Marketing

Digital & Traditional

It has to be said from the start, we absolutely ‘love’ marketing. We eat, breath and sleep it. We’re confident - without doubt - that no-one will enjoy working on your project as much as we will. We’re passionate in what we do, and - we hate to admit it - will enjoy making your competition weep.

At Zen Digital Marketing we help both newly established businesses and more seasoned marketing departments & teams dominate their competitor market. For those more experienced marketing professionals we encourage you to reach out to us to see how we can help you, but for those new to marketing or who have been unsuccessful with past marketing efforts we encourage you to read on to understand how our marketing processes can put you way ahead of your competition and take a huge slice of their customer traffic.

Marketing - Digital & Traditional

Do you truly understand the importance ‘effective’ marketing can have on your business and the magnitude of returns if done correctly? Do you actually know ‘all’ of your likely customer bases and understand their needs? Importantly, do they know who you are, where you are, what you provide, and why they should choose you over your competition?

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At ZEN Digital Marketing Agency, having been in the marketing arena for over 25 years, we’re confident in calling ourselves marketing experts. No matter where you are in the marketing process, your business size, type of industry, or whether you’re UK based and/or International, we’ll ensure we shine a spot-light on your business and shout your name from the rooftops, letting everyone know “...you’re here, this is what you do, and this is why you’re better than your competitors”.

Below, we’ll discuss the main considerations of the marketing process.

Marketing with Zen

The cornerstone of any marketing process is the marketing company understanding your business. No matter what anyone tells you there is no “..one size fits all…” marketing plan. Although many businesses operate in similar ways and often come across similar issues, your business is unique and because of that it’s imperative that any marketeer - before they start the active marketing process - understands the core principles of how your business operates, the competition you’re up against, and where you want to get to, which then provides a great opportunity to benchmark marketing performance. Afterall, you don’t want to pay for something that you’re not sure is working for you.

At ZENDMA (Zen Digital Marketing), following an initial client enquiry, we usually start with a general chat to assess what’s broadly required from the client’s marketing request and the budgets they’d be comfortable working with. From that knowledge we’ll then arrange a meeting with the main stakeholders (those that share an overriding interest in the business and/or will be instrumental in driving the marketing plan forward) to fully understand the business (as described in the previous paragraph) and arm us with enough information to prepare a killer marketing plan.

Understanding Your Business To Formulate The Perfect Marketing Strategy

It’s not surprising that most businesses don’t even realise that they don’t really know and understand their customer segments, and blindly chase business without really knowing who they are after and how to attract them (a simple analogy would be someone fishing in the wrong river, with the wrong equipment, and the wrong bait and catching a fish they didn’t really want or need!). Knowing your customers is paramount to driving your marketing plan forward and ‘should’ be the very foundation of your business, and this is why the first marketing meeting is the most important; to understand the business and to go away armed with enough information to allow us to consider and create your customer segments and personas.

Knowing & Understanding Your Customers

Core to Zen’s business ethos is to get the most value for the client out of the marketing process. Anyone worth their salt should be able to get you more customers if they’re working with crazy budgets, but what clients should really want is a good return on their marketing investment e.g. if I spend X I expect 2X return. With this in mind, we're always looking to get maximum value out of any client’s marketing strategy through what is commonly referred to as ‘growth hacking’ - a way in which to acquire and retain customers utilising creative yet low-cost strategies. If we can find a better and cheaper way to attract customers, that will be our main focus.

Growth Hacking - ‘Cleverly’ Getting The Most Out Of Your Marketing Budget

We now live in new marketing times and there’s that many different avenues to advertise through it can be mind-bending, so not only do you need to consider which advertising channels are best for your particular business and marketing strategy, but invariably most marketing campaigns will take an omnichannel approach, whereby several marketing methodologies and advertising platforms are being utilised simultaneously; think Facebook, Tiktok, SEO, traditional print advertising, billboards (both digital and traditional), radio, podcasts, YouTube, TV and many many more.

Unfortunately there’s no universal panacea that tells us which is the best platform for your particular business, but through experience we know what channels are best for particular industries and achieving marketing benchmarks, and coupled with constant testing we’ll eventually hit upon the ideal marketing formula; the platforms and/or mediums that give you the best return on your marketing spend.

An Omni-Channel Approach To Marketing

GDPR (or GDPR like privacy laws in other countries) is almost a swear word amongst the marketing community. From very recent past times of being able to track nearly every nuance of the customer journey and the resulting return on Ad spend, we’re now in a new marketing age where we’re practically operating blind (like in the old days… think Mad Men).

If you’d gone to any marketing company before these changes, if they were good enough, they should have been able to tell you with a very high degree of accuracy that for every X spent, you got a return of 2X or more (in some instances a ‘lot’ more!), however this golden age is now over. Now, in most countries, particularly the UK & Europe, all companies ‘should’ be requesting user consent before storing and using their data, this is particularly pertinent for websites which track user behaviour. So the ‘legal’ way of tracking users, is exactly how we track people on our site, we ask tracking permission first, before any tracking cookies are placed on their computer - this being converse to how most websites operate where they either don’t ask permission or simply operate on a “if you don't decline our cookies we’ll still track you” basis, which is essentially illegal and liable to large fines (trust us when we say these are coming to those not observing the law!). Additionally, for those websites that do try and circumvent GDPR compliance and the correct procedures for cookie tracking, popular internet browsers such as Safari and Firefox (and others) are now automatically blocking cookies on their customers behalf; essentially hiding all our users (and customers) data from us.

In short, because of all these new changes, no marketing company should be telling you they can guarantee and accurately report your ROI (return on investment). Ultimately, it now comes down to whether you’re noticing more brand awareness of your company (usually via Social Channels) and/or you are seeing an increase in clients and turnover, and that either at the very least balances out your marketing spend, but ideally gives you a return above and beyond your marketing investment.