Rapid digitalization and proliferation of the Internet in the past two decades have allowed us to connect with almost anyone in the world. Facebook helps us find relatives and friends and stay in touch with them, whereas Instagram enables us to communicate directly with celebrities and share stunning pictures and visuals. Twitter allows us to stay abreast of the latest news and trending topics, and LinkedIn helps us connect with the people in our industry or niche for business purposes.

Still, you can’t turn these connections into relationships. A relationship requires awareness, commitment, and a certain level of trust, even if it exists purely in the social media realm. So, a relationship isn’t just a click away, contrary to what most digital enthusiasts claim. It needs nurturing and time to grow.

However, if you look at the trends, businesses hardly have the patience or inclination to develop customer relationships. They want quick results. It happens mainly because digitalization has brought everything to our fingertips, and everybody seeks instant gratification.

However, the truth is far from it. Regardless of the environment and technology you live in, people’s reactions are based on their emotions, feelings, and motivations.

It can be big marketing to treat online profiles simply as digital existences. There are real people behind these digital profiles who would like to be treated as humans. So, if you expect people to respond to your marketing, focus on building relationships rather than completing transactions. Remember also, that you build relationships with people and not digital profiles.

What is Relationship Marketing?

Unlike transactional marketing, relationship marketing aims to build long-term relationships with your customers. When you implement it as a strategy, you start achieving your business goals swiftly. It includes almost everything from generating revenue and sales to attracting more clients, getting repeat purchases, and making loyal customers.

Relationship marketing aims at providing the best customer experience through top-notch service and building trust. In transactional marketing, brands focus on completing sales, making it a closed-minded and myopic approach.

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Brands that resort to transactional marketing may soon lose their customers to their competition as they don’t invest in building lasting relationships. When closing sales becomes their primary focus, they move from one customer to another, increasing their churn. A high churn rate can become fatal for a company. It can become even more lethal if you run a subscription-based business.

You can run customer success programs to arrest churn. According to The Customer Success Association, “Customer Success is a long-term strategy that is scientifically engineered to offer proven value that is also sustainable. It’s professionally directed to maximize customer value and achieve business goals through it.”

So, to sum up, customer relationship marketing is a long-term marketing approach. You might think that most businesses must be practicing it because of the apparent benefits it offers, but the research proves otherwise.

Tracking Relationship Marketing Industry Trends

Every business owner knows that establishing long-term customer relationships is crucial, and 85% of companies affirmed this in a Super Office study. But are they really investing in relationship marketing? If studies are to be believed, the truth might shock you.

According to a 2013 Econsultancy study, 30% of businesses invest in relationship marketing. Whereas in 2021, only 24% of companies used relationship marketing as their long-term marketing strategy. So, there was a sharp drop in the number of companies practicing relationship marketing in these six years.

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The study also revealed that relationship marketing is linked to a higher ROI as compared to transactional marketing.

So, why are companies not taking relationship marketing that seriously? It’s not a lack of awareness but a lack of strategy that prevents them from taking the plunge.

This article discusses how to formulate the strategy to implement relationship marketing into your marketing plan.

How to Formulate a Sound Relationship Marketing Strategy?

You won’t get much traction if you only use a few tactics such as offering discounts, personalized services, and introducing loyalty programs & rewards. It is simply because you can’t refer to these tactics as a strategy.

Start by bonding with your audience. Use social media for forging friendships and leveraging the power of feelings. It’s a given that no marketing campaign or offer can ever score over customers’ emotions.

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Customer relationship marketing allows you to go into the heart and minds of your customers. Here are some of the ways you can do that!

Take some of the biggest, most successful product/service-based companies in the world. We’re talking about companies such as Tesla, Apple, Nike, Amazon, and Starbucks. You’d think they don’t need to invest in relationship marketing anymore, but you’d be wrong. All of them, in fact, is highly customer-centric brands.

The love & respect for these brands is so high that if someone talks negatively about any of these, their customers get offended and defend their beloved brands.

What else can you wish for as a brand?

Again, it is not limited to just B2C brands; emotional bonding also affects B2B brands.

In B2B transactions, too, someone who visits your website watches your videos or downloads a white paper isn’t a business but an individual.

These individuals have feelings, so you can easily tap into their emotions and build a bond with them. It’s their emotions that will make them spend their money on your brand and not facts, stats, or logic.

Here are a few tips to formulate your relationship marketing strategy.

1. Be Real; Show Your Vulnerable Side

Tell your real struggle, and don’t just brag about your achievements. According to Adam Enfroy, you need to show your vulnerable side, so that people can relate their struggles with yours. Authentic stories that showcase your weaker side help you establish an instant emotional connection with your audience.

2. Build Trust

Deliver on your promise throughout the customer journey and build trust through positive reviews and testimonials on your website. The important thing is to ensure that these reviews and testimonials are authentic and verifiable. You should also bring your communities together to inspire and build trust.

3. Use Storytelling

Since humans are emotional creatures, storytelling has emerged as a powerful technique to establish emotional bonds. Tell them stories about your business that may include the following:

• Inside stories
• How you treat your employees
• Your mission and vision
• How your business was founded
• How you overcame the fierce challenges and failures

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You can also ask your audience to share their stories. Videos are the best content formats you can use to inspire trust and bring authenticity to your stories.

4. Personalize Your Communications

According to a University of Houston Victoria research paper, personalized interactions enhance the recipient’s experience. For example, you can try sending handwritten personal notes to your customers along with their orders. They will love it.

5. Keep Your Communications Consistent

Consistency leads to better customer experience, and excellent customer experience inspires confidence. So, keep your communications consistent across different locations and individuals. It would also help to keep it uniform across various advertisement campaigns and sales presentations.

6. Strive to Provide an Excellent Customer Experience

To give customers a fantastic experience, treat them exclusively. You can use CRM to craft custom messages and videos to make them feel valued. Address their queries and offer solutions to their problems. Ask them to provide their feedback and suggestions and inspire them to create user-generated content. It will help you boost your brand image. It’s a proven fact that excellent customer experience is the only factor that helps you make loyal customers.

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7. Offer Real Value

Successful businesses have a purpose-driven strategy and offer real value to their customers. This is the reason it’s tough to replace them in the marketplace. They don’t position themselves as product suppliers or sellers. Instead, they focus on adding value to their customers’ lives. For example, many cosmetic companies don’t perform testing on animals and people love them for it.

Here are some of the companies that offer cruelty-free products.

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It can be a cause, social responsibility, environment-friendly products, charity, or affordable products that people perceive as valuable.

Conclusion

Successful organizations try everything in their capacity to turn every customer into a long-term one. Long-term customers can ensure your success and growth and protect your brand against market fluctuations. With the help of an army of loyal customers, you can successfully decrease your marketing and advertising costs and scale your business.

Technology has impacted business activities in many ways, but the bottom line is still the same, and that is building, nurturing, and growing your customer relationships. Be mindful of how your customers feel regardless of the competitive advantage you may have over others.

