Mike Koshatko is an entrepreneur who has seen it all. He founded a vacation rental property management company with minimal starting capital. He built a ground-breaking arts & crafts brand Arteza that has changed the niche. Today, he is running several multi-million revenue startups.
Over the years of versatile entrepreneurial ventures, Mike has gained a profound experience in all things business. One area Mike has especially emphasized is marketing. It is a key mediating tool connecting brands to customers and yielding all those leads, conversions, and sales every business is chasing. Eager to share his expertise with those struggling to ace effective marketing, Mike Koshatko has compressed his immense knowledge into 8 top marketing tips you can incorporate into your marketing strategy now to consistently grow your brand.
Why prioritize marketing?
Mike is convinced that without marketing, there is no business:
“The benefits of quality marketing are simply endless, no matter what type of brand we’re talking about. It connects you with the right audiences, communicates the value of your product, boosts brand visibility and authority – you name it. Higher sales figures are just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much more happening underneath, driving your business further up to stand out among competitors.”
Mike got to experience this simple yet fascinating fact when he was the CMO of Arteza. He focused on more than straightforward performance KPIs such as conversion rates, CTRs or CPM. Mike and his team prioritized brand awareness and brand trust, using marketing to build a solid brand reputation. It is the comprehensive marketing strategy that ultimately helped Arteza attract $24 million of investment funds for brand expansion.
Here are the top 7 steps Mike recommends businesses take right now to master marketing for explosive business success and sales growth:
- Establish your brand identity
“You simply cannot build a reliable marketing strategy without a clear vision of your brand identity,” underlines Mike. This is the foundation of your business or, metaphorically speaking, it gives your brand a proper personality consumers will recognize and trust.
Mike recommends starting with determining what your brand stands for and what your customers’ pains are:
- what consumer problems are you solving?
- what are your brand mission and values?
- what message do you want to convey to consumers via your product or service?
Once you have clear answers to these questions, you can go on to develop visual brand identity components. The more clear-cut your brand identity is, the more effectively you can project it onto your audiences.
Speaking of…
- Get to know your audience
Remember, marketing is first and foremost about communication between brands and audiences. To craft a slick marketing effort and hit the right target customers, get to know your audience as much as you can.
- Use the four essential levels of consumer segmentation to establish your customer personas: demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral;
- Implement modern digital tools to analyze your audiences and their behaviors, including Google Analytics and Medallia;
- Constantly monitor customer feedback and engagements;
- Conduct regular customer surveys;
- Conduct brand sentiment analysis.
Why care about deep audience research? Mike explains that it allows brands to choose the best communication strategies to promote their products:
“Imagine your target audience consists primarily of Gen Z consumers who strive for mindful consumption. Having this knowledge alone will give you clues on what social media to use for outreach and what brand values to focus on to inspire trust and empathy in prospective customers. The more you know, the better you are equipped to address your audiences’ needs and expectations.”
- Set your marketing goals
This tip may seem redundant, yet many brands make the mistake of choosing a generic marketing strategy that ends up bringing no results. “You cannot find a one-size-fits-all type of solution when it comes to effective marketing. That’s why setting specific, measurable marketing goals is key to success,” says Mike.
Ask yourself: what do you want to achieve through your marketing campaign? Is it growing brand awareness? higher traffic on your brand’s website? Are you trying to get people interested in your freshly launched product?
Once you know what kind of result you’re shooting for, you can establish the essential marketing KPIs that will help you track the progress of the marketing campaign. Besides, you’ll be able to pick a specific strategy and marketing tool for each goal. It might be an email blast, a billboard, or a series of social media posts.
Let’s say, you’re launching an influencer marketing campaign that aims to raise the visibility and reach of your brand among new audiences. This is what Mike did to grow Arteza in the US market. His marketing team focused on such KPIs as:
- influencer reach and engagement rates;
- influencer CTR;
- the number of impressions or views per post;
- audience location and demographic;
- audience growth.
