It is not easy to survive in today’s business world, it becomes even more difficult if you are a small business trying to find your feet. With a great marketing strategy, you can put your new small business in the face of your targeted audience.
But does this always come easy? Definitely not. Developing such a marketing strategy might take some time and market research to perfect it. Below are some tips that can help you scale through as a new small business with your marketing.
- What is Marketing
- How Can Marketing Help Your Business
- Types of Marketing
- How to Promote Your Small Business Locally
- What are the Most Effective Marketing Strategies?
- How to Attract More Customers
- Inexpensive Marketing Ideas For Small Businesses
- 13 Marketing Tips to Get Your New Small Business Noticed
What is Marketing
Marketing refers to activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product or service. Marketing includes advertising, selling, and delivering products to consumers or other businesses. Some marketing is done by affiliates on behalf of a company.
Marketing also involves all the actions a company undertakes to draw in customers and maintain relationships with them. Networking with potential or past clients is part of the work too, and may include writing thank you emails, playing golf with prospective clients, returning calls and emails quickly, and meeting with clients for coffee or a meal.
How Can Marketing Help Your Business
Marketing helps to Build a Relationship between Your Business and Your Customers
Businesses need to build a relationship of trust and understanding with their customers. How does marketing establish this relationship?
Marketing research segments should be based on demographics, psychographics, and consumer behavior.
Segmentation helps the business meet the needs of its customers hence gaining their trust. The product team ensures the business delivers what’s promised at the right time. This makes the customers brand loyal.
Loyal customers will have the confidence to buy more products from you. The trust and understanding between the business and its customers make your commercial activities more fruitful.
Marketing helps You Engage Your Customers
It’s important for your business to engage its customers. Marketing is a tool to keep the conversation going.
Engaging customers is different from pushing your offers. Engaging involves furnishing your customers with relevant information about your products and your business as well. It’s all about creating fresh content.
Tell your customers what they don’t know. Let it be interesting and worth their time.
Social media is one of the best platforms where you can engage your customers. Some organizations use short videos and other humor-laden tricks to engage their customer base.
Marketing Helps to Build and Maintain the Company’s Reputation
The growth and life span of your business is positively correlated to your business’s reputation. Hence, it’s fair to say your reputation determines your brand equity.
A majority of marketing activities are geared towards building the brand equity of the company.
Your business’s reputation is built when it effectively meets the expectations of its customers. Such a business is considered a responsible member of the community. The customers become proud to be associated with your products.
Marketers use effective communication, branding, PR and CSR strategies to ensure that a business’s reputation is maintained.
Marketing is a Means of Communication to Keep Your Customers Informed
Marketing informs your customers about the products or services you’re offering them.
Through marketing, the customers get to know about the value of the products, their usage and additional info that might be helpful to the customers. It creates brand awareness and makes the business stand out.
There’s stiff competition in the market and you need to be a constant voice to convince the customers. Inform your customers of discounts and other competitive tricks you intend to use.
Marketing Helps to Boosts Sales
Marketing utilizes different ways to promote your products or services. Once a product has been advertised, it’s already on the radar and this increases your chances of selling it.
Customers may want to try your products or services and this will trigger a purchase decision.
When customers are happy about your products or services, they become your brand ambassadors without your knowledge. They will spread the word and your sales will start to increase.
Ensure you offer high-quality products and services to complement your marketing efforts.
Marketing Creates Revenue Options
During the startup phase, your options are sparse since you’re mostly cash-strapped. This limits your options.
As your marketing strategies generate more customers and revenue opportunities, you’ll begin having options. Having options is comparable to having a nice war chest.
Having options will give you the courage you need to penetrate new markets. You will have the freedom to start letting go of customers who are too demanding to your sanity and well-being.
Without marketing, you will be forced to continue working with clients who you have outgrown and are paying you peanuts.