With the relationship marketing strategies mentioned in this article, you can directly appeal to your customers’ emotions. Profitability keeps you in business, but if it becomes your ultimate objective, you may soon find yourself in deep trouble.

So, the best strategy for a business is to stand for a good cause and build a community of passionate supporters, who will likely turn into your brand advocates. Customer relationship is the most crucial element of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), so you should focus on relationship marketing to survive and grow in this highly-competitive, cut-throat environment.

Almost every organization is developing unique and engaging content these days, which is why there's a shallow entry barrier for content marketing. Though easy and cost-effective, most brands are unable to utilize it to the fullest to achieve their organizational objectives.

It happens partially because the bar is getting higher and higher every year. What worked yesterday may not be working today. High-quality and appealing content receives the lion's share of traffic and eyeballs, and the remaining brands end up fighting for a tiny amount of traffic.

According to a 2020 AHREFs study, around 90% of all content online receives almost zero traffic from Google. It might not sound very comforting for the startups, especially those not having sufficient cash to spend on content marketing.

This article discusses how to implement content marketing in the lowest budget to achieve the desired results.

Plan Your Content Marketing Campaign

When you begin implementing online marketing, you are confronted with multiple choices. Running PR and social media campaigns and creating podcasts and videos can be on top of your mind, but soon you may find it overwhelming. It can grow even more overwhelming when your budget is tiny.

According to a Microsoft study, people start losing attention after about 8 seconds, and it is falling further every year.

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Content is exponentially increasing in volume. So, to grab the user's attention, you need to be diligent and focus on quality and engagement.

The sheer number of online marketing channels used for your online marketing campaigns can be devastating as it decreases focus and leads to poor management.

In this competitive environment, you need to choose one or two channels and put in your best performance.

To compensate for the users' decreasing attention span and content visibility, you may run short-term campaigns like getting featured on prominent platforms, news sites, and channels.

For example, you can promote your products on Product Hunt or increase your visibility by getting featured in Hacker News.

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Find opportunities to speak in industry events. Create podcasts and share them on different platforms.

Through these action steps, you can increase your market understanding and create better opportunities to be in front of your target audience.

Here are the four tips to crack the content marketing code for startups.

1. Set Your Goals

Goal setting is a crucial step as it serves many purposes, such as communicating the business objectives to the team, tracking progress, and team management. It also helps provide direction and focus to the team and optimize team performance.

Your organizational goals keep your team motivated even after a setback.

Pro Tip: You will find your goals easy to achieve if you split them into smaller objectives and even smaller targets for better measurement.

Setting goals is essential to keep your eyes on the bigger picture and prevent your team members from feeling overwhelmed.

To create awareness and buzz around your brand, you can do the following:

• Organize an industry event for better networking and build industry relationships
• Organize PR activities
• Build a blog or set up a podcast channel to create awareness and drive traffic to your website

2. Define Your KPIs

With well-defined content KPIs, you can easily measure your performance. It would help if you had exact and specific targets to easily track your performance. Here are some of the content marketing KPIs you can follow:

• Unique Website Visitors
• Downloads
• Time (spent) on page
• Inbound Links
• Shares
• Comments and interactions
• Cost per Click (CPC)
• Cost per Lead (CPL)
• Number of Leads
• Annual Contract Value (ACV)
• Influence (Leads, opportunities, or closed deals)
• Conversion rates
• Followers and subscribers

You can have specific targets such as publishing 30 press releases by September or 10 keyword-oriented blog posts every month as pillar content on your website. You can also set marketing targets by hosting five meetings with micro-influencers every month.

3. Use Appropriate Messaging

Your marketing messaging is crucial to your startup's success as it helps you convey the value and benefit your product or services offer your target audience. You should carefully plan it as it's used everywhere, from social media posts to ad scripts and blog posts.

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Conveying the right message moves your prospects down the sales funnel, helping you convert your prospects into leads and paying customers. You can engage with your audience by discussing their pain points and how you can offer a unique and practical solution for the same.

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Pro Tip: Content marketing messaging should be educational and not salesy.

Pro Tip: Every time you create content, your audience anticipates a story from you. So, be a storyteller.

Your messaging should vary according to the stage of the user in the marketing funnel. The message for the first-time website visitor shouldn't be the same as you would like to flash in front of someone who is in the consideration phase and have already received a couple of drip emails.

4. Use Various Promotion Techniques

When you plan to implement online marketing, you are confronted with numerous choices. Running PR and social media campaigns and creating podcasts and videos can be on top of your mind, but soon you may find it daunting when you realize you have budget and time constraints.

Would you like to know the secret recipe of success in content marketing? Publishing more and more content is not a standard formula. On the flip side, it can be counterproductive. To drive maximum value and ROI, focus on generating fewer content pieces. What you can do instead is to repurpose and reuse this content into various other forms of content and take it to the audience by scheduling and rescheduling it on social media.

For example, we can create a webinar or a long tutorial video and split it into small videos and audio clips. You can reuse these small clips as social media posts or blog posts to turn them into rich media. People work hard on producing content, but once content is published, they gather dust on their website or YouTube channel.

The best content strategy for startups is to extract the maximum juice from your content by repurposing it into a blog post, pro tips, actionable insights, a slide deck presentation, an infographic, a picture message, a small video, a podcast, etc. This way, you will have enormous content to share on social media for a long time, eventually decreasing your content product cost and increasing your content marketing ROI.

So essentially, you can implement content marketing for startups without an astronomical budget if you know how to effectively reuse it.

The success rate in content marketing is relatively low because the bar is getting higher and higher. With 79% of the marketers using content marketing, the competition increases almost every day. People are no longer happy with regular content that adds little or no value. They want powerful yet compact content that adds value. Such content also increases engagement and ROI. Complacency can kill you even if there is no entry barrier in content marketing.

The big brands produce excellent content because they have the funds and resources to invest. It has raised the bar for midcap and smaller companies. Apart from that, millions of writers, marketers, and brands create free content because they want visibility.

How to Make Content Marketing Work for Your Startup?

Another major issue responsible for the deteriorating visibility of content is people's waning interest in branded content. So, unless your content resolves the reader's issues and addresses their pain points, they are unlikely to spend time reading your content. Here are a few things you can try to make content marketing work for your startup.

• Focus: Don’t work on multiple channels as it may overwhelm you and bring down your overall performance. Master just a few channels and put in all your efforts.
• Quality: Acquiring proficiency and producing quality content takes time. So, rather than focusing on the metrics, you should focus on the quality, especially in the initial phases. When quality becomes a habit, it becomes easier to produce content people love.
• Consistency: If you think the compounding effect is applicable only to finance, you might be wrong. Content marketing is also an excellent example of the compounding effect. As you start building your content repository, you start getting noticed by the search engines and attracting traffic through them. Gradually the traffic starts increasing exponentially. That is probably why the big brands term content marketing as miraculous.

