Marketing majorly deals with branding, services, products, pricing, blogs, prints, promotions, advertising, research, and social media. With all the marketing options out there, it can be somewhat hard for small businesses to know what to do, how to market your business, and which marketing strategies to focus on.
Marketing is a concerted effort used to push a business or brand across various platforms with the hope that your strategies make it through to your potential customer.
While traditional advertising methods are quite expensive and hard to measure, businesses now have more access to cost-effective and trackable marketing tools.
The best way to market your business might be a lot more accessible than you actually think.
Here are some of most effective strategies on how to market your business:
Get Organized
Getting an organized plan is the first step to market your business effectively. Start with brainstorming ideas, creating themes, and transferring action items to a calendar or to-do list.
After these, create an elevator pitch and get customer input early. Whatever you do, just make a good first impression.
Also, make sure you start small at first and try to get a good ROI (return on investments) for everything you do.
Conduct Market Research
Market research is an important part of developing your market strategy.
It is about gathering information that offers an insight into your customer’s thinking, buying patterns, and location.
In addition, market research can also help you undertake an initial sales forecast, monitor market trends, and monitor what your competition is doing.
Profile your target markets
Here’s another effective strategy on how to market your business.
Trying to promote your product or service to everyone can sometimes be costly, stressful, and ineffective.
Grouping or segmenting your potential customers based on some characteristics will help you focus your marketing efforts.
Generally segmentation is based on the following factors:
- Geography – Location
- Demographics – Age, gender, education level, occupation, and income.
- Behavior – Loyalty, readiness to buy, attitude, and usage rates.
- Lifestyle – Social class, personal values, and personality.
Your target market should need your product or service and also be willing to pay for your products and services.
Identify your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
USP is the special reason your customers buy from you and not from your competitors. It’s what makes your business unique and different from the others.
It is crucial to define what you do uniquely and be able to convey that to potential customers.
You can start developing your USP by answering these questions:
- What special skills or knowledge do you have?
- What do you love most about your products and services?
- What makes your customers come to you instead of going to your competitors?
- What do your customers benefit from purchasing your products or services?
- Which aspects do you generally focus on when you describe your business to strangers?
Develop your Business Brand
Every business, no matter the size, is likely to need a brand. A brand is much more than a logo, color, or tagline.
Though all those are very important for a business. But a well-expressed brand personally connects with your target customers and conveys who you are, your values, and what you can deliver.
Set your Goals and Budget
Marketing goals will assist you in defining what you want to achieve with your marketing activities.
Your goals should be specific, attainable, measurable, relevant, and time-based.
You will also need to allocate a budget to each of your marketing activities.
Create Local Awareness and Establish a network
Here’s another proven strategy on how to market your business.
Join business associations, chambers, community groups, etc. Find various ways to get involved.
Networking is one of the best ways to capture business leads as long as you don’t come on too strong.
It allows you to meet new contacts, make more brand awareness, and attract new referrals.
Sponsor nonprofit events, sporting events, or anything that is for a good cause.
Get your brand or business name out there while also being a good community steward.
Give away SWAG (free items with your business name, logo, and contact info on them).
Offer Coupons or Free products/services
Create loyalty early on. A happy customer will come back to patronize you and will also tell their friends about you.
Create a relationship with brand ambassadors. These can be family and friends who help promote your brand.
If someone has the chance to experience your product or service, there is a higher probably that they will want to purchase more.
Do CPA Advertising
Here’s another strategy on how to market your business.
To effectively market your business, you must get out there and tell people who you are, why your product or service is unique compared to the competition, and how to find you.
Cost per action (CPA), which is sometimes referred to as cost per acquisition is an online advertising measurement and pricing model that refers to a specified action.
Some of the actions it refers to include sales, clicks, or form submits (e.g. contact request, newsletter sign up, registration, etc.)
The goal to be reached is set up by the advertiser.
Some of the action CPA advertising platforms offer to advertisers includes;
1. Download – Cost Per Download (CPD)
2. Sales – Cost Per Sales (CPS)
3. Signup – Cost Per Registration (CPR)
4. Traffic – Cost Per Click (CPC)
5. Call – Cost Per Call
To start CPA advertising and to start benefiting from the various types of CPA Ads, you will need a well-known organization in that niche.