Types of Marketing
1. Paid advertising
This includes multiple approaches for marketing. It includes traditional approaches like TVCs and print media advertising. Also, one of the most well-known marketing approaches is internet marketing. It includes various methods like PPC (Pay per click) and paid advertising.
2. Cause marketing
Cause marketing links the services and products of a company to a social cause or issue. It is also well known as cause related marketing.
3. Relationship marketing
This type of marketing is basically focused on customer building. Enhancing existing relationships with customers and improving customer loyalty.
4. Undercover marketing
This type of marketing strategy focuses on marketing the product while customers remain unaware of the marketing strategy. It is also known as stealth marketing.
5. Word of mouth
It totally relies on what impression you leave on people. It is traditionally the most important type of marketing strategy. Being heard is important in the business world. When you give quality services to customers, it is likely that they’d promote you.
6. Internet marketing
It is also known as cloud marketing. It usually happens over the internet. All the marketing items are shared on the internet and promoted on various platforms via multiple approaches.
7. Transactional marketing
Sales is particularly the most challenging work. Even for the largest retailers, selling is always tough especially when there are high volume targets. However, with the new marketing strategies, selling isn’t as difficult as it was. In transactional marketing, the retailers encourage customers to buy with shopping coupons, discounts and huge events. It enhances the chances of sales and motivates the target audience to buy the promoted products.
8. Diversity marketing
It caters to diverse audiences by customizing and integrating different marketing strategies. It covers different aspects like cultural, beliefs, attitudes, views and other specific needs.
9. Guerrilla Marketing
Guerrilla marketing is an advertisement strategy in which a company uses surprise and/or unconventional interactions in order to promote a product or service. It is a type of publicity.
Guerrilla Marketing is a creative content marketing strategy that prides itself on being unconventional. In your daily life, you may encounter examples of other business’ guerilla marketing tactics, without even realizing it. Examples include the use of publicity stunts, viral videos, stencil graffiti.
10. Email Marketing
Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations.
Email marketing strategies commonly seek to achieve one or more of three primary objectives, to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. The term usually refers to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing a merchant’s relationship with current or previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and sharing third-party ads.
11. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. This involves publishing great content on your social media profiles, listening to and engaging your followers, analyzing your results, and running social media advertisements.
The major social media platforms (at the moment) are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat.
There are also a range of social media management tools that help businesses to get the most out of the social media platforms listed above. For example, Buffer is a platform of social media management tools, which can help you achieve success with your social media marketing. Whether you want to build a brand or grow your business, we want to help you succeed.
12. Content Marketing
Content marketing is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online. It is often used by businesses in order to:
- Attract attention and generate leads
- Expand their customer base
- Generate or increase online sales
- Increase brand awareness or credibility
- Engage an online community of users
Content marketing attracts prospects and transforms prospects into customers by creating and sharing valuable free content. Content marketing helps companies create sustainable brand loyalty, provides valuable information to consumers, and creates a willingness to purchase products from the company in the future. This relatively new form of marketing does not involve direct sales. Instead, it builds trust and rapport with the audience.
Unlike other forms of online marketing, content marketing relies on anticipating and meeting an existing customer need for information, as opposed to creating demand for a new need.
How to Promote Your Small Business Locally
As a small business, growing your business by capturing new customers might not come easy. For one, you have competitions to contend with and you are not too experienced in the business world.
For these reasons and more, it is best that you first try to reach your local audience. Taking your Business to them might start giving you some immediate results. Here are some tips to help you do that.
Develop Recognizable Branding
With a recognizable logo and consistent branding, your local business can gain a foothold within the local marketplace and shoppers’ minds. Think of brands you know well. They’re simple, timeless, and easy to recognize — that’s what you’re striving for.
You can make your brand recognizable through:
- Your store’s sign
- Your website
- Social media
- Packaging
- Invoices
- Handouts/marketing materials
- Ads
- Store assets, like windows, rugs, etc.