But, simply because content marketing is so effective, you shouldn't deduce that producing more content is akin to achieving the best results. Holly Pels says that creating more content can be counterproductive as your cost shoots up and quality worsens.

Create Memorable Content

Startups use content marketing to produce their go-to marketing messages. But here's the catch. Lots and lots of companies are making similar content to get noticed. So, to differentiate your content from others, you need to create remarkable content. That's perhaps a significant reason why startups don't succeed in content marketing.

SEO and social clicks should lead to fan following and conversion. If it doesn't happen, your website fails in its ultimate objective ā€” brand building.

Writing is about crafting content that matches your audience's interest, resolves their problems, embodies your tone of voice, and creates a fan base. Uniqueness is the essence of successful content marketing.

Pro Tip: Create unique content and make it memorable. Creating poor quality or generic content equals creating no content at all. With the run-of-the-mill content, you won't succeed in content marketing.

Good content strengthens your brand and makes a product top of mind when your prospect decides to buy the products or services similar to yours.

Some famous brands share a slice of their office life, employee stories (workplace storytelling), and an inside look at company culture, which often generates curiosity. It also helps make the content go viral. It works both ways. When employees are encouraged to share their stories online, it builds an attractive and lovable work culture. On the flip side, your customers trust and respect your organization when they see that employees are valued, and the information comes directly from them.

Pro Tip: To automate employee advocacy programs, you can use an employee advocacy tool like EveryoneSocial.

Buffer's Open Blog and Vanguard's employee stories are great examples of how you can use employee stories to enhance branding.

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Adobe's workplace storytelling on the Adobe Blog and social media is also an excellent example of it.

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Content marketing is highly effective for startups, but you shouldn't expect immediate results for keyword rankings, links, or views. However, in the beginning, it will help you get market validation for different ideas.

In the later stages, you'll learn how to leverage different content pieces to attain your SEO, lead nurturing, and PR objectives. Startups have an advantage over established brands in terms of agility, so they should focus on building a community first. Later on, you can produce 10X content to beat your closest rival.

How to Do Content Marketing on a Small Budget?

Here are a few things you can try to implement content marketing for startups at a small budget.

• Create a YouTube channel
• Join or launch an industry podcast
• Seek speaking opportunities at industry events and conferences
• Host and record webinars and share them on social media
• Create branded content
• Leverage influencer marketing
• Join online communities
• Create industry reports, stats, manuals, and trends
• Exert your presence on ProductHunt
• List your products on AppSumo and eBay
• Share your blog posts and articles on LinkedIn Pulse and Medium
• Repurpose your content into different content formats
• Split large content pieces such as a long video or a blog post into small social media posts

Conclusion

Content marketing is the best strategy for building communities, conducting online marketing, increasing organic visibility, and generating and capturing demand. Still, many people don't succeed because they lack focus, commitment, and consistency.

The key to success is focusing on a limited number of channels and initiatives as soon they start getting overwhelming. Choose your initiatives according to the interests and preferences of your audience, so you can get immediate feedback and leads.

Choose the channels where your target audience spends most of their time. Try to master one channel before jumping on to the next. If you try to manage too many things simultaneously, even the best startup marketing campaigns will fail.

Continue tracking and measuring to explore what works best in your niche and repeat those activities with a fresh perspective.

Suppose you canā€™t afford quality content or have a problem finding excellent writers. In that case, you can avail DashClickā€™s white-labeled content services to deliver your clients beautiful and unique written content like clockwork. Itā€™s the best way to generate more organic traffic and leads.

Marketing automation platforms revolutionize the way that businesses and agencies handle their advertising.

With the assistance of these smart tools, professionals can unburden themselves of the countless manual tasks that are necessary for managing and optimizing campaigns. AI assistants automatically compile audience data, guide performance, and oversee advertising budgets.

However, why use a marketing automation platform if your traditional strategies are already working?

Below, we’ll dive into what a B2C marketing automation platform is, the benefits of using one, and help you determine if it’s the right choice for your organization.

What is a Marketing Automation Platform?

A marketing automation platform is a collection of software that automatically manages and processes manual everyday marketing tasks.

This can include:

• Lead & sales pipeline management
• Email & SMS messaging
• PPC campaign analytics & optimization
• PPC campaign budget management
• Website analytics & optimization
• Product/service upselling
• Directory listing syndication
• Social posting & promotions
• Measuring ROI for all marketing channels

The software acts as a virtual assistant that can automatically oversee all of these processes, leaving you and your teammates with the ability to focus on more involved tasks that require hands-on attention.

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With that said, a marketing automation platform does not give your organization the freedom to be complacent or uninvolved. Though these smart, automated tools may be able to rapidly handle certain tasks, you still need an experienced agent to help your efforts to ensure that the gathered data is utilized effectively.

Why Use a Marketing Automation Platform?

The benefits of using a marketing automation platform are powerful enough to make them a no-brainer for any company or agency.

1. Optimized Workflow

The first major benefit that we touched upon above briefly is that this smart software will help your team improve their workflow. Users can quickly visualize the entire process of lead management, from lead acquisition to closing the sale.

Then, you can set up your custom automation based upon your company's unique needs to rapidly complete monotonous tasks. This saves the organization a tremendous amount of time and frees the talent up to focus on tasks more deserving of their attention.

2. Improved Accuracy and Mitigation of Human Error

Equally important, these AI assistants will provide far more consistent and accurate work than is possible with human efforts. Even the most careful individuals make mistakes and one unchecked error can upset the overall workflow.

Marketing automation tools collect data and manage key processes almost instantaneously, leaving you with the cold, hard data you need to guide your future marketing decisions.

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3. Real-Time Analytics & Behavior Tracking

The minute you publish an ad, web page, or some other form of content online, your marketing automation software will immediately begin tracking performance. Without any additional effort, you can track:

• Impressions
• Page visits
• Traffic sources
• Session duration
• Keyword rankings
• Form submissions
• Intersite navigation
• Cost-per-action
• Cost-per-lead

These metrics simply scratch the surface of what is possible depending on the software you're using. You can not only monitor your performance but can quickly glance at competitor analytics to see how your efforts stack up in comparison.

4. Automatic Bidding & Budget Management

Finally, marketing automation is essential for staying competitive when it comes to paid search or paid social campaigns. You can utilize your platform to automatically set your budget minimum and maximum limits as well as your desired daily spending.

The software will then seek out opportunities to utilize your budget effectively when reviewing current bidding costs. It can even automatically allocate funds to higher-performing ads or landing pages when A/B tests multiple creatives at the same time.

This is a significant boon as it ensures that your organization maximizes its available ad spend. You can easily avoid getting caught up in fruitless bidding wars and focus your budget on ad sets that are delivering a worthwhile ROI.

Let's consider an example.

A PPC campaign manager creates their initial ad set and landing page for lead discovery. The minute these assets go live, their automation platform (i.e. Google Ads, Facebook Ads) automatically begins to capture performance data.

