Small or big, your company can not survive without sales and the sales come from an effective marketing strategy. Entrepreneurs always want to stay ahead in the world of marketing. They hire marketing agencies, implement new strategies, create a lot of content, but not all of them achieve sales goals. If not done right, marketing turns out to be a gamble. But if you are doing it right, it is one of the best ways to make your business thrive.
Here are 5 secrets to improve your business marketing.
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Go where your audience is
Now when we are all set to welcome the new year, you can’t market your business like it’s 2010. Know where your customers are and put all of your resources and efforts into producing content for those channels. It is necessary to know where your audience goes to consume content. You should know where your audience spends most of their time.
People are no longer interested in newspaper ads. Nobody reads billboards anymore. Nobody is interested in those pieces of papers you call pamphlets and printed brochures. When people see an advertisement on television, they mute the television set. Your ads on television are served to those who are too lazy to change the channel during a commercial. Most people use their mobile phone during movie or TV show breaks. People use mobile devices a lot, and on a mobile phone, they use social media networks. It means that you have to create content for platforms your audience is spending time on. Their actual attention is not TV commercials or radio jingles, they are more interested in operating a mobile phone and using social media networks. So take your brand there.
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Use the right tools
If you have excellent content writers, the best graphic designers, experienced SEO professionals, and expert web developers, but you are not using their skills properly, you will definitely lose. The problem is, you are not utilizing the resources in the way you should. It’s all about what fits where. You need to know when and where to deploy the right tools. You need to know where your audience is and what they actually want from your business.
Is Facebook the right platform for your content? Is online advertising the best way to reach your target audience? Is webinar or video content the best solution to attract customers? You need to figure out what your customers and what your business needs from each other. You need to know what goals you are trying to accomplish.
There are many platforms available for your business. Youtube, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Play, SoundCloud, LinkedIn, iTunes, Spotify, Tumblr are some of the most popular platforms you can use for marketing. But what matters the most is context. If you are treating all the platforms, in the same way, you will fail. Each platform gives a unique experience to its users, but if you are creating one piece of content and relying too much on cross-platform promotion without knowing whether your context is right or wrong, your efforts will never pay off.
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Don’t rely on machines
When it comes to SEO, many companies start pleasing search engines as if Google or Bing is coming to buy their products. Same goes for other marketing strategies. The obsession with automation can kill a customer’s interest. Automation saves time and energy, but it is not something you can use everywhere in your marketing and sales process. Marketing is about people, emotions, and how you make your customers feel about your company, products, and services.
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes then see how you feel. Chatbots, auto-responders, and CRM can never replace humans. So, before you choose such tools for all the touchpoints of your marketing process, think like a customer and try to understand the their feelings.
When you create content, focus on building long-term relationships. Your content doesn’t always have to include a sales pitch. Don’t try to sell with every piece of content you publish. Make your content entertaining, engaging and bring value to the end user. As long as you are creating valuable content, people are going to stay in touch with you and in the long run, they won’t mind buying from you. Keep things personalized as much as you can. Make them feel that there are people behind your company, not a bot or machines.
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Identify opportunities
Your Facebook page doesn’t have enough likes, your Twitter profile doesn’t have good follower ship, nobody likes your social media posts, and nobody shared the info graphics you posted on Pinterest, Instagram, and LinkedIn. There’s a lot to complain about, but nobody really cares about it. You can cry about it for some time, but you’ll have to let it go.
You just have to go with the facts. If everyone is paying attention to mobile-optimized websites and mobile applications, you have to accept it. You can’t just beat your drum and convince everyone to open your website on a laptop. You can’t do it. You have to accept and be ready to adapt.
Instead of focusing on problems, you should focus on identifying opportunities. When Facebook’s founder saw people communicating through the web, he didn’t start complaining about why everyone is wasting their precious time. Instead, he brought a solution for his college group and later launched a global platform. He knew that bringing something more engaging can be a good business idea. Despite strong competition from the well-established companies, he won the game with his social media network, and you can see how successful Facebook is.
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Stay hungry for audience’s attention
Don’t focus too much on increasing the number of likes, followers, re-tweets, and comments. To make sure that you’re winning the marketing game, encourage people to consume your content. The number of your followers on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram can be different, but it doesn’t really mean that the consumption ratio is related to the number of followers, likes or re-tweets. This may sound surprising to you, but if you compare these platforms on the basis of the number of followers and consumption ratio, you’ll realize that having a huge list of followers doesn’t guarantee higher consumption rate.
Having so many followers doesn’t mean that people are listening to your marketing messages. What matters the most is quality, the depth of your message, and the number of people who actually consume the content you publish. Keep these strategies in mind, design a compelling campaign they can’t ignore, and nothing can stop you from winning the marketing war.
Image Credits To: Geralt
