5 Marketing Techniques Every Small Business Needs to Use
How important would you say effective marketing plans are to the success of your business? According to some surveys, not a lot of businesses think that it’s important enough. Fifty percent of small businesses responded to survey and revealed they had no marketing plans at all. This is a huge mistake because marketing is tied to the profitability of your company.
Marketing helps secure new customers, create awareness of your brand and convert leads to paying clients. Without effective marketing, your business could be easily overshadowed by the competition and lose profits. Lack of sufficient cash flow is the reason 82 percent of small businesses shut down. Unless you want your small business to go the way of these enterprises, you’ll invest some serious through to your marketing endeavors.
Here are five marketing tactics you can use to bolster your business.
The most important step to securing the future of your business is by coming up with a marketing plan. And the first step to that is by identifying what goals you want to achieve with your marketing efforts in a given period. For example, if you’re selling fruit flavored water to other businesses, consider what you want to achieve by studying your current situation. If people don’t know about your brand, then your goal should be increased recognition and presence. If businesses respond to your marketing pitches but don’t become paying customers, you need to work on marketing endeavors that close leads. Setting goals is essential in choosing your strategies and formulating effective groundwork.
Websites are no longer an option for businesses of all sizes. Whether you’re opening a Subway or setting up a boutique patisserie, you need a website. So much business is being conducted online, not getting one is equivalent to shuttering your shop. You could miss out on online orders, increased recognition and the chance to connect with customers or other businesses. If you’re intimidated by the thought of creating your own website, you can always hire freelancers or professional site designers to do so for you. However, there are also a plethora of websites like WordPress and Square Space that allow you to build and maintain your own website with ease.
Marketing is like target practice: unless you know where the targets are, you’re going to miss and use up a lot of resources. The solution is to conduct thorough research on your business’s target market. This entails more than just finding out their demographics like age and sex. This means digging deep and determining their motivations and buying behavior. What time do they usually browse shops? Which days do they prefer to buy? What colors do they like on your products? Each question is essential in painting a complete picture of your target. The answers will be invaluable in crating effective strategies to secure new customers and create more opportunities.
Marketing requires consistency because it enables potential and present customers to recognize your company or product. For example, Coca-Cola’s distinctive swooping white text immediately clues in anyone looking at it that the product is theirs, even when the company’s logo isn’t printed on it. Similarly, you need to build recognition by using certain images, fonts and colors consistently in your marketing efforts. Aside from imagery, you also need to pick a certain demeanor in the vocabulary of your messages, emails and website content. Consistency provides your customers with a relatable and comforting image that will help draw them to your business.
When you have a website, you will need a reason for people to visit it and new content to boost it to the top of search engine results. Blogs are excellent method of achieving both goals. People looking for information related to your business will go to your site if you provide them with authoritative and well-researched blog posts. For example, if your business is a small boutique flower shop, you can publish articles on flower arrangements, which colors are in style and which flowers bloom in what season. Such informative articles can draw in potential customers, and they can share your content on social media.
Small businesses have to contend not just with other small businesses but with larger enterprises as well. Marketing is one way to get ahead of the competition. Investing the appropriate amount of time in conceptualizing and developing a proper marketing plan is essential in securing the future of your small business.