Create a Responsive Website
The number of mobile users has already surpassed desktop — and this trend is only growing. With this in mind, it’s more important than ever to have a mobile-responsive website as part of your promotion (and sales) strategy when reaching a local audience.
Getting a website might not come cheap especially for a small business, but the investment you make towards will definitely yield good results for your business.
Get a Google Business Listing
If you wonder how to promote a business without money, focus on generating organic traffic from search engines. Many people search out local businesses through Google, so having a complete business listing here makes it easier for customers to find you.
When people search for businesses like yours, you’ll come up both as a search result and within Google Maps. Showcase your business hours, phone number, ratings, and get smartphone users quickly routed to your store with directions.
It’s a good idea to update information in your listing that’s changed as a result of COVID-19, as people turn to Google to verify open businesses.
Make Your Service and Delivery Perfect
Before you decide how to market a local business, make sure you deliver on customer service. Word-of-mouth is a powerful referral source for your small business — and you can drive it with stellar service and delivery to your existing customers.
If you want to increase the chance of repeat customers, ensure a quick and smooth delivery. They are likely to recommend your business to their friends and family after a positive experience. Another way to impress customers — offer free delivery for orders over a certain subtotal, for example, for orders over $100.
Another way to deliver top service is to show you care about your customers’ safety. Explain on your website how you are minimizing contact during the pandemic (moving from cash to online payments, using gloves when delivering products, etc.)
Wowing shoppers with perfect service and delivery is a way to show that you’re honored to have them as a customer and that you value each and every one of them. Consider going above and beyond for your audience.
Offer In-Store Pickup
For nearby shoppers who don’t want to pay for unnecessary shipping costs, you should consider adding an in-store pickup option that also drives foot traffic to your local business.
While we’re waiting for the pandemic to end, offer carry-out to let your customers order online and safely pick up from their vehicle. A curbside pickup option allows businesses to minimize person-to-person contact.
To make the pickup process easier, let customers schedule a convenient date and time at checkout. You can set it to factor order fulfillment time. When enabled, your store will automatically display the available pickup times.
Try Facebook Ads
You can invest in Facebook ads to drive local visitors to your store. Thanks to the detailed targeting options on Facebook, you can pinpoint the local audience based on zip code or town name as well as demographic options (gender, age, interests, etc.) to only showcase your ad to the best-suited audience.
Work with Local Media
Local media coverage (think radio, TV, newspapers) is a great way to remind your local audience that you’re around town and doing great work.
Come up with a pitch list of 3-5 interesting story angles for these outlets (try not to put your business at the center) and send them out to some of your local reporters to see if there’s any interest.
Stories about how you’re supporting a charity or giving back locally typically work best. If you don’t hear back within a few days, be sure to follow up. Don’t forget to write a great copy for your About Us page to hook reporters.
Be Part of Local Online Directories
Chances are your city has local business directories. Those are websites you can get your small business listed to get in front of more shoppers.
First, make a list of available directories. Then ask around to see which of these your current customers look at to find which would be the most relevant for you. You may find that some are more worthwhile than others.
You’ll likely want to consider directories like:
- Local Chamber of Commerce
- Merchant Circle
- YellowPages
Aside from these more common local online directories, you may also see if there is a local newspaper or magazine that does special industry directories during the year, too.
Host Events
Events are a great way to build excitement around a special occasion happening at your local business.
Whether it’s a special shopping event, an arts and crafts fair, a local entertainer performing in-store, or a partnership with another relevant shop, events give customers one more reason to come by your store and build valuable emotional connections with your brand. Make a note of it and start thinking of an offline event to host after the pandemic.
For now, you can host online events like webinars, live stream video in your online storefront or on social media. It’s one of the cheap ways to promote your business, allowing you to engage with customers in real time. For example, you can answer frequently asked questions or collect insightful feedback.
Make a to-do list based on the ways to promote local business we’ve outlined here, and then start getting your bases covered for driving local traffic. You might only have a few things left to finish, or maybe you’re starting from square one.
