8th April 2021
You want your services and products to stand out from the crowd, but wait a minute….so do your competitors. And when you’re operating within the same field, it can be a real challenge getting potential customers to choose you over rival companies. You may know that the services you provide are a better quality or your product range is more extensive, but prospects don’t automatically know that or take the time to find it out either (sorry, but it’s true). So what do you do? You need to get your brand out there – and quick. But if you have limited time and/or budget, it can add a whole new level of hassle to the equation. Fortunately there are several best practice tactics you can implement, such as having a marketing budget plan and brand awareness strategy, carrying out marketing for events and marketing for trade shows, as well as carrying out that all-important social media for your photography brand. Keep reading, because in this special three-part blog series, we talk you through how to stand out from the crowd using social media, according to the marketing and sales funnel. What do we mean by marketing and sales funnel? The marketing and sales funnel is essentially the customer journey; the route every individual goes down when they make a decision to purchase a product or service. For instance, when you decide to buy your morning latte from Starbucks and not Costa, when you get a new piece of kit from Nikon and not Canon, and when you decide to get an Uber Eats over Deliveroo treat. From the moment you decide you want a particular product or service, all the way to the point of making that transaction, you will travel along the sales funnel. And, as you do so, you’ll go from the: Start – the awareness and recognition and research phase (also known as the Top of the Funnel or TOFU) and progress to the; Middle – where you’ll consider and evaluate the various different options available to you (also referred to as the Middle of the Funnel or MOFU) before finally ending up at the; Bottom – which is the commitment/conversion/purchase phase (also known as the Bottom of the Funnel or BOTF). You travel along this funnel. We travel along this funnel. And your prospective customers experience this funnel too. For some people, it can take days, for others weeks or months. The ideal for you, is for prospects to reach you at the end point and go with you when they’re at that all-important decision-making/purchasing stage. So that’s a quick whistle stop tour of the marketing and sales funnel. Why have we run through that? Because best practice dictates you tailor your marketing activity by each stage of the funnel – top, middle and bottom. Here are some practical examples of what we mean, particularly when it comes to using social media for photography exposure… 3 tactics for generating awareness and recognition on social #1: Get