The campaign manager also sets a maximum daily and lifetime budget they wish to use for the campaign. Thus, the automation platform also automatically tracks and manages bids in real-time to help your better-performing ads gain more exposure. All of these things happen around the clock without any additional input from the campaign manager.

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With all of this additional time, your campaign managers can easily oversee several client accounts simultaneously. They can also utilize their extra time to prepare new ad sets, landing pages, or offers based upon the performance data they're receiving from the active campaign. They can be more proactive and make decisions with reliable data as opposed to testing with guesswork.

Determining Which B2B or B2C Marketing Automation Platform to Use

With how significantly marketing automation can improve your efficiency and customer experience, our answer is clear.

Your organization needs a marketing automation platform if it wants to remain competitive and grow in an evolving digital landscape.

However, not every platform is the right fit for every business. You'll need to ask the right questions to ensure that your team gains the right tools for your offerings.

1. What Are Your Business Goals?

Every business has unique objectives that they wish to achieve with their marketing. Clearly defining these goals and the process to get there will help you identify the tools you can leverage to improve your strategy.

If you wish to improve lead generation on your website, you'll want to focus on tools that can provide clear analytics and custom goal tracking.

If you're struggling with your sales pipeline workflow, you'll want to investigate lead and pipeline management tools that can automatically define deal stages and move your lead through the process accordingly.

Defining this is important as not all marketing automation platforms offer the tools you need. Some position themselves as a comprehensive package, while others are highly specialized to serve organizations in key areas.

2. How Can We Measure Our Performance?

As we highlighted above, you can instantly measure the performance of any marketing channel with the right software. In addition to defining your goals, think about which aspects of the process you need assistance with measuring.

This can vary whether you're focusing your efforts on social media, email marketing, paid ads, etc. Think about the specific types of metrics that are success indicators for the channel and seek out software that can help capture data and make the overall process more efficient.

3. How Does the New Platform Mesh with Our Existing Tools?

Finally, you need to perform an analysis of how these tools can augment existing strategies. To keep the transition simple, you may want to look for software that simply improves existing processes.

However, if your analysis determines that your existing strategies are inefficient, you may need to consider a major change. You'll need to perform a cost-benefit analysis of what it will take to not only upgrade to the new platform, but the time it will take to retrain all of your employees to effectively utilize new automation tools.

You may also need to incur additional costs depending upon the available subscription plans to that platform and the account limits for each tier. Smaller businesses can typically take advantage of low-cost plans due to their smaller client base, but growing organizations may need to make a substantial investment to gain plans that effectively suit their needs.

Marketing Automation Platforms Are Essential for Your Organization

Your organization must mobilize and find the right platform for its specific needs. If you're still relying on traditional marketing management methods, you're moving at a snail's pace while all of your competitors are lapping you in the race.

Because marketing automation platforms offer universal benefits and features to all types of industries, you must make one the center of your tech stack. It can make your workflow more efficient whether you're content with your current success or positioning yourself for future growth.

Aside from the initial cost to transition, there are little to no arguments to make against using a marketing automation platform. These tools are long proven to be reliable, accurate, and will allow your talent to perform more effectively than ever before.

Though every marketing channel has its struggles, perhaps no other medium deals with the same bed rep as social media.

It's unfortunate as these platforms are powerful digital marketing tools. When leveraged correctly, it can generate engagement and conversions like no other.

The issue is that many brands don't take social media seriously, skimp out on the talent/costs, and perpetuate common misconceptions of social media.

If you want to conquer social media in 2022, it's time to dispel these 20 social media myths from your marketing vocabulary.

Social Media Myth 1 - My Target Audience Isn't on Social Media

While this can be true in some niche cases, the probability is highly unlikely.

According to Statista, there were 3.6 billion social media users around the globe in 2020. They project the user count to reach just under 4 billion in 2022 while reaching upwards of 4.41 billion by 2025.

If you're unsure of what this means, know that nearly half the world's population now uses social media in some capacity.

There are several unique platforms for those users to find a home online. While apps like Instagram and TikTok largely appeal to Gen Z and millennials, Facebook boasts a fairly wide array of demographics. Meanwhile, LinkedIn secured its place as the social media app for professionals and is consistently used to great effect for B2B advertisers.

The TLDR - segments of your audience are most assuredly on social media.

Social Media Myth 2 - Social Media is a Young Person's Game

This is another misconception of social media you can quickly dispel with basic research.

According to a Pew Research study, a significant percentage of users between the ages of 18 and 64 utilize at least one social media site regularly. The results are as follows:

• 18-29 years - 84%
• 30-49 years - 80%
• 50-64 years - 64%
• 65+ - 40%

The only age demographic that shows a noticeable dropoff is the senior citizen range. This makes sense as older adults are less likely to adapt to technological changes. Nonetheless, 40% is nothing to scoff at when it comes to potential leads.

Furthermore, young people below the desired age for advertising are the ones growing up with social media. It wasn't long ago that our current 30-year-olds (Millenials) were considered the young ones. Now, they're prime targets for consumer purchases.

By investing your brand into social media now, you position yourself for better results as the expected social media usage continues to grow in the coming years.

Social Media Myth 3 - Social Media Marketing is Free

It's free to create an account and free to post, but the free ride effectively ends there.

If you want to get the most out of social media, you need to invest in them the same as you would any other marketing channel.

As a baseline, you'll want to appoint a dedicated social media marketing manager to oversee your accounts throughout the week. This will account for daily post creation as well as everyday user engagement. You wouldn't run paid ads without an account manager, so you shouldn't treat social media as set it and forget it.ā

Since we mentioned the feature, you'll want to take advantage of paid promotions on social media to boost your campaigns. You can choose to boost or promote individual posts on the platform or use the promotion to gain more clicks on your landing page or sales funnel offer.

Social media can be free, but you can't expect to get much out of it if you aren't willing to invest.

Social Media Myth 4 - Social Media is a Job for an Intern That I Can Undercompensate

We wish this were a joke, but this is how companies all too often treat their social media accounts.

It's a major misconception that anyone can run social media marketing. All of the talents should go to big earners like paid search, while up-and-comers without experience can manage social posting.

And yet, these same companies perpetuate the myth that social media is not a worthwhile marketing investment.

The reality is that social media is one of the most dynamic marketing channels available. Your content plans can change at a moment's notice depending upon breaking news or events relevant to your brand. Because social media is conversational, you need a rep actively managing engagements and making the right calls on how to approach your posting.

If you need proof of how easy it is to make mistakes, just look at these painful blunders from famous brands. It happens more than you'd think.

Rather than risking unnecessary damage to your brand online, take the time to interview and hire a dedicated social media marketing expert. Allow them the opportunity and resources to show you firsthand how much social media marketing can impact your bottom line.

Social Media Myth 5 - Social Media is All About Negativity

If you find yourself agreeing with this point, there's a good chance you've been on platforms like Twitter or Reddit personally. We won't argue that the negative vocal minority tends to be loud, but that's not all there is to see.