Whatever the case, don’t overlook local opportunities for promotion. Sometimes the best long-term supporters are the ones right in your backyard.
What are the Most Effective Marketing Strategies?
As a small business, you may not have enough funds to start with, which is why your marketing strategy should not be too expensive. There are other factors to consider in your marketing strategy, and some of them are explained below.
Content Marketing
18% of marketers say that content marketing has the greatest commercial impact on their business of any channel in the past year.
Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience and drive profitable customer action.
Unlike paid advertising, content marketing focuses more on long-term results. The initial payoff tends to be low, but the long-term, sustainable growth in visitors, leads, and customers can single-handedly carry a business.
Content marketing is not easy, however, and requires every element to be done right:
- Quality content
- Relevant topics
- Optimized for SEO
- Optimized for readers
- Consistent content creation & promotion
Content is not limited to blog posts. It includes videos, podcasts, online courses, and a host of other mediums in which people consume information.
If you are considering this strategy for your own business, make sure you have the time and capital needed to get going with no initial ROI, and then DO YOUR HOMEWORK. Too many businesses these days are just wasting resources creating mediocre content with no payoff, now or ever.
Facebook Advertising
Two million small to medium sized businesses advertise on Facebook; it’s an inexpensive and effective way to market to virtually any audience.
Facebook ads excel at advanced targeting. They allow you to target a specific audience based on location, interests, age, sex, online behavior, and many other factors.
Creating Facebook ads is very easy. You just need a solid headline, a bit of descriptive copy, one image, and a link.
The Facebook Ads Manager also makes it fairly simple to run and test multiple ad sets, allowing you to hone in on a winning formula and reach profitability without needing advanced technical expertise.
That said, many new users have a lot of difficultie succeeding with their initial campaigns. It takes some persistence, but on the plus side, Facebook’s popularity has produced numerous 3rd party tools that can help you succeed.
If you decide that Facebook is the right channel for you, I’d recommend using a tool like AdEspresso to run your campaigns and speed up your journey to positive ROI.
If you run a business that has a strong visual component, it might be worth trying out Instagram Ads instead. As a subsidiary of Facebook, Instagram Ads benefit from the same database and targeting options, while allowing you to connect with an audience that is better primed for visual sales.
Google Adwords
There are more than 40,000 search queries on Google every second. No other advertising method has the potential to get your business before that many pairs of eyes.
Google Adwords is sort of the godfather of online marketing channels. It’s been around a long time. It’s competitive. It’s expensive. And if you know what you’re doing, it can work very, very well for you.
Despite being a paid channel, Adwords’ goal is still to deliver relevant search results to users, and as a result, it will be less expensive for you when you are utilizing proper on-page SEO.
Google assigns a quality score to your ad, which is dependent on CTR (Click Through Rate), relevance and the landing page your ad sends traffic to. This quality score factors into the bid rate you will need to get an ad displayed, with higher scores lowering the bid cost.
Unlike many of the channels we will discuss today, Adwords is a remarkably symbiotic channel that can be paired with many other strategies to maximize output. As a paid marketing channel, it also allows you to obtain immediate results and can scale as far as your budget allows.
Organic Social Media
Using social media for business is really a non-negotiable.
67% of consumers use social media for customer support, and 33% prefer using social media instead of the telephone. If people can’t find your business via social media, they will look for your competitors who ARE present on preferred social channels.
The real question isn’t whether you should have active social media accounts, it’s how much time and resources you should be investing in growing your social audiences.
For some businesses, it makes sense to invest heavily in organic social media growth.
For example, Instagram users that follow fashion influencers are actively looking to purchase new styles. By building an active, fashion-savvy audience, a clothing retailer can build a consistent direct sales channel.
For other businesses, investing in Instagram might not make sense.
