This is a concept that I’ve been implementing more and more into my businesses (and client’s businesses) over the last year or so, and it’s proven extremely beneficial.
In future videos, we’ll breakdown each pillar further to explain it more in depth, so keep an eye out for those. However, to get started, we’re just going to give you an overview.
What we’re doing is breaking down your online marketing into 3 pillars and then attacking each one of those pillars individually and at different times, because in your business, your customers, or potential customers will fall into one of these pillars.
The first pillar is to, market to client’s you already have.
The second, is the market to those you’ve never sold to and don’t know who you are.
In the third is to market to those who know you but had never purchased from you.
Obviously, if you’re a brand-new business and you have never had customers than you would attack the second pillar first.
So, let’s assume that we’re talking about an existing business right now.
Pillar #1 – Market to Clients You Already Have
The majority of businesses that we deal with tend to skip the first pillar altogether. Or if they ARE marketing to these people, then they tend to only market to them only once or twice.
Typically, we would do this with email marketing. You can market different things such as promotions, seasonal campaigns, new events that you have coming up, new products or services, or even asking for reviews, testimonials, or even referrals.
Pillar #2 – Market to Those You’ve Never Sold to and Don’t Know Who You Are
This is where people tend to spend the most time and money. But they seem to forget the other two pillars.
Now, free advertising tends to be very slow and can take a long time before it starts to show you results. However, we want to make sure that we take advantage of it as over the long run, it can be a very profitable area for your business.
Free advertising can be as simple as completing and optimizing a Google Business listing, a Yelp profile, putting your business on Angie’s List or scouring Facebook groups and connecting with people who may be looking for a service or product that you offer.
Now, the paid advertising piece deals with Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing and can include Google Adwords, Facebook paid advertising, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Bing and others. This is the quickest way to get new customers for your business… but will always be the most expensive.
And, you can probably see right now why people spend most of their time on this pillar as it typically brings in the most business.
Pillar #3 – Market to Those Who Know You But Have Never Purchased
These can be people who you’ve given estimates/quotes to before, people who have visited your website, potential clients who saw you at a trade show, etc.
This is where things like retargeting/remarketing are introduced. Now, don’t get stuck on the terminology as I said that I was trying to keep this simple.
But I’m sure you’ve seen retargeting being done on you before.
This is an ad for a website that I was on earlier today.
To show you how this works, simply go to Amazon.com and look at any product by clicking on that product and going to the individual product page. Spend 30 seconds on that page looking around.
Now, over the next few days (if you happened to be cruising around online), you will more than likely see ads for that product that you looked at. For example, if you go to CNN.com and click on a news story, you will probably see those ads.
How do they do this? Well, when you were looking on that product page, they put a pixel on your computer. Now, don’t worry, it’s just letting them know that you saw this particular product.
When you later visit a website with those advertising platforms, they see that pixel on your computer and it lets them know what types of ads to show you.
I know a lot of people get weirded out by this, but wouldn’t you rather see advertisements for products that you’re interested in, rather than for baby strollers (and you don’t even have a baby)?
So that’s called retargeting/remarketing and you can market to potential customers using this pillar in many ways including: Google Display Ads, emails, abandoned carts, Facebook likes/followers, and more. But we will dig into these in the following videos.
So, those are what we call our 3 Pillars of online marketing. Stay tuned and we’ll be releasing a breakdown of these 3 pillars and how to best use them to your advantage.
See you soon.
-Mike