One of the best CPA Advertising companies out there is Adbirt.
It is a CPA advertising platform that helps advertisers achieve their goals at their own budget.
On this platform, advertisers can set up a campaign with as little as $0.1.
To create an account, you just need to visit Adbirt.com and sign up as an advertiser.
Then create an account, fund your wallet, create your first ads, and set your budget.
After creating an account, you can now create your first campaign and let affiliates or publishers promote your brand/products across their websites, blog, and all social media platforms.
You also get charged only when your action is performed on your Ad.
Leverage Social Media
Let’s be honest, almost everyone is on social media these days, and most of the traffic still comes from Facebook.
If you are not using Facebook for your business, make sure you create a page today. You are really missing out on a lot of traffic if you don’t.
There has been a shift in the past few years with ever-increasing retirees joining the social media world.
Set up and Claim your Business Online
Whether you put it out there or not, information about your business will eventually be on the internet.
It’ll be much better if you proactively control what shows up on search results.
Search on different browsers to check out what information you see about your company and then claim or create a listing for your business.
Get a Website
Getting a website is one of the most well-known and effective strategies on how to market your business.
In today’s technology-based world, the first thing a potential customer does is Google your business.
You need an online presence to show you’re real and to offer more information about your business to potential customers.
You should make sure your website is mobile-friendly and search engine optimized.
Also, use Google Analytics to monitor the traffic to your website.
There are many do-it-yourself website services, but depending on the features you require on your site, some things are better left to the experts.
Research keywords Opportunities
Keyword research is an augmentation of buyer persona research.
You can use the personas you’ve made to search for the best keywords for your business, and then use a tool like KW Finder to find related keywords for your target audience.
Boost your Google Ranking with SEO.
Here’s another well-known and effective strategy on how to market your business.
If you already have a business, have you ever searched for your business or your product/service online?
If you did and you couldn’t find your business, what will definitely come to your mind is “Why isn’t my website showing up on Google?”, “How do I rank on Google?”, or “How can I improve my Google SERP ranking?”
There are a lot of factors that determine whether a certain site or page appears in the top positions on Google (or another search engine) search engine results page (SERP).
These include having relevant keywords (and their placement on your site), having high-quality content, the length of your content, how fast your page loads, how often you post content, and more.
When it all boils down, Google always tries to find the best content to display to web users.
Use Email Marketing to Nurture Leads
Just because you’ve converted some website traffic into leads doesn’t mean those leads are ready to purchase your products/services yet.
It’s important to stay keep reminding them and move them closer to a purchasing decision.
Email marketing is an important part of your marketing toolkit. This strategy is a free, easy, and scalable way to communicate with both your new and existing customers.
Manage relationships with a CRM
Email marketing is most effective when you’re sending personalized and targeted emails.
This starts with a customer database or customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Your CRM system stores information about your prospects, leads, and customers so that you can monitor customer interactions and identify sales opportunities more effectively.
Build Interesting Landing Pages
Building interesting landing pages is another effective strategy on how to market your business.
A landing page offers your potential customers a free resource as a reward for filling out a short form of contact information.
When your potential customers receive the resource, they might be even more pleased by your company and more willing to buy the full product.
Because landing pages increase your chances of converting a lead or prospect to a customer, you should really make yours look enticing.
Ask for Referrals
Don’t be shy to ask for customer referrals. Most people say they are willing to bring in a referral if asked, but very few persons take the initiative to do it on their own.
Referrals make it easier to achieve the first stage with new customers. If you aren’t asking from them, you are missing out on various opportunities.
Conclusion
There you have it, 18 proven strategies on how to market your business. These strategies will help you engage customers, build relationships, and ultimately keep your brand top-of-mind.
Once you have your initiatives running and you’ve experimented with a few things, pay attention to the data.
This can inform you of what’s working. As you scale, it’s a good idea to double-down on the most effective strategies.
Then, after some time, you can start trying new strategies.