Users regularly post about the exceptional experiences they have with brands. It takes little effort to @ā  a company and talk about a positive thing that happened. By engaging with these types of mentions, you can reinforce the positive effects by showing that your company is aware, thoughtful, and concerned about public opinion.

Furthermore, running away from social media isn't going to protect you from online negativity. Countless platforms from Yelp to Google Reviews actively seek to provide users with a way to share their experiences with other users. If you ignore those platforms and negative reviews, then your reputation remains that way forever.

Instead, you can have your team actively engage with those talking about you positively or negatively. Showing kindness and patience to customers or prospects can often quell negativity and allow your brand image to come out as more positive on the other side.

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The trick is to not take these users for granted. They're aware that you're a brand, so you shouldn't pretend to be something else.

Social Media Myth 6 - Likewise, Any Negative Feedback is Just from the Haters

Not only is this false, but it's also a fairly juvenile attitude to have toward existing or would-be customers.

Your average social media user may not voice their frustrations gracefully, but that does not make their complaints less legitimate. This is not your personal social media account, it's for your company. You should be able to disassociate from difficult comments and aim to extract useful information from the interaction.

It's unlikely for dissenting voices to appear for no reason. It could indicate poor customer service, a product or service error, or shipping issues. If you simply ignore negative feedback, the relevant teams will never hear about it and your brand never gets the opportunity to improve.

Finally, publicly acknowledging negative feedback isn't easy, but it shows gracefulness. Users don't stay angry long, and if your company is willing to take its lumps, it leaves a window of opportunity to win customers back in the long run.

Social Media Myth 7 - I Can't Share or Promote Brand Content

While it's true that social media is more about the conversation, there are zero reasons for you to avoid posting brand-related content.

The error comes from making a social media account and exclusively posting about your products, services, or offers. Anyone that spends time online already sees more advertisements than they can handle. When you flood your timeline with self-promotion, it just becomes more noise that's easy to avoid.

You wouldn't shove a company brochure into a person's face without first making conversation, so why treat social media differently?

Make the effort to engage with your audience and meet them on their level. If the opportunity reveals itself, you can then share brand-related content in a way that feels natural and applies to the person or group's actual needs or desires.

It's been said already, but it bears repeating: social media requires active attention and proactivity to get real results. As long as you dedicate yourself to a platform, you'll be surprised at how much you can get out of it.

Social Media Myth 8 - I Need to Go All-In on Every Platform

Not only is this statement false, we actively discourage it.

The social media platforms you should use are highly dependent on the following factors:

• Company type: B2C or B2B
• Target audience demographics
• Your budget
• Talent/resources
• Company voice / values

For example, B2B businesses tend to prioritize sites like LinkedIn as it attracts more employed professionals. You would want to emphasize social outreach to those types of individuals to get the best ROI possible from your social media efforts.

Likewise, B2C businesses can't go wrong with posting or advertising on sites like Facebook or Instagram. These sites feature users typically between the ages of 25-50 who have a lot of purchasing power.

Sites like Twitter typically exemplify a more casual, laid-back tone. While more professionalā  companies can still find success there, you may want to avoid it if you do not want to represent your brand casually.

Finally, it would be wise to research the average CPC (cost-per-click) for each platform. Facebook consistently possesses the lowest CPC, making it the most accessible to a wide variety of small businesses. Meanwhile, a site like YouTube has a higher cost-per-view and will be more resource-intensive to get the most out of it.

Companies should invest their marketing resources wisely when it comes to social media. As always, actively monitor your analytics, test new creatives, and don't be afraid to abandon certain platforms if they're not right for your brand.

Social Media Myth 9 - A General, Once-a-Day Post is Enough

While the rules are different for each website, this point will always be a myth.

We touched on this point under Myth 7. If you go into the process of creating all of your week's posts at once and scheduling them, don't expect to get much engagement. Your timeline will look cold and calculated because it is cold and calculated. This is the opposite of the dynamic, conversational approach that social is known for.

You need to be aware of best posting practices for each social media site that you utilize. For sites like Facebook or Twitter, you can help boost engagement by posting several times per day. However, this is contingent upon the type of content you post and whether or not it's worth sharing.

In some cases, it is recommended to post once per day as is the rule for a site like LinkedIn. However, this means you'll want to put thought and creativity into your post to get enough mileage to make it worth your time.

You'll also want to monitor times for peak activity on your platform and post accordingly. For most sites, posting first thing in the morning is a mistake. Users are on their way or at work and your content will get lost throughout the day. Alternatively, posting during lunch hours or on the weekends gives you the best chance for further engagement.

Social Media Myth 10 - My Employees, Friends, and Family Should Like My Posts

If you can count on people to give you easy likes, your numbers go up. If your numbers go up, then it will attract even more engagement, right?

This is true in a broad sense, but this approach effectively never works. Algorithms are intelligent and will understand the source of engagement. Not only will this small number of clicks not make you more discoverable, but it will also make your analytics unclean. It will only get harder to determine the effectiveness of strategies.

It can also make it more difficult for your content to get discovered by new audiences. Because your posts are not getting an opportunity to be discovered organically, it can teach the algorithm to avoid showing your posts to new potential groups.

If you want to utilize social media marketing, then do it the honest way. If a post is a dud, learn from it with analytics and testing, and do better with the next one.

Social Media Myth 11 - I Must Use as Many Hashtags as Possible

Don't you love #marketingposts that are #cool, #clever, and #funny? #marketing #social

If you want to post correctly, and to avoid harming everyone's eyes, stop using hashtags for things other than their intended purpose.

A hashtag is a platform-wide tool that serves to qualify and categorize the thousands of posts that go out every minute. If a user searches for a specific hashtag, they can quickly locate content directly related to that hashtag.

So, when you flood your posts with unnecessary hashtags, you are actively making everyone else's user experience worse. Furthermore, using hashtags on nonsensical words or phrases provides no benefit and makes the post look messy and amateurish.

An alternative way to utilize hashtags is to help promote and solidify a campaign. One of the most famous and successful hashtag campaigns was Coca-Cola's #ShareACoke campaign. You can see countless more examples of superb hashtag use thanks to Adspresso here.

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Social Media Myth 12 - More Followers = Success

If you're experienced with other marketing channels, your gut should already tell you that this is false.

For example, if you boost your website visitor count from 100 to 1,000, but see no noticeable increase in conversion, would you consider that a success?

The analytics could potentially tell more, but this example seems to indicate that those new clicks were not from qualified visitors. The same premise applies when it comes to your social media following.

In other words:

• Company A has 1,000 followers and receives 500 purchases as a result
• Company B has 5,000 followers and receives 500 purchases as a result

Though Company B has a much higher follower count, company A has a significantly higher engagement and conversion rate. This means they're spending time engaging with highly-qualified individuals as opposed to audiences that will likely never convert.

When it comes to digital marketing, quality almost always wins out over quantity. Keep this in mind when preparing your social media marketing strategy.

