One of the biggest mistakes that people make in business is with marketing. They think that once they’ve gained the interest of customers and clients, they can ease off on marketing. This isn’t true at all and marketing has to be a constant force in your company. You always need to be pushing what your company can give to your clients and why it’s better than the rest. Failing to market your business even for a moment will ensure that customers switch to another company that seems fresh and far more interesting.
Of course, that leads to a few problems. First, it means that marketing and promotion are going to take up a lot of your time as a business owner. This is particularly true if you’re a solopreneur because there will be no one else around to complete the job for you. Second, it could eat up a lot of your business budget and third you’re going to have to think of ways to keep things fresh in your company.
However, each of these issues can be resolved with a smart business plan. On this post, we’re going to look at the areas you’ll need to focus on to keep marketing up to date as well as how to ensure it doesn’t take a lot of time or money.
Staying up to date
There are a few different areas that need to be kept up to date for your marketing to be effective. You certainly need to upgrade your website with fresh content. Google loves fresh content, and by adding new articles, graphics or videos to your site, you should be able to gain a stronger ranking. This, in turn, will mean that you are able to gain higher levels of traffic and that should mean more customer interest. Not only that, but existing customers will also find it easier to reach your site online.
Don’t forget, that new content also encourages customers and users to share it through social media. And again, this is going to increase your ranking eventually. So it certainly pays to put a lot of focus on your site. To do this, you want to make sure that adding content is as easy as possible. You should consider agreeing to a website maintenance contract with a professional digital agency. With this type of agreement, they will set up the website for you in a way that makes it easy for you to add content yourself.
However, you can also think about hiring someone to take a more active role in your business marketing management. It is possible to hire someone that will release the content for you as well as promoting it on social media. They will also monitor other aspects of your business site such as any issues with speed.
Speed can be a serious issue on a website because it can mean that your site is not performing as effectively as it should be. When that happens, you can lose customers purely because they get tired of waiting for the site to respond.
You should also be aware of the fact that the smallest issue with your site can stop a customer from buying. For instance, you might find that there’s an image on your site that customers simply aren’t responding to. This is why your site needs to be regularly tested and checked. This is another role a digital marketing agency can fill for you.
New angles
When you market to customers and clients, you always need to be thinking about who they are and what they want to see from you. Essentially, you must focus on your target audience and make sure you are speaking directly to them. There are lots of ways to find out what your target audience wants from your business.
For instance, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are all known to send out anonymous surveys with questions linked to the future of their consoles. They’ll ask about new features that their customers may want to see as well as opinions on changes that may already be in development.
Hollywood producers run test screens of products that haven’t been finished but are at the stage where they can be used to pool an audience. Manufacturers send kits of unfinished products to groups of customers to see what they think and find out what improvements they might be able to make.
You can also think about simply engaging customers on social media. Social media has brought a whole new tool for business owners, and it’s so easy to connect with customers online. You’ll find that they are quite happy to respond to queries, giving you ideas for reshaping the marketing and how you promote products.
Of course, you also need to consider whether you are using all the tools at your disposal to promote your business. A lot of companies these days tend to focus on either online or offline techniques. The truth is that you should be doing both. With both, you can make sure you are ready to market to both local and global customers, guaranteeing you’re reaching the widest audience possible.
Keeping costs low
You probably think that constant marketing sounds incredibly expensive, even if it is necessary. It can be, but ironically, that’s usually if you’re too focused on ways to cut costs. For instance, you might decide to run the marketing campaigns yourself. However, if you do this, you’re going to be wasting a lot of time that you could be spending on other things. It may not feel like you’re losing money, but you almost certainly will be.
Instead, it’s best to use an outsourcing service. With an outsourcing service, you’ll have a full team to run your marketing campaign. But rather than paying each individual wage, you can just pay one fixed sum for the full service. That way, you’ll get everything you need without your business bleeding funds.
You can also look at cheap, effective ways to market your business while continuing to stay in the spotlight. In the past, if you wanted to make sure customers paid attention to your business, you needed to spend a lot of money on TV advertisements. These days, social media is your greatest weapon.
You need to work to make sure that you are constantly updating your social networks just like your website. Add fresh content, new posts and aim to attract enough interest to get your business trending. Once this happens, you’ll be gaining hundreds of potential new customers every single day. And guess what? It won’t cost you anything.
Ahead of the curve
Marketing trends change every year or in some cases, every month. One minute, a certain SEO tactic is working a treat and the next, Google have put it under intense scrutiny. Yesterday, you were finding great promise by using gifs on your social media. Today, customers seem to think that it’s making your business look unprofessional. The trick is changing your tactic before opinion turns. If you do this, you’ll always be able to keep the interest of customers and continue to engage them.
Staying ahead of the curve with marketing is about focusing on what’s going to be next. For instance, most marketing experts believe that in ten years the majority of content online is going to be video. As such, this might be where you want to be focusing when promoting your company. Videos and images are definitely more likely to be shared compared to plain text.
As you can see then, marketing can never be a one and done option for business owners. You have to keep evolving, and your company must continue to move forward.