49: Digital Marketing Strategies with Kendra Ramirez

My Guest: Kendra Ramirez

Kendra Ramirez is globally recognized as the face on the home page of LinkedIn.com, a John Barrett Entrepreneur Vision Award recipient, AMA Marketing Legend and a finalist for the Social Media Innovator of the Year. Since 2005, she has helped hundreds of organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, leverage digital technologies. Kendra has spent more than 15 years in technology companies as a change agent in sales, marketing and recruiting leadership for B2B customers.

 

The Advice:

 

 

1. Read The E-Myth. You will wish you had read it sooner!
2. Don’t be put off by people who tell you it won’t work. If you believe in it and have a good reason why it should work, go for it and surprise everyone else!

Most people are aware of the sales funnel where you get attention and try and convert that attention into sales. But for real business success, you need to have a sales pyramid as well. A sales pyramid is the process of converting existing sales into more sales, creating a self-sustaining sales cycle. This happens when your existing customers either come back to buy more, or they love you so much that they refer other customers to you. Without a sales pyramid, you have to continually invest more and more time and money into getting new customers which can exhaust both your energy and your business resources.

The only products or services that you offer when you want to scale are those that you can produce in bulk. There are many products or services that you could provide if customers request them, but they involve more effort and cost you more money and you can’t easily scale them. These are the products or services to bail out of and simply not provide at all.

Digital marketing strategy means having a goal of what you want your digital marketing to do for you, and then creating a plan of how you will reach that goal. There are five steps to creating a digital marketing strategy:

The first step of creating a digital strategy is assessing the following three areas:

1. Digital Assessment: Look through your digital assets such as your website, social channel and your web presence (what shows up when you search for yourself on Google) to see what needs cleaning up. For example, maybe your branding is not consistent across all digital assets or it is not clear what you provide.
2. Competitive Assessment: Look through the digital assets of three to five competitors looking at metrics such as the platforms they are using, the frequency of their content, how much engagement they are getting and any special products/ services that they are offering.
3. Client Opinions: Ask a few clients or trusted contacts to give you their opinions such as their initial emotion when they look at the home page, or their initial impression of what your main offering is.

Now that you know where you are standing and what your strengths and weaknesses are, you need to set your goals. Goal setting can be broken down into four steps:

1. Set a general area to focus on, for example, do you want to focus on lead generation, recruitment marketing, reputation management or brand awareness.
2. Decide on key metrics i.e. what data gives you detailed information and understanding in the area that you want to work on.
3. Take a baseline of all key metric data to see where you are currently holding.
4. Using the key metric data and your current position, decide on a goal of what you want your future positioning to be.

Next you need to build a campaign to help you reach that goal. To successfully build a campaign, you need to layout all the content and plan in advance exactly how it will run. This includes:

1. The tone of the content.
2. The types on content- blogging, guest blogging, ads, e-newsletters etc.
3. The brand archetype.
4. Frequency of posts
5. Channels
6. Who will own the content? Will it be owned internally or will there be a partner ghosting for you?

You then need to map out all the content over a 30 day period (a content calendar can help).

You are ready to launch the campaign and then straight away dig into analytics.

Once you have a working campaign, keep in mind that things keep shifting. You especially need to keep an eye out for what competitors are doing and for new innovations in the industry.

To avoid complacency and to keep yourself up to date, have a monthly meeting in which you take a 30 day look back to see what worked and what didn’t, and then 30 and 60 day forward planning, pointing out things to be aware of going forward.

For Kendra, 2018 was an intense year devoted to scaling her business. In order to do this, she needed to take a close look at every step of her systems and processes to find efficiencies that could be brought in to her processes and also find gaps that she was missing that would stop her from scaling. However, this posed a problem for Kendra since she is creative and idea focused, not process and detail orientated. How could Kendra scale her business by improving her business processes given her personality and nature?

Kendra found exactly what she was looking for in the form of a database system. Kendra had been using Trello as her database software before she discovered ClickUp. She made the switch and has been incredibly grateful that she did! With the new system she can now link items to tasks so that the database itself changes the project workflow and timeline in line with when tasks are completed, in effect removing bottlenecks and creating automatic efficiencies.

Live, learn and pass it on.

Resources and Links:

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