Digital Acquisition Guide 2024 - part 2 - digital sales and marketing for real estate, dental, clinics and education centre, financial consultants.

With the increasing debate on whether businesses should reduce ads and prioritise content markeing more in 2024..I want to shed some light on this... from a Digital Acquisition viewpoint - not just pure marketing or pure sales - because ultimately it's all about the customers' journey... 

It's not just about posting content, or using ads. 

All these efforts should be a match to... what's the customer journey for this product/service of my business?

photo credit: Voxco

And if we only focus on 1 or 2 or many, without first understanding the customers' journey, we're basically just chasing shining objects/ latest trends to no end..throwing all our balls up expecting we'd juggle them all well. And worse, not achieving our desired goals - increased revenue and sales, while also creating a wonderful customer experience for our customers to create a thriving business.

photo credit: google

Before investing further to any content, ads or chasing new trends again or jumping onto new platforms - first, understand and identify the customer journey - if you want to be the most effective to manage and optimise your marketing and customer acquisition. 

It's not about the quality but quantity - how to make the most out of each step - create the most wonderful experience and value for customers.

Which is also why there's a new saying now - it's not the cheapest that win, but the one with the most value creation - my question to us is, how are we creating the most value, stacking them up to make it stupid not to say "yes" to our offer? 

With this deep understanding, this does not only help to simplify the system and process for your business, as soon as you can systemise it and automate it, you're also reducing you and your team's workload to be able to focus on delivering and fulfilling brilliantly. 

photo credits to B Squared Media

Once we're able to identify customer's journey from awareness to consideration to close to loyalty and advocate, 

we know exactly what are the questions customers would be asking and information that they would need to progress to the next stage until they're ready to purchase. 

However, this is often not in place. Which is evident through how 80% of businesses are posting - product features and throwing promotions. While these may be good- only for prospects at certain level of warm intention, but businesses need to anticipate that 80% of prospects or their audiences are just not ready to be yet - for multiple reasons like..

1. Problem unaware

2. Solutions unaware

3. Brands unawareThus using different elements like educating, inspiring and entertaining help to increase the values in the content that businesses are pushing out. It's simply to help prospects move to the next stage easier... But if content is always at the stage where it seems like the prospect is ready to buy or just need to decide which brand they would pay for... businesses are only losing opportunities. Which is why creating value on different touchpoints at different customer journey stages throughout platforms are important so as not to stop the engagement... what we want is to stack.. more and more until we create a lifelong relationship with prospects until they become our customers and then hopefully our advocates

TLDR: 

1. Research and understand our customer's unique buying process and how they buy - craft our customer's journey 

2. use this new insights to craft out content and ads strategies - how to use these to get more traffics into our platforms or list and nurture

3. by providing values that would help prospects make better decision, increase their trust towards us 

4. systemise and increase these touchpoints - stack across different platforms where these ideal prospects/target would be at 

5. use ads to increase touchpoints/ top of mind / visibility

6. focus on giving values - instead of just "me me me" - about your products/ etc. but more focused on speaking to their pain points, desires, aspiration and how the product would be their desired solutions. 

7. Position as expert - and earn it - be the subject matter expert - know your subjects well enough and know your prospects well enough too. 

Hope the above points help! Let's have an amazing 2024! and can't wait to see more specialists, consultants excel and serve more with their impact and create a win-win-win for everyone :) 

If you're in the dental, real estate, insurance, healthcare/aesthetic clinics businesses, specialist etc and need more insights, feel free to drop me a DM and I'll tend to your queries whenever I can.