Social Media Myth 13 - You Can't Measure Social Media Performance

For starters, every social media platform offers built-in analytics that can highlight:

• Views
• Impressions
• Cost-per-view
• Cost-per-impression
• Potential reach
• Growth rate
• Virality rate

This only scratches the surface. The analytics available to you increases exponentially when you begin to experiment with paid social.

You can then track any activity that happens off of social media by using platforms like Google Analytics. This tool allows you to set up custom goals so that you can easily identify every time a user navigates to your website or landing page from a social media website. You can further qualify your goals to see which of those new visitors then go on to make a purchase, subscribe, and so on.

Those that perpetuate the myth that you cannot measure social media performance typically do not have well-defined goals. Without understanding what you're there for, you'll be hard-pressed to know which metrics to view and what to do with them.

Revisit the drawing board and determine what your overall goal is with your social media accounts currently. There exists a wealth of marketing tools that make it simple to track social media activity and how many conversions you're earning as a result of your presence on that platform.

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Social Media Myth 14 - I Can Just Crosspost Everywhere to Keep it Simple

Social media cross-posting tools like Sprout Social, Loomly, and Hootsuite often lead people to this conclusion. However, doing so with every post ignores what we've learned so far in this article.

Every social media platform has a different audience and a different way you should approach engagement. While it's typically safe to post similarly on Facebook and Instagram, you would want a unique, better-optimized post for a site like LinkedIn.

When you write a single post to publish on 10 different platforms, you're not truly considering the audience on any of them. The more general and vague you are with your posting, the less likely you are to establish any sort of meaningful connections.

With that said, this isn't a diss on the aforementioned tools. There are times when it is appropriate to crosspost when it comes to important company updates that concern consumers. However, using these options to simply be lazy will come back to bite you when your social media marketing efforts amount to very little.

Social Media Myth 15 - I'll Start Getting Engagement in a Week or Two

If you work as a digital marketer, you're likely all too aware of the unrealistic expectations companies have when it comes to social media.

You create your account, optimize it, and start posting every day. The expectation is that this work will immediately be rewarded with likes, follows, and shares just within a couple of weeks.

Unless you're a legendary social media marketer in disguise, we can assure you that this is not going to happen. As with all forms of content marketing, it takes time to build up a repertoire of content worth following to see.

Many of your initial engagements typically won't come organically, either. Your social media manager will actively reach out to potential audiences or like-minded individuals in the industry. When you create natural, pleasant exchanges with established presences, you give your content a better opportunity to get shared and noticed.

None of this is possible without effort and time. Every brand puts their time into social media to get where they are, and you shouldn't expect yours to cut the line without exceptional effort.

Social Media Myth 16 - Social Media Only Works for B2C

While it's true that some platforms are preferred for B2C targeting, social media can be used in similar ways for B2B transactions.

Though you will tailor your content to speak to ranking professionals within companies, those same people are still active online. Furthermore, when you locate potential leads on sites like LinkedIn, you already have valuable data such as their company, position, and some insight as to how your products or services can help them.

Even if the individual you engage with is not your end target, they can be the gateway you need to bring your brand before a company. As you use social media to build a relationship with members of that company, you position yourself to be a strong contender for their business.

In short, social media marketing works quite similarly with B2B as it does with B2C. It's still all about connecting with the right individuals where they happen to spend time online. Social media can be one of the most effective marketing tools of all as B2B-focused platforms naturally qualify the types of individuals you want to connect with.

Social Media Myth 17 - I Can't Create Enough Content

Unique content creation can be tough if you're currently engaged with:

• Blogs
• Paid ads
• Landing pages
• Sales funnels

Adding several social media profiles to the mix can leave your content writers stumped as to what will make for ideal social media content today.

The truth is that not all of your marketing content needs to be unique 100% of the time. Creating high-quality content and utilizing it for one purpose should be considered a waste of resources.

Instead, revisit a high-performing blog or page and think of how you can repurpose that content for the social media format. Perhaps a new, hot blog contains some engagement metrics that make for a compelling infographic to share on Facebook. With a bit of love and elbow grease, you suddenly have excellent content for social media posting.

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Instead of thinking about how you can plan for more content, consider strategies to help your content teams synergize for the best possible ROI.

Social Media Myth 18 - New Trends Like TikTok, Reels, or Shorts are Just a Gimmick

Sometimes a hot new feature burns out as quickly as it's introduced. In other cases, like the aforementioned examples, those features are here to stay.

Even those who embrace social media can quickly find themselves falling back into the initial trap of believing a new tool is not for them or won't apply to their audience.

However, the brands that are finding the greatest success on social media are the ones who quickly embrace and adapt to new trends rather than ignore them. Remember, it's never about your personal bias, but about engaging with audiences in the way that they choose to speak on social media.

Embracing these types of silly, fun new trends can also provide a necessary burst of inspiration for your social media team.

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So, instead of writing yet another cold, text post, consider making a fun Instagram Reel that you can share with your followers. They will take notice and your metrics will thank you for it in time.

Social Media Myth 19 - Social Media Will Deliver Results to Anyone with the Right Strategy

Now that we've spent the entire article highlighting what you're doing wrong, it's time to acknowledge the reality.

Social media is not always the way to go for every brand. Even those who dedicate the time, energy, and resources can struggle to generate any worthwhile engagement.

While we do believe that with enough consistent effort, anyone can succeed, not everyone has the budget or ability to get there. It's in these times that your team will need to make the tough call and choose to devote those resources to marketing channels that provide a better ROI.

However, you shouldn't take this as a sign that social media does not work. Instead, consider postponing social activities indefinitely while you focus on growing your brand elsewhere. When your company is better positioned to approach social media once again, you may find your team in a new place with a refreshed mindset that can give them a leg up in the social media game.

Social Media Myth 20 - All of My Established Strategies Will Work Forever

No matter how well a strategy is working for you now, never rest on your laurels. Digital marketing, itself, is a dynamic industry that will never stop evolving.

Social media is an already dynamic channel that can make creating a reliable strategy for your brand even more tumultuous.

If you choose to be in social media marketing for the long haul, do your best to establish a short memory. Celebrate your victories quickly and be ready to embrace the newest trends and techniques as they come. The more agile you are, the faster you can adapt, and the further you can get ahead of the competition.

Start Doing Social Media Marketing Correctly

Now that we've successfully dispelled the most common misconceptions of social media, it's time to adjust your approach.

Social media marketing can not only be beneficial to your bottom line, it creates a great opportunity to establish fun relationships directly with your audience.

Social media is a place for all ages and will continue to grow even more commonplace in the years to come. Use your analytical tools to observe the latest patterns, investigate which platforms are better for your brand, and treat each of your accounts with the care they deserve.

Marketing analytics tools continue to change the way we advertise businesses.

Before digital marketing, brands and agencies were spending far more on their advertising campaigns in exchange for very little feedback. Smaller businesses with less budget to work with could not benefit from the additional exposure to help business growth.

With the advent of digital marketing tools and techniques, brands can now approach a level playing field. Even a small, local company can reliably drive business growth with the help of marketing analytics tools.

