All businesses have to do marketing activities if they intend to survive, especially if the competition is intense in the industry they operate in.
Thus, if you’re a business owner, you’ll probably have to learn how to make a marketing strategy and then implement it in real-time. Without marketing, your business will not get enough customers to survive for the long term and will die a natural death.
Here are some tips you can follow so that your first marketing strategy can be developed, then launched successfully.
1. Make SEO Your Business’ Friend.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of the most important concepts you’ll ever encounter in marketing. You can do simple SEO on your own by writing articles and coming up with content that you can post on your website. By doing this, your website will easily be seen online and people will remember visiting your site in their search for information.
If you want to, you can also seek out SEO specialists online, such as Caffeine Marketing, and hire them to do SEO content generation for you. This is recommended for people who don’t understand enough about SEO to generate their own website content. Of course, this costs money, so you need to be sure what content you want for the SEO specialists to make.
2. Think About The Possible Effects of Your Marketing Strategy.
Yes, your marketing strategy can help rev up business for your company. But, you have to be sure this is the effect that you want. So, take some time to think carefully about what you want your marketing strategy to do for you.
Maybe you want more people to know about your business? Or, maybe you want to bring in new customers so that you can increase sales? The answer to those questions should be specific, too.
For example, you could make a marketing goal of 100,000 visits to your site over a course of three months. Then, you can make it your long-term goal to sell at least one product to each of those visitors by the time three months have passed.
Specifics like these help you measure just how successful your marketing effort will be.
3. Know Your Ideal Customer.
It pays to know who your customers are so that you’ll know how to improve your products and services for them. So, you need to specify who your ideal customer is.
For instance, you might be selling a beauty soap, so you may say “my ideal customer is a female, between the ages of 21 to 35 who has a stable white-collar job and who does socio-civic work for different nonprofit organizations.” If you specify, it may help you come up with content for your marketing plan so that your ideal customers will buy that beauty soap from you.
If you say “my ideal customer is a male, between the ages of 40 to 52, who loves sports and fast cars and who’s employed in the foodservice industry,” but you’re selling a beauty soap, then there seems to be no connection between the customer and the product your selling, hence your marketing plan may flop.
4. Set a Definite Budget and Schedule for Marketing.
In marketer paradise, you would have an unlimited budget for marketing online, plus all the time in the world to do marketing your way. In reality, though, you probably have to set a definite budget to work with when creating your marketing plan and know when to start and stop it.
Simply put, you need to come up with results over a predetermined time. That makes marketing something measurable that you can analyze.
5. Establish a Feedback Mechanism.
If you want to market to the public, bear in mind that you want their feedback about what you’re marketing. Your SEO specialist can help you by integrating a special form into your website. Your customers can fill out that form when they visit or buy something from your website.
Take note that you shouldn’t be troubled by possible negative feedback. Use it as constructive criticism so that you’ll know what parts of your marketing strategy need improvement.
You can also ask for feedback from your own employees and your suppliers (if any). They may have noticed something about your marketing that they feel you should know about.
Keep communication lines open for as long as they’re willing to help you. You may be surprised by what they comment.
Conclusion.
If the business is to survive amidst competition, a business owner will definitely need to learn about marketing. Your marketing plan should be realistic and tangible for it to work.
Get to know your ideal customers, too. You need to set a specific budget and timeframe so that you can measure its effects. In addition, you should try to get feedback about the business from website visitors, your employees and even from your suppliers. That way, you’ll know if there are parts of your marketing program that need tweaking to bring better results.
