Online Marketing Strategies for New Jersey based Businesses

Online marketing in New Jersey is no different from other states.

Except when it is. New Jerseyans are a special type of people--they’re FUN, TOUGH, INTELLIGENT, and REAL—and that’s how they like their online marketing.

Here are four online marketing strategies created with New Jersey small businesses in mind—but they might work equally well in other states, too—especially if you have feisty people there!

1. Spread FUN through Social Media

Some of the most powerful advertising appeals are fun, pleasure, joy, and happiness. The best place to harness these emotions is social media. While many small business owners think Social Media Marketing is expensive, you don’t need thousands of dollars to make your content go viral on social media.

Spreading fun, humor, and other positive emotions on social media engage your audience and greatly expands the reach of your organic posts and paid ads.You do it by generating excitement.

You need a gimmick!

For example, Wix launched a viral Facebook video campaign before the Super Bowl, creating excitement using a block of ice with a football frozen inside it.

The company announced that each time the ice-block melted and the ball fell, it would give away $10,000 to a lucky participant.

Users were asked to change their profile pic to a photo of one of Wix’s campaign characters to enter the lucky draw.

To further boost engagement, fans were asked to comment on the post to start hot air blowers or a fire torch to melt the ice faster. Each time a user commented, Facebook would send a story to their friends’ news feeds, expanding the post’s reach.

More recently, Wix ran the following Facebook campaign for Halloween.

Everyone likes to hear a spooky story. I mean, look at the number of comments on the post. These are 1.3K news feed stories for which the brand paid virtually nothing!

Key Takeaways:

• Use inexpensive video ideas to create engaging Facebook videos.
• Capitalize on public occasions and events by sharing interactive posts.

2. Create a TOUGH Brand For Your Local Business

Your brand management team like to think their brands have the attributes they have created. But your customers don’t always think what you want them to think.

Customers build own perception through experiences they have with your brand. So, if you say in advertising that you are very responsive, and your telesales people take two days to call back, your customer is going to think sluggish, not responsive.

Brands can make promises and claims, but it takes more than advertising to fulfill those promises. Only trained and motivated employees can deliver pleasant customer experiences, and only through multiple such experiences, you can build a strong and robust brand.

Your current and potential customers experience your brand through numerous online and offline interactions. The points where these interactions take place are called customer touch-points.

Some of the common touch-points can include your website, social media pages, online reviews, phone calls or visits to your office or store, and all other places where people come across your brand.

To create a tough brand that walks the talk, you should identify and optimize as many customer touch-points as you can (some of them will be beyond your control, like a bad customer review).

However, optimizing touch points is not possible without human involvement. It’s your people participating in back-office and front-office processes to create and deliver value to the consumer.

That’s why there’s no great brand you can name that doesn’t have an elaborate employee training and engagement program.

Amazon, which has more than 245,000 employees worldwide, offers an intense one-month training and leadership program before hiring people.

“But, Amazon is huge! We just have 200 people”.

Alright, how about Bonobos, a 155-people company that trains all employees to better understand the customer experience through its “Know Your Customer” program? They offer three other training modules that focus on performance management, interpersonal relationships, and management skills.

Key Takeaways:

• Train and engage your employees to deliver great customer experiences.
• Identify and optimize all customer touch-points by streamlining all back-office and front-office processes.

3. Build an INTELLIGENT Sales Funnel

A sale funnel is a journey that a customer takes. They start at point A, when the potential customer first discovers your brand, to point Z, when you get money from them.

It’s called a funnel because it’s wider at one end. That end is where you acquire your business leads. Your PPC ads or organic search results are examples of points located on the rim of the funnel.

In the next phase, you nurture the leads using techniques such as email marketing, SMS, or retargeting. These are called MoFuor middle-of-funnel strategies.

Finally, the customer is convinced your product is worth a trial,and you make the last part of their journey easy by killing the pain points—perhaps by offering live chat or using a smooth checkout sequence—what they call the BoFu strategies.

To build an intuitive sales funnel, you need marketing smarts and expertise (and the technology, of course). More than anything, however, you need a deep understanding of your customers. Know them so well that you and your marketing team start thinking like them.

Survey your market. Distribute questionnaires, hold focus group interviews, or collect customer feedback and insights using online tools like Qualaroo or Survey Monkey.

Create your “ideal customer persona.” It’s a simple description of who your customers are, what they think, and how they are likely to behave when they need to buy your product.

From there on, designing your sales funnel is a matter of intelligence, and New Jerseyans have plenty of it. Imagine that you are your customer and answer questions like:

• Which digital channels would you be most likely to use?
• Where would you search if you needed a product like yours?
• What would you do after you discover your brand (as a customer)?
• What information will you require?
• What would you need next? Where would you go after that?
• And most importantly, what would you think and need at each stage?

After you know the different points in your customer’s journey, you can plot them in the shape of a virtual funnel and decide how you are going to make the customer transition from one stage to the next.

You can ease the customer’s journey with the help of “digital assets” such as your website, social media pages, landing pages, emails, blog posts, online videos, product pages, and so on.

Together, these assets and their arrangement constitute your sales funnel, which, once built, can keep driving sales revenue even when you’re closed or asleep.

Key Takeaways:

• Discover your customer’s journey by conducting market research.
• Create the digital assets to help them move from one stage to the next.

4. Keep it REAL and Outsource Online Marketing

In New Jersey, we don’t pump our own gas! An attendant saves us the trouble of getting out of the car in bad weather, and we can make those cell calls we couldn’t while driving.

Likewise, an online marketing agency can save you the headache of creating and managing your online marketing strategy.

According to a survey conducted by Smart Insights, more than 90% of businesses think there’s a skill gap in their digital marketing departments.

Outsourcing to a professional agency makes sure that your brand is well-represented across all online marketing channels.

For example, your in-house team might not have video production skills, and a competitor might take advantage of this weakness.

Or you might find that your people don’t have the expertise to use digital marketing software such as keyword research or social media management tools. Such limitations will leave holes in your online marketing strategy.

Also,managing your online marketing in-house distracts you from your REAL business. You might feel you’re saving money, but you’re not accounting for the opportunity cost—the opportunity that you miss by NOT focusing on your business.

According to research, companies outsourcing services can save about 60% on operational costs.

In the case of online marketing, you save money because you don’t have to pay salaries, training costs, and technology costs. Instead, you pay a fee or retainer to the agency, which is just a fraction of the cost of in-house services.

So, if you’re working too hard to develop and deploy your online marketing strategies yourself, maybe you should work smart!

Maybe it’s time to call a competent and proven digital marketing company in New Jersey and set up a consultation.

Key Takeaways:

• Outsource online marketing to a professional agency.
• Focus on growing your core business.

Conclusion

We just discussed four online marketing strategies that are a natural fit for the typical New Jerseyan’s psychographic profile. Of course, there are many more strategies that you can adopt. But, regardless of your strategy and goals, working with an online marketing expert maximizes the chances as well as the scale of your success.

Would you agree? Let us know in your comments and don’t forget to share this post with your friends and associates.

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