Here are four ways that analytics can help your business grow successfully.

1. Marketing Analytics Tools Improve Your ROI with Direct Feedback

Free-to-use platforms such as Google Analytics have effectively taken all of the guesswork out of digital advertising. Even paid ad platforms like Google Ads or Facebook Ads support all of your work with constant analytical feedback.

Whether you're choosing the right image for an ad, working on the perfect headline, or writing copy for your home page, marketing analytics tools can help you improve.

These digital advertising platforms allow you to keep track of vital metrics including page visits, bounce rate, average session duration, click-through rate, and much more. You can even leverage marketing heat maps to see where on the page users tend to look and which areas they're skipping.

Even when you are unable to precisely pinpoint an issue, your analytics will provide enough feedback to help you construct a better marketing product. You can and should A/B test several versions of an ad or website page to see which performs better with your target audience. You'll be able to actively study what visitors enjoy and what they don't want to see from your brand.

Provided that you actively monitor and engage with your analytics, improvements to your ROI are virtually assured. Even if your early campaigns do not boast huge sales numbers, the feedback you're purchasing is a sound investment in your business's future growth.

2. The Ability to Create Personalized Advertisements

One drawback to the accessibility of digital marketing is that audiences are inundated with advertisements daily. If you simply hit publish on a generic ad and landing page for your campaign, you shouldn't expect to see many conversions.

However, one of the many benefits of analytics tools is the ability to discern more vital information from your target audience. As you gather enough data, you can begin to segment your target audience into specific groups. This allows your company to create highly-personalized advertisements to increase your CTR and CVR.

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This is vital as each individual in your target audience is at a different stage of the buyer's journey. Some may be uneasy at the idea of spending cash and simply want to gather information. Meanwhile, others may be on the verge of checkout, but abandon the process for some undefined reason. You wouldn't approach these two individuals with the same sales tactics in real life, so your marketing should also reflect this.

With marketing analytics tools, you can create content to help consumers make smart purchasing decisions. You can meet undecided buyers at their level and send follow-up emails personalized with their name and email. Your company can also publish email marketing lists that are exclusive to recurring customers.

When the customer feels a personal connection with your brand, there's a far greater chance of achieving a conversion. The more conversions you obtain, the more data you have to drive future marketing decisions, which drive business growth to new levels.

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3. Marketing Analytics Make It Easier to Find New Leads

As a customer moves from the discovery stage to the buying stage, your brand can gather a wealth of information. When you obtain a satisfying number of customers, you'll have enough of a sample size to draw meaningful conclusions about your marketing as well as your customer interests.

With this analytical data, you can utilize digital marketing platforms to rapidly discover and connect with new leads. In the paid ads world, this is sometimes referred to as targeting lookalike audiences.ā

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These new potential leads share similar attributes to previous or existing customers. Because your marketing analytics already helped you curate an effective strategy, you can reuse similar techniques to reach new customers with little additional effort. Your previous investment is rewarded by allowing you to spend less on new customer acquisition.

Typically, it can cost as much as five times more to obtain new customers than it is to retain existing ones. However, your business cannot grow without expanding its customer base. By utilizing your marketing analytics tools, you can achieve this growth while keeping your expenses low.

4. Achieve Growth by Keeping Tabs on Competitors

Your analytics not only provide personal company insights but can help you see the latest activities from your closest competitors online. Your marketing analytics tools will help you with this in a variety of ways.

First, you can look at competitor websites that rank higher than yours for the same targeted keywords. This helps you focus your vision on the specific sites and web pages that are utilizing more effective copy, graphics, or techniques.

You can use this study to take note of what you can change or implement within your website or advertisements. Alternatively, you can rule out specific keyword targets that are victims of a bidding war and seek new routes for obtaining qualified traffic. Oftentimes, the strategy is not to simply burn your budget by outbidding the competition, but by capitalizing on unique angles that suit your business and differentiate you from other results.

Companies can also utilize their marketing analytics to see the exact number of clicks and average estimated ROI competitors are getting for the same keywords. This will assist in gaining a better understanding of marketing costs so that you can modify your strategy according to your budget.

As a final note, know that all of your competitors are already taking advantage of marketing analytics tools for these same reasons. You must adapt to new technologies and expand your knowledge if you want your brand to survive and remain competitive for the years to come.

Business Growth is Achievable for Any Brand with Marketing Analytics

The benefits of marketing analytical tools cannot be ignored. Not only are the insights imperative for creating effective ads, but they also make digital marketing far more cost-effective than any traditional advertising method.

With these marketing analytics tools, you never waste your budget simply for the hopes of potential exposure. The constant feedback loop will serve as your blueprint of what to do and what to avoid when creating your new web pages, paid ad campaigns, or even social media posts. Everything a visitor does or does not do is recorded for your observation.

However, while these digital marketing platforms do the heavy lifting of collecting the data, you still need to remain active. With a capable digital marketing manager at the helm, you can turn your investment in analytics into your key for dependable business growth.

If you're looking to breakthrough in the digital marketing world, you need a solid digital agency business plan.

There are no secret tricks, shortcuts, or techniques to help you accomplish this. It's going to require a team effort, hours of forethought, and an agile mindset to do it right. If you aren't prepared to get your hands dirty with research and cold, hard numbers, you should rethink your plans to start a business.

If that hasn't scared you away, then it's time to get to work. While we can't do the work for you, we can provide you with a marketing agency business plan template to follow. Take these broader strokesĀ and carefully consider how each category applies to you and your future team.

Step 1 - Define the Business

When creating your digital agency business plan, you need to ask the core questions. When it comes to the business itself, you should be considering:

• What is the business?
• Who is it for?
• Why does the business exist?
• Where will you market and sell your services?
• How will you make all of this happen?

When it comes to defining your new digital marketing agency, you want to focus on the who, what, and why of the matter.

Making money is not a sufficient reason as this is the primary purpose of all businesses. Making a profit is not enough of a motivator to guarantee that your agency will succeed.

The services offered by a business are also not what defines a business and what helps it succeed. There are thousands of digital marketing agencies available. In an industry where location is ultimately irrelevant, you need to offer your customers something more than paid ads, content, and SEO.

A digital marketing agency exists to solve the unique problems that businesses face when striving for growth and customer connection. Your primary business goal should be aligned to help your target audience solve the specific problems they face that may or may not be unique to other potential audiences.

To help gain a better understanding of what your new digital agency business is and why it exists, you’ll need to perform the following:

• Name the business
• Create a mission statement (why does the business exist and who are we helping)
• List your company’s defining values and motivators

With a better visualization of your company’s goals and values, you’ll then have a framework to start building. To achieve your vision, you’ll need to consider the individuals you’ll need to partner with and hire to make it all possible.

• Define the management hierarchy and their titles/responsibilities
• Company structure for future employees
• Expected salary/benefit structure for each employee hired

When it comes to your employees, you shouldn’t plan for just the initial hire. The talent you’ll want to acquire is already active in the industry and will be looking for competitive compensation packages that scale with their time invested.

