Digital Marketing Masterclass with Marcus HoJune 1, 2018Feature Ashfaqul Haque
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With 10 years of experience in Digital and Social Media Marketing, Marcus Ho is a seasoned entrepreneur and proven expert in the industry. He is the author of two bestseller books on Digital and Social Media Marketing called Social Payoff & Secret to Facebook Marketing. As the Director of Digimetric- a Digital Marketing Agency based in Singapore, he also manages several global brands like Qatar Airways, 3M, and Fuji Xerox.
In a two-day long workshop with the startups of GPAccelerator Batch 5, Marcus Ho shared his insights on the most important aspects of Digital and Social Media Marketing. The participating teams had the hands-on exercise of designing and running their own campaigns on social media platforms. To convert potential customers into paying ones, Marcus urged the startups to focus on benefits instead of features while running their campaigns.
Creating a Buyer’s Avatar:
The workshop started off with Marcus asking all the teams to create Buyer’s Avatar- A proprietary method to get into the minds of ideal customers, and how to reach out to them in the most effective way. Creating a detailed customer persona allowed the startups to put themselves in the shoe of their customers, figure out their pain point and recognize the key traits. To understand their customers better, the startups broke down the mindset into four parts:
Frustration: The problem the customers encounter.
What They Hear: Things the customers hear from their peers.
What They See: Things the customers see around them.
Goals: How you can solve the problem with the customers’ insights you have.
It is also very essential to categorize the audience as it helps the startups to identify the right niche to serve. But that’s not enough. There still remain a couple of other things to consider as well. Throughout the workshop, Marcus guided the startups to adopt different strategies to provide the right offer to the right people in the following manner:
Understanding the Audience:
Unaware: Customers who are unaware of the problem they are facing.
Problem-Aware: Customers who identified the problem but do not have a solution for it.
Solution-Aware: Customers who figured out a solution to their problem but do not have access to it.
Offer-Aware: Customers who are both aware of their problem and already have a solution for it.
Customer Value Proposition (CVP):
Customer Value Proposition is a compelling statement that outlines the reasons why a potential customer should buy a product. With a powerful headline, it communicates the value the customers will receive and convinces them to push the buy-button.
Minimum Viable Offer (MVO):
Before start selling, it is essential for startups to establish a Minimum Viable Offer (MVO). In simple, Minimum Viable Offer is the least amount of benefit necessary to make an actual sale. It allows the startups to market its prototype version of the product and collect feedback from the customers. Often times, it involves providing discounts and a free trial to potential customers and converting them into regular ones.
Landing Page:
Creating a Landing Page is a very effective and tested way to generate traffic and leads to the website. A Landing Page is a standalone page designed to convert the visitors into leads. The secret recipe to convert visitors into successful leads is to give them a Digital Gift. The visitors can claim their Digital Gifts such as free samples, limited trial, and discount coupon after providing their name and email address. The provided information can later be used to communicate with the potential customers. On an average, the conversion rate for websites through sign-ups is 1-2% whereas Landing Pages conversion rate is 8 to 10 times more. Marcus highlighted on 7 key points to create high converting landing pages
7 Point checklist for creating Landing Pages:
1. Attention Flow: All the elements such as design, copywriting should be user-friendly.
2. Headline: A landing page must contain a compelling headline with market call-out.
3. Bullets: Use of bullet points to translate the features into benefits.
4. Hero Shot: A visual representation of demonstrating how a product works results in higher conversion.
5. Social Proof: Social Proof helps increase confidence by highlighting the number of benefitted customers.
6. Call to Action: A call to action needs to include on the landing page above the fold.
7. Contrasting Button Color: Button color needs to be distinctive and eye-catching.
At the end of the workshop, the teams had the firsthand experience of running their own campaigns on Facebook. According to Marcus, the aim of running an ad or campaign is not to gain likes and shares, but to focus on the number of customers acquired against the amount of money a business spend on advertisement. Additionally, Marcus also shared his insights with the teams as to how to effectively select an audience, set campaigns, placing an ad, setting a budget and a timeline for it. Finally, with the help of tools like Audience Insight and Power Editor, the teams were able to successfully run their own campaigns on Facebook and started getting the leads even before the workshop ended.
Marcus Ho was impressed to see the enthusiasm among the startups of GPAccelerator Batch -05. He believes, the startups are capable of bringing a positive and disruptive change in the status quo. He said:
“Batch 5 is made up of a bunch of passionate entrepreneurs. Their ideas are proving to be innovative and practical, and they’re solving real problems in Bangladesh. I’m confident that they’ll be seeing success in the future!”
https://sdasia.co/2018/06/01/digital-marketing-masterclass-with-marcus-ho/
