When you run a business you end up spending a lot of time trying to work out how to grow it. It is easy to say that you need to improve your marketing to grow your business, but how you should improve is not always so simple.
There are lots of ways in which you can develop a strong marketing strategy, some steps are quick and easy, others take time and are difficult. This article aims to give you a solid foundation of knowledge in how to improve your marketing and grow your business.
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Consult The Experts
If you want to grow your business and improve your marketing then you will probably need to consult some experts. Unless you are a seasoned professional, developing a successful marketing campaign is no easy feat. By hiring a company with a proven track record you are going to be setting yourself up for success.
Most likely, these companies will have worked with businesses that are similar to yours and will have the background knowledge to understand what works and what does not. By reading BoostYourCampaign Reviews you can see how many people these companies have been able to help. Although it might be an expensive option to hire a marketing company, it is an essential investment if you want your business to grow. Consulting with the marketing experts and letting them help you with your business is a smart move.
Analyze Your Data
As you will probably have read in the news, there has been an explosion in data over the last 10 years. This has come from the digitization of so many things, as well as the dramatic increase in smartphone use and cloud storage. 90% of all data ever created has been made in the last two years.
The amount of information available to collect and analyze is so vast and is only getting worse. As a business, you should be thinking about the data that you are collecting. To truly understand your customer base, you need to be generating profiles of each customer and identifying patterns in sales. This type of analysis will be done by your marketing team but can be utilized across all departments in your company. Having a dedicated team of analysts will allow you to be armed with the most useful business insights. Using data to your advantage is crucial to improving your marketing and growing your business.
Do Your Research
Hopefully, before you even started your business you will have done extensive market research. This should have given you the foundational knowledge for how to start your business and how it may succeed. However, you should be continually researching your marketplace and updating your knowledge base.
Keeping a close eye on what your competitors are doing can allow you to understand what type of marketing has worked for them and what types haven’t. If you are trying to brand yourself as a distinct alternative to other companies, then you need to make sure you are not advertising in the same way as them.
The marketplace changes all the time and you need to be keeping abreast of all of the updates. Ask your team to update you weekly on what is going on and have them collaborate with the data department to see if any trends are appearing. Doing your research continuously will help improve your marketing and inevitable grow your business.
Have An Interesting Blog
You may have noticed that many successful companies have accompanying blogs on their websites. This is for a very good reason. By attaching a blog that posts frequent articles about relevant subjects to what you are selling, you are spreading your reach further.
What this means is that some people might be investigating what type of soaps are good for sensitive skin and come across an article on your website that rates sensitive skin soaps. If your company happens to sell soap then they are already one click away from checking out your products. The article itself is also an opportunity to sell your products as well. Having an interesting blog that extends the reach of your company is vital to improving your marketing and helping grow your business.
Exploit Social Media
Social media as a tool for marketing is incredible. The level of interaction you can have with your customer base is amazing and allows you to build up trust.
As part of your customer service, you should have a dedicated social media representative. Through active posting and engagement with your customers but running competitions or encouraging users to tag your company, you are developing a community around your products. These types of communities are essential for building up brand loyalty and essentially become free marketing for you.
If you are encouraging users to share pictures or videos of them using your products then all the people who follow them will also see this mini advert. This type of marketing is invaluable and can be global in its reach. If you can manage to get a viral hit then you will probably be set for life. Exploiting social media for all it is worth will improve your marketing and help grow your business.
Customer Referrals
Customer referrals are a tried and true marketing technique that works. Essentially this is similar to what was mentioned above about social media but in a more official way. Many companies offer introductory offers for people who refer their friends. These offers can come in many forms and it is up to you to decide what makes sense for your company.
Free things or a voucher are both solid options, with discount codes also working but with potentially less appeal. The success of customer referrals depends on what you offer and what type of business you run. If it is a consumer good then offering a great deal will likely attract new customers but if you are an energy company you might not get quite as much traction. Either way, you are unlikely to lose out by offering customer referral incentives.
