report written in stone. It’s a fluid document meant to help you identify opportunities. Adjust it as needed (especially if your KPIs change in the future).

Competitive Benchmarketing needs to answer the question: What are your KPIs?

Basic Overview of the Competition

Aside from your KPIs, there are secondary metrics that will help you find competitors to keep an eye on. These aren’t your primary metrics (a.k.a your KPIs), but the smaller metrics that still tell you a lot about what that competitor is doing and where you stand in comparison.

These secondary metrics are things like:

• Backlinks
• Organic traffic
• Social media followers
• Social media engagement, etc.

Tools like Ahrefs, Keyhole, and Similarweb will help you collect all this necessary data.

Basic Overview of the Competition needs to answer the question: What are our secondary metrics of focus?

Detailed Dive into Organic Search Engine Optimization Tactics

There are two types of marketing interruption-based and intent-based. Interruption-based marketing is all the sponsored posts on your Instagram or Facebook newsfeed. It’s the commercial before your Hulu show or the ad in the middle of the YouTube video you’re watching. Intent-based marketing is more focused on answering someone’s question. When someone looks for a “black bookshelf” on Google, they have the intent to find a black bookshelf. Intent-based marketing helps your black bookshelf show up in their search results.

You can use Google Smart Shopping to get in front of the right audience and you can use organic search engine optimization tactics. Look at some key search engine optimization tactics your competitors are using:

• Which keywords are they focusing on?
• How are they optimizing their title tags and meta descriptions?
• Are they optimizing their old content and how often?
• What does their site architecture look like?
• How are they organizing their main navigation?
• What’s their internal linking strategy?
• What are their most successful pages (i.e. those that rank for the most competitive search queries)?
• What’s their semantic optimization strategy? 

Try running a few of the most important pages through a tool called Text Optimizer to determine whether your competitors are doing a good job optimizing for search intent:

One of the most actionable steps here is to look at Content Gaps, i.e. researching which keywords your competitors are ranking but your site is not. This is a great way to expand your content strategy to include new keywords. Ahrefs provides this analysis, so it is both easy and effective:

Organic Search Engine Optimization Tactics needs to answer the question: What organic SEO tactics are our competitors using, where do we stand, and where are there opportunities for us to rank higher?

Competitors’ Backlink Research

Backlink research is important for many reasons but don’t just use it in an effort to “steal” some of those tactics or claim some of those links. Remember, you don’t need to copy marketing strategies from your competitors. You just need to figure out what they’re doing to see the gaps that you can fill.

Look at a bigger picture:

• Who are your competitors’ promoters (i.e. people who link to them) and how did your competitors win their hearts?
• Which PR tactics seemed to work best for your competitors and why?
• How are they utilizing content to generate backlinks?

The purpose of competitive backlink research is to understand what works for niche publishers and how you can build your own long-term relationships with them to outmatch your competitors in the long run. There are quite a few backlink checking tools that would help you create this report.

Competitors’ Backlink Research needs to answer the question: What’s our competition’s backlink strategy, where do we stand, and what opportunities are available for us?

Social Media Growth and Engagement

This section of your competitive report is an overview of your competitor’s social media channels. Some of the companies you research could be direct competition but others could have a similar audience and you’re figuring out what garners attention and engagement.

Create a quick chart summarizing your competitors’ active social media channels, number of followers and friends, and their overall activity. Use these metrics as either your goal or numbers you want to far surpass.

Keyhole can help you with this section:

Social Media Growth and Engagement needs to answer the question: What are our competitors doing on social media and what are companies with the same customer avatar as us doing?

Social Media Tactics to Take a Note of

While researching social media growth and engagement, you probably came across some inspiring ideas. Things that you haven’t done yet, but you know your audience would love (and engage with!).

Highlight some creative tactics your competitors are using on social media. In this section, forget about numbers! Highlight what you find ingenious. You’re not looking for what yielded great results, you just want ideas that your brand could take action on. My advice: take lots of screenshots!

• Did your competitor use humor when replying to a customer?
• Did you like their video they uploaded for a holiday?
• Was their sponsored update particularly creative and attention grabbing?
• Did they manage to get attention from a niche influencer?
• Did you like the idea behind their social media contest or poll?

This section is supposed to inspire your social media team. Discourage them from copying anything your competitor did on social media (this could quickly turn into a reputation crisis). Instead, let this section be a conversation starter for your team to come up with their own ideas.

Social Media Tactics needs to answer the question: What strategies should be we implement on social?

Every Business Needs a Competitive Report

It’s impossible to name a business idea or model without competition. There’s competition to get to space these days, and we’ll safely assume the competitive reports from those companies are hundreds of pages and a foot thick when printed.

A competitive report is one of the keys to marketing success. But, you have to make it actionable, or else it will collect digital dust on your desktop. Use it as a starting point for your brainstorming meetings and continue to bring it up as you ideate new marketing strategies.

Distinguish tactics to discuss and use unified communications to come up with the ideas to improve and expand those tactics, as well as find unique angles and maintain your brand identity.

Because a competitive report is like getting a crystal ball and getting to ask it what the future of your business is.

The only difference is that you have to put work into creating that future, but luckily your competitive report is telling you exactly what to do.

If you need marketing inspiration from the top marketers around the world, you can join DigitalMarketer Lab to access Insider Trainings, Workshops, Playbooks, and Certifications. Learn what’s working in Facebook ads today, how to use Google Smart Shopping, and how to turn brand awareness into net profits.

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Ann Smarty

Ann Smarty is the brand NINJA at Internet Marketing Ninjas as well as the founder of numerous startups including MyBlogGuest, MyBlogU, ViralContentBee, TwChat and many more.

Ann Smarty has been an online marketing consultant for 10 years providing high-quality digital marketing consulting through her services and courses (both free and paid).

Ann Smarty’s content marketing ideas have been featured in NYtimes, Mashable, Entrepreneur, Search Engine Land and many more. She is known for her indepth tool reviews, innovative content marketing advice and actionable digital marketing ideas.

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