Nikhil Moorjani, Marketing and Sales Head, HealthifyMe

The world has moved towards the digital age. There has been a widening adoption of smartphone and mobile broadband usage in India and globally. It is clear that mobile devices are having a profound impact on how we communicate on a daily basis, and how we interact and engage with individuals and organizations of all types. Mobile is becoming the default device of choice for communication.

Today’s customers are not just silent spectators or passive listeners. Instead, we are dealing with an empowered consumer base that is engaged in real-time, social and mobile conversations, fragmented across various platforms. While companies are aware about segmenting the audience to reach out to the right target customer baseat the right time with the right message, it is not easy to categorize audiences based on needs, expectations and behaviors.

However, no matter what the platform or channel, be it social media, search optimization or email marketing, it is best to stick to the basics. Set your objectives, understand your target audience, select the appropriate tools, channels and content – deliver, learn and optimize. It was never meant to be simple. It must be an adaptive process that takes its own feedback to improve over time.

The first step to marketing is to have a solid plan. Find below the steps to determine the best plan for your business:

1. Quantify your goals: Your goal should be simple and tied to your business. Remember - Growing revenue is a goal; growing your likes on Facebook is not. Making your goals concrete is the best way - possibly the only way - to tell when you've achieved them. Your chance of implementation depends on your being able to track progress toward goals and measure results. Set measurable objectives and avoid listing vague goals that can't be tracked.
2. Create your buyer personas: Customers are more than just attributes such as age and gender recorded in some database. Marketers need to also understand the behaviors and preferences of customers in order to provide them with the best possible experiences while simultaneously influencing their purchasing plans. With personas, you can be more strategic in catering to each audience, internalize the customer that you are trying to attract, and relate to them as human beings.
3. Create a unified campaign: Different audiences open their doors to brands at varying stages of the sales cycle. We need to provide a seamless experience, regardless of the channel or device.What you do on a particular marketing channel should go hand-in-hand with the rest of your marketing  campaign in order to maintain a cohesive brand image that resonates well with your audience.
4. Create your marketing funnel: Goal setting is just the start of your story. The real challenge lies in how you convert anyone who comes across your brand into a loyal customer and bring value to your business. This is where the conversion funnel comes into play. The conversion funnel is a path that you would like your prospect to take once they encounter your brand. In short, it would be a series of steps to cultivate leads, help them take the right decisions and turn them into loyal customers. The conversion flow process goes by the following steps:
   Awareness: Awareness takes the top of the funnel. In the fast-paced world of online marketing, you need to be quick and direct to capture the eyes of your prospects. Using powerful words or interesting pictures in your content would be a good start
   
   Engagement: The upper middle layer of the funnel is all about the customer engaging with your brand. Engagement could be via content on website, mobile app, newsletter or more. It is all about creating the right recall by creating constant engagement  with your prospective customer.
   
   Conversion: Conversion forms the lower middle layer of the marketing funnel. Conversion is the point where your prospect takes the desired action. The key at this point is provide clear direction and strong call-to-action  to complete the sales process.
   
   Retention: Once you have converted your prospect to a customer you then need to retain them so that say stay loyal and become your brand’s evangelist. There is nothing that can work better than a loyal customer advocating your brand to his circle.

The most important part of the marketing funnel is your ability to track every part of the funnel. You can not optimise when you can not measure. It is important to track each part of your funnel to measure and optimise your conversion.

The digital environments change rapidly, which require a lot of time, planning and management to keep up. It is imperative that you keep your strategy fresh and reactive to external influences.Your strategy will need to evolve as you see results.