Focus On Customer Service
There are a few key things that build up the main impression customers have of your company. Your product and the price of it are big players but another is your customer service. At this point in time, customers expect nearly instantaneous answers to their questions or queries. Having to email and wait five working days for an answer, only to be asked a few more details and then have to wait another five days for the final response is not acceptable.
Traditional call centres are also being phased out in favour of instant messenger type chat services. It is best to have a human at the end of these chat services, the benefit of this over a phone line is that they can be answering multiple queries at once. There are also AI chatbots that you can use to answer frequently asked questions. Making sure that your customer service is top-notch will help increase sales and also improve the perception of your brand. This is important for the marketing and growth of your business.
Work With Your Communities
As a new and exciting business, you should be looking for ways to engage your local community. Hopefully, your heart will be in this endeavour and it won’t exclusively be a public relations exercise. The world is a more progressive place and customers are increasingly conscious of the impacts their purchases may make on the wider world.
It is important to consider how you can make your company as ethical as possible and find ways to invest in your local communities. Find a cause the resonates with you and directly offsets a less than ideal aspect of your company. Your sole motivation in business should no longer be to sell sell sell. There should be an aspiration to improve the world for the better. Working with your communities and showing that you care about the world will help you market your products and grow your business.
Promote Your Value
When you are in the position of pricing up your products there is a delicate balance to weigh up. You obviously need to be able to make a profit, hopefully, a reasonable one at that. However, what is more important is promoting the value of your product, not merely the price it is sold at. This is a tricky concept to master and harder still to enact. The issue is that it is all tied to the customer’s perception of how much the product is worth. To a certain extent, this is linked to the price, if you sell a watch for $100 then it is perceived to be worth that much.
But what if you sell a watch at a reduced price of $100, down from a regular retail price of $200? Is the value of the watch still $100 or is it $200? This is a tricky question as it again depends on whether or not your customer believes it to have ever been worth $200 in the first place. Rather than promoting the fact that your products are cheap, instead promote that they are worth something. This worth should be reflected in the price but not be dictated by it. Promoting your value is a great way to improve your marketing and grow your business.
Show That Your Product Works
You could have the best website in the world, great pictures of your products, and company explanations of why your product is great but what does that mean? To the average customer, they want to see proof that your product works and is worth buying. This can be achieved in various ways. Displaying customer testimonials is crucial to the development of your brand perception and allows you to build credibility in your claims.
If you say that your products last five years but there aren’t any reviews that prove it, then why should anyone believe you? If you are offering a service then a free trial can be a good way to show customers that they should believe the hype. Showing that your products work is a good way to improve your marketing and grow your business.
Offer Finance Options
Depending on what type of products you sell you might want to consider offering different finance options. Many people do not have the savings to purchase expensive items but may be able to afford a monthly payment option.
There is a certain irony to this as monthly payment options are often less beneficial for customers than just saving the money and waiting but most consumers don’t want to have to wait. If you include in your marketing a piece of information about what finance options you offer you may find that customers will be more likely to purchase your products. Offering finance options is a really smart way to improve your marketing and grow your business.
Answer All The Questions
One of the biggest issues a company faces when consumers are deciding whether or not to make a purchase is a lack of information. You need to make sure that there are no unanswered questions that could lead to a customer being unsure if they should buy your product. This boils down to having a solid frequently asked question section as well as excellent customer service, as mentioned above.
However, you should include the answers throughout your product description as well, so that consumers do not need to go hunting for the answer to their question. All the information should be there, available for everyone. This shows a level of transparency that will resonate with your customer base. Answering all the questions, before they are asked will improve your marketing and in turn, grow your business.
On Your Marks, Get Set, Success!
Understanding how to improve your marketing and grow your business as quickly as possible is every business owner’s dream. Marketing campaigns are notoriously difficult to pull off and there are so many variables to account for. Hopefully, by using this article you will be able to know what you should do to improve your marketing and grow your business.