You don’t want to start your new digital agency out with a high turnover rate, so you should plan out scaling compensation over years 1-3 using Paystub Hero. Not only will this give you an accurate view of your payroll expenses, but it will help you with the hiring and onboarding process.

Step 2 - Define the Customer

Like any business, your digital agency can't survive without a steady flow of new clients and customers. However, you'll benefit more from targeting a specific, ideal customer that happens to benefit most from your business specifically. The more refined your planned targeting is, the easier time you will have landing new sales when the time comes.

Thankfully, we already started this process by defining your digital agency’s reason for existing in step one. You should already have a specific audience in mind, whether this happens to be:

• Individual persons / self-employed individuals
• Small businesses
• Other marketing / SaaS companies
• Corporations

Your ideal client doesn't have to be confined to any of these suggested categories. However, you can already begin to understand how our business plan will change depending on whom we intend to primarily serve.

Not only should the company service platform be designed for that customer, but it will define our sales and marketing efforts in future steps.

Bonus - Define Who You DON'T Want as a Customer

A strong digital agency business plan will also benefit from defining those who will not benefit from your offerings.

Of course, you need not list the obvious. Your digital agency will provide little to no assistance to the average working consumer.

Instead, you need to eliminate audiences early that may be tangentially related to your offerings. For example, DashClicks exists to serve other digital marketing agencies, SaaS companies, hosts, coaches, and directories. While small businesses can benefit from digital marketing services, they are not our primary clientele based upon our decided business plan.

This allows us to better engineer our offerings package as well as our digital advertising and sales efforts. With a clear vision of our ideal customer, all of our business efforts trend in that direction. We avoid wasting time, effort, and expenses on leads that aren't truly aligned with what we have to provide.

Do the same with your business plan. Know who you want to do business with and whom you want to avoid.

Step 3 - Define the Services

While you've likely generated an idea of what your digital agency's services will look like, it's time to nail down definitions.

For this step of your marketing agency business plan, you’ll want to address the following:

• What are the core service offerings?
• What type of talent will you need to hire to sell these services?
• What will it cost for your company to provide these services?
• What can/should you charge for these services?
• When can your business expect to turn a profit?

Going through each potential service step-by-step should naturally help you curate your company's unique offerings. If your cost-benefit analysis determines that service will cost more than you can expect to earn, you may need to eliminate it from your platform. Alternatively, you can choose to postpone that offering for now and revisit the matter a year from now.

Each service your agency provides should be critical in helping your target client solve the problems they face in business. This may also help you realize services you need to include that you have not already considered.

You may choose to position your agency to specialize in specific services or to offer a comprehensive, complete package. Agencies around the globe find success with either strategy. As long as your services align with your company's mission statement and work to satisfy your desired client, you will be golden.

Step 4 - Defining the Sales Process

Thus far in our digital agency business plan, we have:

• Defined our new digital agency
• Identified our ideal customer
• Curated a cost-effective service platform that serves our audience

With these factors, we have nearly realized a legitimate digital marketing agency. We now need to consider how the team will approach selling the brand to audiences and acquiring new customers to reach our monetary goals.

For starters, your business plan should clearly define the strategies you intend to use to approach both new leads and established clients.

While it's true that each customer will have unique qualities, laying out a defined approach or pitch will provide a higher success rate and help employees stick to the company vision.

Because not all new leads typically buy right out of the gate, you'll also want to lay out your strategy for nurturing prospects.

Remember, you're not writing out a guarantee nor is your suggested process set in stone. Nevertheless, you'll need a proof of concept regarding how you intend to obtain new clients if you want to sell your digital agency to others.

Something that can help you define your sales approach is conducting a detailed competitor analysis.

Scout out other digital agencies that will be your direct competitors and determine what strategies they use to attract and secure new clients. Find ways to incorporate tried-and-true techniques into your plan, but do so in a way that adheres to your vision.

Clearly Define Your 1-, 2-, and 3-Year Sales Goals

With your sales strategy defined, you'll now want to create a predictive sales forecast for your digital agency. Every new business is unique, so you'll want to work together with your partners to create realistically achievable sales goals for years 1-3.

It's expected and virtually a guarantee that profits will be low during startup. That's why it's important to project sales growth over time with supporting data.

When outlining your business plan, you should be able to estimate target sales revenue goals as well as a profit margin that slowly increases with time. You must be able to prove to yourself and investors that your brand will be able to operate, market, and sell services in a way that spawns steady, predictable business growth.

Step 5 - Your Marketing Plan

Another major business expense will be your digital agency marketing efforts. Every business has an expected cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and you'll want to define yours now.

You’ll get a better idea of how much it costs to market your brand once you decide which channels you aim to utilize. Because you’re in the digital marketing business, you should be aware of your available options:

• Paid ads
• Paid search
• Organic search (SEO)
• Social media
• Content marketing
• Email

However, you may want to consider additional forms of advertising including print advertising. You may also wish to create your Affiliate marketing program, providing incentives to existing clients in exchange for marketing assistance.

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The marketing section of your business plan should not only include a cost-benefit analysis but should fully detail anticipated strategies for each channel. Not only will this serve as your proof of concept, but will serve as the instructional guidelines your employees need to execute and achieve your marketing goals.

Step 6 - Financial Analysis and Summary

Throughout our entire digital agency business plan, we've set out to define our business, our services, our customers, our sales strategy, and our marketing approach.

With all of this accumulated data, we can create a full-fledged financial analysis of:

• Cost to startup
• Cost to operate
• Payroll
• Equipment
• Programs/Services
• Office expenses
• Taxes
• Cost to acquire new customers
• Cost to retain existing customers

All of this data can help us determine the digital agency’s expected yearly gross revenue, and, therefore, the expected gross and net profit. As briefly mentioned before, you’ll want to set numerous short-term and long-term goals for each category.

Consider setting goals for expected customer acquisitions and revenue for each quarter and each year. This will help to guide business behavior and alert you to potential problems with your business plan if you fail to achieve said goals. Failure to reach expectations can either be an indication of internal issues or that your set goals are unrealistic with the existing market.

Either way, you'll be able to make smart, data-driven changes as long as you have goals that allow you to respond quickly.

Your Business Plan Can and Will Change!

The final thing you should take away from this digital agency business plan template is that none of your writing should be fixed. A rigid, inflexible mindset is almost guaranteed to spell a quick doom for your new startup.

Your desired audience may not be your best choice. Your service package may require changes to net more revenue. Your overall business goals may change as you acquire more experience with new partners, employees, and clients. Even uncontrollable global or economic factors can suddenly shift the way you do business forever.

What makes a successful business is not nailing it on the first try. Rather, it's the ability to intelligently plan for the future, anticipate problems, and remain proactive to changing landscapes as opposed to being reactive. Regardless of what happens, your company should always fall back to its core values and remember that its objective is to serve others and help them solve their issues.