How to Make Digital Marketing Effective at Each Stage of Business Growth
As a business owner, especially of a small or medium-sized business, choosing digital marketing services to advertise your products and drive sales or increase brand awareness is absolutely the right decision.
Beyond that, understanding the role of marketing at each stage of business growth is essential. A specific marketing plan with suitable KPIs for each stage helps you market effectively with a reasonable budget.
The brand, product and service launch stage
At this stage, your products or services are completely new to the market and not yet widely known to customers. Your goal is to get more and more people to know about them. With that goal established, marketing's task is to build an online marketing plan with a clear direction, including:
Analyze the product's weaknesses and strengths and create the main communication message
Identify potential customer groups
Choose suitable advertising channels and a separate strategy for each.
Step 1: Analyze the product's weaknesses and strengths
First, the marketing team needs to research the market and competitors to answer these questions:
Strengths
What can the business do better than its competitors?
What are considered advantages of the business's products or services in the market?
What factors help the business sell its products or services?
Weaknesses
What can the business improve?
What should the business avoid?
What factors could cause lost revenue?
With this information, the marketing team will know which strengths to focus on in advertising, how to plan content and how to address existing weaknesses.
Step 2: Identify potential customer groups
Based on market size and the number of products or services being sold, the marketing team can identify target customer groups using factors such as:
Age
Gender
Current location
Interests
Behavior
...
There should be 3–5 target customer groups, including 1–2 main groups. These main groups are defined by the factors that most closely match potential customers. Most of the marketing budget will go toward advertising to them, while the remaining groups will be prioritized later.
Step 3: choose suitable advertising channels and a separate strategy for each
Your industry, sales platforms and advertising budget influence the choice of communication channels for your products or services. In the example below, for retailers of consumer goods, household goods, cosmetics, fashion and so on that already have sales platforms such as a website, Facebook Page or Zalo Shop, the channels suited to each stage of purchase conversion are shown in the image below.
Small and medium-sized businesses, or businesses that want to start digital marketing with a small budget, can choose Facebook and Google, the two communication channels with the largest user bases today. Both also have optimized ad management systems to deliver the best marketing results for businesses.
Once you have identified suitable communication channels and the role of each, develop an appropriate advertising strategy for each channel by:
Choosing suitable ad formats and an implementation schedule. For example, if your Facebook Page is new and has few likes, running Page like ads is advisable to reach target customers and increase the number of users who like and take an interest in the products on the Page.
Allocating the investment budget and setting KPIs for each channel over the next 3 months.
Creating smaller messages based on the main message to suit the ad formats on each channel.
To sum up Stage 1, to advertise products effectively to potential customers, the marketing team needs to complete its main task: create a digital marketing plan with a clear direction that can be implemented quickly.
The stage of increasing brand, product and service awareness
After introducing products and services to customers, the next step for the marketing team is to analyze and optimize the advertising channels already in use to keep expanding their market presence effectively. This means removing ineffective channels to avoid wasting budget and focusing only on those delivering promising results.
Channel performance analysis needs to be based on the following:
Data reports: initial KPIs and actual figures for each channel
Creative reports: including topics, quantity, post content and banner messages.
Reports on the business's products or services: product quality, pricing, delivery and returns, customer service and more.
Once there is enough data to analyze, the next step is to answer these questions:
Which channels and ad formats are effective, and which are not?
Which topics, content, messages and banners attract the most customer engagement?
Among the potential customer groups identified, which has the best engagement results?
Which channels, ad formats and content were expected to perform well but did not?
What have customers complained about?
What caused the issues above?
Answering these questions helps the marketing team understand whether the current advertising plan is effective and what needs further optimization. They can then adjust the plan to meet KPIs with the best possible budget.
However, not every business can recruit an experienced marketing team. In that case, using a digital marketing agency offers many benefits in terms of costs and personnel management.
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