The key is identifying where your customers are and how they like to be approached. If social media is the answer to both those questions, it’s the perfect channel for your business.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is the cornerstone of digital marketing.
Most of the people who visit your site will not buy from you immediately. Capturing contact info for additional marketing and “lead nurturing” is the best way to sell in 2016, and email remains the highest converting channel for interacting with leads.
Email marketing funnels begin with a “lead magnet”. This is something compelling you offer your website visitors in exchange for their email address. Possible options include a free digital download, a free service trial, a “seat” at a webinar, site membership, a coupon, etc.
Other benefits of email marketing include:
- Low cost
- Global reach
- Easy to automate
- Easy to segment
- Immediate communication
- Easy to setup and run
- Easy to track and optimize
There are a lot of marketing channels that are hard. As you may have noticed from the above list, email marketing is one of the few that can be described as “easy”.
How to Attract More Customers
As you already know as a business person, customers are the lifeblood of your business. Your staying in business will depend on your ability to attract more customers to your business. To help you do this, we have provided some tips below:
1. Identify Your Ideal Client
It’s easier to look for customers if you know the type of consumers you seek. Without a composite of your ideal customer, you probably wouldn’t know where to start looking.
“Have a crystal clear picture in your head of exactly who you’re targeting,” says former OPEN Forum community member Nicole Beckett, president of Premier Content Source. “Think about what makes those types of people happy, sad, scared, relieved, and then think about how you can make their lives a little easier.”
Narrow down the focus of your ideal client and avoid making broad target market statements, such as every woman, every man or all baby boomers. Few products appeal to that vast of a group of people, and overstating your market will prevent you from developing viable targeted strategies for attracting clients.
2. Discover Where Your Customer Lives
With your targeted customers in mind, “identify those places where they are likely to be found (media, online, offline, mail, etc.), and then create messages for them,” says Jeff Motter, CEO and chief marketing officer of East Bay Marketing Group.
Where you look for customers will depend on the nature of your business. Some good online locations include forums and social media pages, including your own and those of similar or complementary businesses. Offline, you can meet plenty of potential customers at conferences and conventions in your industry.
3. Know Your Business Inside and Out
Thoroughly understanding your industry and having a firm knowledge of your product or service is critical to being able to attract interested clients. When you know your product backward and forward, that fact comes through. The people who would be interested in your offerings can see how knowledgeable you are and will seek your assistance.
4. Try Direct Response Marketing
Your best bet for reaching out and touching customers is to use tactics to encourage them to complete a specific action, such as opt into your email list or request more information.
Create messages directed at your target market, suggests Motter. “Learn to create ads that attract your ideal clients by giving them something of value for free to get them started in your funnel. Learn all you can about direct response marketing practices because they will teach you to focus on results that matter.
Create compelling messages that tell your ideal audience why they’d have to be a fool not to work with you. Show them you understand their pain, and can make it go away faster and cheaper than they could without you.”
5. Build Partnerships
Teaming up with businesses that offer complementary services offers you the opportunity to take advantage of synergy, which can be very effective in building a business. For instance, if you have a company that specializes in SEO, consider teaming up with a business that builds websites.
When all is said and done, nurturing relationships, either with other business owners or customers, helps you create a client base, Beckett suggests. “Focus on building human relationships. The stronger your relationships are, the more likely your customers will be to tell their friends about you. And, the more likely they’ll be to come back.”
6. Follow Up
After your efforts to bring in business, always remember to close the loop, suggests Josh Sprague, CEO of Orange Mud. “Remember to set follow up tasks (follow up to sample sent, etc.), and execute your plan. So many leads and great conversations are wasted because you forget to follow up.” Doing this simple step is sure to get your client base to grow.
Inexpensive Marketing Ideas For Small Businesses
Marketing on a small budget is possible; you just need to be strategic about what you spend on. Try out these five inexpensive marketing ideas for small businesses.
