Before you add any new marketing activities to your plate, make sure you know the following 5 things about your business. This will help you determine the most effective marketing strategies for your small business.
Customer service is more important to your marketing strategy today than many business owners realize. Because of brand exposure via social media, marketing needs to be concerned with the entire customer experience. Companies that provide excellent customer service strengthen their marketing by simplifying the task of tracking and managing the perception of your brand.
Marketing is an investment in your business. Creating and implementing an inbound marketing plan can increase your visibility and strengthen your expert reputation. But marketing mistakes can be costly to your small businesses in terms of dollars, reputation, visibility and results.
How is your marketing working for you? Did it help you increase visibility, generate more leads or find new lucrative clients? Even if you feel your marketing was successful, you should conduct a simple marketing review every 90 days. Find out why.
If you want your marketing to be effective, you need to treat marketing as a process – a series of actions to achieve your particular marketing goal. But unless you create a marketing system, your marketing process could be inefficient and inconsistent, producing results that are less than you had hoped.
Selecting the best target market for your business is the most important but difficult part of the marketing plan. Business owners will make many excuses when asked why they have not chosen a target because they believe that targeting limits their opportunities.
Business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing is different. Understand the differences and develop marketing programs that are appropriate for your audience.
If someone is willing to invest in your business, what do you promise to do that provides value to them that matters? This promise, or value proposition, needs to be based on something you do that is uniquely different from your competition.
Every 90 days you should conduct a marketing review in order to measure and track your marketing effectiveness. By reviewing your results every quarter, you can determine what is working and what is not.
Small businesses have many marketing challenges, but one of the hardest things small business owners need to do is determine what makes their business stand out from the competition and present it in a way that attracts their ideal client. Being able to differentiate your business by communicating your unique capabilities that your competition does not have is paramount to attracting your ideal client.
Why are business owners afraid to select a target market? You can’t appeal to everyone. But many business owners drive themselves crazy trying to work with clients they just don’t connect with.
Everyone likes to talk about creating a marketing plan. It’s the fun part of marketing, the creative aspect of your planning process. But strategy without execution won’t help your business succeed. In fact, marketing execution is how you achieve results.
How do you view marketing when it comes to your business – an investment or an expense? If you pick investment, then spending money on creating a powerful web presence is something you will do willingly because you know it will help your business grow and succeed. If you pick expense, then you will cut marketing when things get a bit tight (if you spend on marketing at all) and make irrational decisions when it comes to your web presence.
The best way to improve your marketing results is to set marketing goals. Without goals that can be tracked and measured, how will you know if you are successful?
We spend a lot of time discussing how to select your target audience as part of creating an inbound marketing plan. Hopefully you know who your target audience is for your small business. But have you taken the time to further divide that target audience into smaller market segments?