For many, doing digital marketing means immediate increase in sales, leads, traffic or any other metric they want to attain. However, when they come face to face with reality, they start changing their agencies/vendors or start blaming the medium for not having worked for them. What many do not realize is digital marketing is a game changer!
Unfortunately, most of the so-called digital marketing experts fail to educate the customers and often end up doing things that provide only a short-term success leading to a long-term failure.
One of the first things that we at Wild Creek do is, sit down with the client and explain to them how any digital marketing activity works and the key elements that are needed for its success.
After experiencing nearly 15+ years in the digital marketing space and experimented upon a multitude of tools, we narrowed down to the following three crucial elements for any digital marketing activity to bring in the desired results. Every business is unique and it is built on a solid, positive relationship with each and every customer. This is the foundation on which the success and failure of any business resides upon. If the customer is not the focal point of a business, no strategy or methodology is bound to work.
The VCP Process describes the process of creation, growth, and strengthening of a business.
CREATING VISIBILITY
The first step in any digital strategy is creating VISIBILITY.
Every business should start off with getting their brand, products or services known to potential customers and their target audience. In a highly competitive market of today, the visibility part is very important for any enterprise as it creates awareness and recognition. The higher the visibility, the wider the brand/product will be known, the more customers it will be exposed to and the greater the chances of getting accepted by end users. Visibility must be actively maintained and developed. Without it, a business cannot move on to the next level.
ESTABLISHING CREDIBILITY
Credibility is when people know who you are, what you do, and they know that you are good at it. Potential customers will not buy your products or services if the business has not established its credibility.
To determine how credible you are, people often turn to third parties. They ask someone they know who has known you longer, perhaps bought or used your services. Will they vouch for you? Are you honest? Are your products and services effective? In the current digital scenario, that if often seen in the form of reviews and testimonials from real-time buyers or users.
Credibility is the seen as being reliable and worthy of confidence. Once you establish a visibility with your potential customers, expectations are formed. Once the expectations are fulfilled, then your product/brand is seen as credible. If each and every customer responds the same way, the credibility will continue to strengthen.
The old saying – “Results speak louder than words” – is true. This is very important. Failure to live up to expectations – to keep both explicit and implicit promises – can kill a business and can create visibility of a kind you don’t want.
Stimulating PROFITABILITY
The ultimate goal of any business is profitability. It is possible to have a lot visibility or a lot of credibility but have no profitability at the end of that. In order for any business to get to the profitability stage, it needs to start at V and move through the VCP process. You have to move through visibility. You have to move through credibility. And only then can you get into profitability, where you are start generating business.
The time it takes to pass through the phases is highly variable. It’s not always easy to determine when profitability has been achieved – a week? a month? one year? It may happen quickly, or it may take years – most likely, somewhere in between. It depends on the visibility and the credibility, and especially on the desire of the customers to start buying your service.
People assume that if they just have Visibility and then they get to Credibility, that it is automatic that they will get profitability.
You will have to stimulate profitability by generating visibility and encouraging people to buy your product/service.
CONCLUSION
Visibility and credibility are important in the relationship-building stages of any business. But when you have established an effective visibility and credibility system, you will have entered the profitability stage of your relationships with many people – the people who will buy your product/service and start referring you to new customers.
Remember it is a continuum. V with effort leads to C and with effort, that leads to P for profitability.
It is: V → C → P
It is not V+C=P.