Website
Every small business needs a website. When people do a web search for your business, your website should show up at the top of the results. And if people are looking for products or services in your area, your web page should be among the results. You can improve your website’s chances of showing up in search results through SEO.
So, what makes a website effective? Your business information must be clear. People should be able to easily find your location, hours, and contact information. Your website should at least have basic information about your products or services. You might also have customer testimonials and a blog.
Social Media
Your customers are spending most of their time on social media platforms, and that is where you should be. Your business should be on their faces.
You can pay for advertising on social media. This will get your business in front of a lot of potential customers. But, this can be expensive. You can also do some free small business social media marketing.
Some social media sites let users leave reviews on business pages. Encourage your customers to leave reviews on your profiles. Then, when potential customers come across your profiles, they will see the praises from other customers.
Vehicle Branding
If you have a company vehicle that you regularly drive around, consider branding it with your company logo and information. A full paint job can be expensive, so you might opt for magnets that stick to the sides. Or, you can purchase window decals to put on the side and back windows.
Sidewalk Signs
If your business is located on a main street where a lot of pedestrians go, try putting a sign on the sidewalk outside your business. You might list a sale or announce new inventory. As people walk by, they will hopefully stop in your business to learn more.
Local Media
You might try getting your local media to cover your business. You can do this by sending out press releases and networking with local reporters.
Keep in mind; reporters won’t cover promotional things, such as sales. You’ll have to buy an advertising spot for those. But, if your business has something unique or newsworthy to share, you might get some free publicity.
13 Marketing Tips to Get Your New Small Business Noticed
1. Focus On Your Existing Content
Most marketers today understand they need to produce large volumes of content to build a traffic base. They often focus on creating new content, overlooking the value in their existing assets. Pro marketing tip: if you want to keep up with today’s competitive markets, it’s important to use your current content to its fullest potential.
For example, you can:
- Identify your most popular content and use these insights to inform future content you create.
- Update old content with new data, visuals, or perspective then republish for more reach.
- Repurpose old content as an infographic, video, slide deck, etc. You can also turn a series of blog posts into a ebook guide or report.
2. Embrace Paid Social
86% of social marketers already use Facebook ads, and the platform’s advertising revenue continues to grow. Meanwhile paid advertising options have come up on Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and elsewhere. Social media platforms are tweaking their algorithms, making it clear to brands that paid promotion is a must if you want to get visibility. If you want your social strategy to maintain or gain momentum, then embracing paid social is a must.
3. Organize a flash sale or promo
As marketing people know, any special occasion is a good excuse to communicate with your customers, especially if you’re smart enough (you are, aren’t you?) to send a message that has both meaning and value. This is exactly what many businesses do when they send you a personalized gift or offer on your birthday.
In this case, just about any special offer will do in terms of value, so as long as you find the right angle that resonates with Friday the 13th, chances are that your operation will perform much better than on any other random day, just like furniture store Johan’s.
4. Look for Opportunities to Diversify
Most marketing budgets today don’t allow businesses to pursue every distribution channel at once. You need to carefully select channels that are most likely to bring strong returns from your investment. So look for opportunities to diversify your strategy by first researching your audience. Identify niche sub-channels where you’re able to cut through the marketing noise, such as on YouTube, social media groups, etc. Then you can diversify your strategy knowing the payoff will be worth the investment.
5. Build Partnerships
Advertising is a great way to broaden your reach on social media and the web. But it doesn’t compare to the power of a strong recommendation from knowledgeable influencers. Collaborate with other major players in your industry to reach a new audience and gain some social proof for your business. You can also enlist the help of micro-influencers to serve as your brand advocates on social media and the blogosphere.
6. Prioritize Authenticity
This one is one of our most important marketing tips. Consumers today are well aware that the content businesses create is agenda-driven. They’re not likely to respond positively to salesy content, so brands need to develop better strategies to build authentic relationships with their audiences. One of the best ways to prioritize authenticity with your marketing is by creating live content. Host a live podcast, stream Facebook Live videos, etc. Make mistakes and go with the flow — you’d be surprised how positively your audience will respond to it all.