“Since our goal was to boost brand awareness, we narrowed down our focus and looked at those KPIs that mattered for that specific goal. It helps channel the effort in a much more efficient way and craft a more detailed marketing plan,” comments Mike.
- Optimize and centralize marketing efforts
Building a strong marketing strategy is a marathon, not a sprint. It requires long-term planning and comprehensive solutions that cover all aspects of your business.
That’s why Mike recommends that brands centralize their marketing operations and constantly look to improve marketing workflows:
“Arteza owes much of its explosive growth to our in-house marketing structure. We built our own creative studio, put together a team to work on website design, social media, affiliate marketing, content production, and more. I quickly realized that forming a permanent dedicated marketing team is better than hiring agencies. An in-house team knows your brand and product inside out, while hired professionals mostly focus on metrics and figures.”
Of course, not every business can afford to maintain its own marketing department. However, you can invest in long-term marketing strategies and consistently work with the same agencies to ensure continuity and consistent results.
Pro-tip: always have your marketing specialists analyze your past campaigns to learn from mistakes and tap into proven successful solutions. This helps you optimize your marketing efforts and make them more cost-effective.
- Test before you scale
“Whatever solution or change you’re about to implement, test it, test it again, and then test it once more”, says Mike. The path of trial and error is a well-trodden one for marketers of all specializations. And testing is a crucial practice that allows you to determine what works for your brand.
Marketing testing methods are versatile. You can implement:
- A/B testing. It works especially well for website UX since different UX/UI changes might affect various metrics, such as revenue, AOV, and conversion rate.
- User testing. It involves real users trying out your product and giving you detailed feedback;
- Content testing. It shows how your content performs among online users and what content works best.
Mike illustrates the value of testing with another case from Arteza:
“We tested pretty much every new marketing idea before scaling it and relying on it as a regular practice. to promote our brand online, we tested new content formats, including guest blogging, various ad types, and influencer marketing. Some of these tactics have proven much more effective for our marketing purposes than the others, and we invested more money and resources in scaling those.”
In other words, do not skip the testing step. It will save you essential time and effort you can channel into scaling the most promising solutions.
- Diversify your marketing tactics
Tap into as many content types, marketing channels, and creative approaches as possible. Effective marketing is multifaceted and dynamic.
Explore different marketing possibilities that can be applied to reach your goals. Mike suggests brands focus on boosting impression generation via any means possible:
“Don’t ignore any marketing channel or technique. To grow my brands, I have, at different points, turned to email marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, social media marketing, and so on. We placed special emphasis on influencer marketing: we have worked with 15,000 influencers across all major social media. The list goes on and on. Diversification has allowed us to generate hundreds of thousands of positive brand reviews.”
Diversifying marketing efforts has helped Mike demonstrate unprecedented sales growth. One of his brands specializing in food production made$1 million during its first year. The following year, Mike’s marketing team incorporated a wider range of channels and content types into their marketing strategy. The solution resulted in 4x growth as the brand made $4 million.
Pro-tip: always refer back to your pre-established KPIs when you try out a new marketing technique. It should align with your brand’s goals.
- Keep your finger on the pulse of customers’ needs
Customers should be your permanent focal point, no matter your marketing goals, key KPIs, or industry trends. After all, everything you and your business are striving to do, you’re doing for the community of people who are consistently choosing your name over competitors.
To stay up to date on your customers’ needs, satisfaction levels, and attitudes, regularly do the following:
- read customer reviews;
- analyze online brand mentions and social media content on your branded profiles;
- use focus groups;
- get feedback from your sales and customer support teams.
Use these insights to understand what your customers expect from your brand. Adjust your marketing strategy accordingly. It will also help you predict customer needs and successfully navigate brand sentiment.
- Always focus on the product quality
Last but not least – quality is the ultimate metric every business should pursue to make any marketing effort worthwhile. Make sure your product or service provides exceptional quality and successfully addresses customer pain points.
“Marketing is made truly powerful by the value you create for consumers. If you have that handled, all you need to do is find the right ways to communicate this value to your audiences,” explains Mike.