7. Constantly Optimize User Experience
Creating a message that speaks to your target audience is only the first step to success in online marketing. It doesn’t matter how great your content is, it won’t drive conversions without excellent website user experience (UX) to go with it.
So make sure you’re constantly testing and optimizing UX to drive marketing goals. This includes improving site speed and navigation, ensuring your content is easy to consume on mobile devices, and more.
8. Nurture Brand Advocates
People look for recommendations from their peers to make purchase decisions. Your own customers are a powerful resource to help you reach new audiences and drive conversions. To make the most of your brand advocates, create campaigns to incentivize them to spread your message. Create an online community or offer rewards for referrals, for example. You can also create a branded hashtag and encourage audiences to use it.
Audi once took advantage of a hashtag a fan created on Twitter called #WantanR8. They surprised the Twitter user by letting her drive an R8 for a day, then used the hashtag to promote the vehicle and offer more free rides to Twitter fans
9. Keep Up With the Trends
Having a strong marketing strategy requires more than adjusting your priorities year after year. You have to be constantly on the lookout for technologies and opportunities to stand out from the crowd. Follow the latest tech and marketing tips to keep up on the important trends and changes you should be taking advantage of.
10. Make Performance Analysis an Ongoing Strategy
Any seasoned marketer knows the importance of performance analytics to optimize their strategy. But waiting until the end of a marketing campaign to analyze and adjust seriously limits the potential benefits of performance analysis.
Top marketers don’t rely on past performance to inform future efforts — they make adjustments to their campaigns in real time based on the latest insights. Your marketing automation platform should offer you tons of ways to analyze the performance of your marketing efforts.
11. Create a Memorable Message
There are only so many ways to directly promote your products and services through marketing. Sometimes it’s worthwhile to stray away from your main marketing agenda to tell stories that make your brand more memorable and likeable. The more creative you get with storytelling, the more likely you’ll stand out and improve your brand image.
A great example of a marketing campaign with this focus comes from the diaper brand Huggies. They found research showing the positive impact of hugs on babies — hugs help build their immune systems, stabilize vital signs, improve brain development, etc. This inspired the brand’s “No Baby Unhugged” campaign aimed at educating parents about the benefits of skin-to-skin contact and providing volunteers in hospitals for babies in need of hugs.
12. Connect Online and Offline Strategies
Creating a consistent customer experience online and off is an important aspect of memorable marketing in 2019. More and more businesses are using in-person events to influence audiences and drive sales, but they often think of them as isolated from online marketing initiatives.
To get the most out of in-person marketing, first identify what steps you want your audience to take after the event (e.g. engage with your emails, sign up for a free product demo, etc). Then create an in-person experience that nurtures them on this journey. Read more about omni-channel marketing strategy
13. Tap into your personal networks
Network marketing involves tapping into the personal networks of independent agents within a company. These agents evangelize the products or services since the incentive structure of network marketing is based on how quickly and broadly they can build and distribute to a network of customers.
For instance, Mary Kay Ash founded her global cosmetics firm in 1963 based on the premise of network marketing. While she may not have been the first to do this, she was the most successful — she figured out how to incorporate network marketing into the very fabric of a middle-class lifestyle. By enlisting stay-at-home moms looking to earn an income but not interested in the traditional 9 to 5 job, Mary Kay built a makeup empire.
Conclusion
Most content marketers struggle to generate search traffic and acquire new clients. One of the best content marketing methods that you can use to attract high paying clients is through word-of-mouth referrals.
But word-of-mouth referrals are only possible when you offer great service, deliver on time and make the client’s goal your #1 objective.
No matter what SEO tactics you decide to implement to improve your blog’s search rankings and traffic, at the end of the day, “word of mouth” is what matters to your brand.
And, you can create word-of-mouth by generating content that users love.
