Marketing is one of the most important tasks you can do for business. Effective marketing strategies can put your business on the path to strong compounding success by generating new leads, connecting with previous customers and reaching entirely new audiences. Getting your marketing on the right track isn’t always easy, nor is there always a clear right answer to marketing problems. Here are some of our favorite marketing strategies that effectively generate real sales.
1. Always be Marketing
If you are good at marketing and understand how to build an audience and generate action, what you sell is almost secondary. In other words, you can have the greatest product in the world, but if you can’t see it, then it doesn’t really matter. There have been numerous examples of this over the years too!
As a business owner, you need to spend at least some time every single day thinking about or working on your marketing content and plan. This could simple activities like posting on social media, updating product photography, talking with network reps about media buys, it doesn’t matter, but it should be something you do every day!
Plan out a calendar that has marketing activities, sales, promotions, etc on it. This gives you a visual look at where you need to add to marketing plan and where you might have problems.
2. Website needs to look good and work on mobile
Around 50% of all web traffic is on mobile according to google, meaning that if your website doesn’t work well on your smartphone, you are potentially failing to capture 50% of all web leads, this is simply unacceptable in 2020. Take a serious look at your website on mobile and if it doesn’t look right, or doesn’t work, talk to your web team about what needs to be done. Even if it takes the investment of building a better mobile version, this should be a priority as over time more and more web traffic will be from mobile.
3. Emails
Even for small businesses, emails can be a critically important marketing tool to convert inbound leads and generate sales from previous customers. Emails need to be a part of your marketing plan. Certainly, as we approach the holiday season, you need to use your email list to reach out to your customer base as you run new offers and promotions. While it might sound daunting building an email marketing plan, it really is quite simple, there many free or very cheap software systems you can buy to store leads and create good looking email content that then is sent to the contacts entered in the list. Don’t constantly spam your email list with not so great offers, this is a quick way to generate unsubscribers. When you send emails out across your list, make sure to have compelling offers and limit emails to once or twice a month.
4. Leverage Social Media
Social media when used right is a powerful tool with relatively cheap ppc pricing compared with google Adwords. Coordinate your social media posting with the other offers you are running on digital ppc, broadcast and email campaigns. Even without spending a lot per day or month, you can use facebook’s ad program to put A/B optimized ads in front of a very specific audience. Over time you will refine your campaign, the content, offers and targeting to generate a more profitable campaign. It’s critically important that you check and refine your campaign often, you must be running A/B campaigns in order to do this effectively.
5. Local Events, Associations and Sponsorships
It’s easy to be dismissive of how effective participating in local events and sponsorships can be, but if done correctly it can be very profitable. It largely comes down to the amount of energy your firm puts into it. If you take advantage of having people on-site for events, a good kiosk etc setup and really make a point of engaging with as many people as you can it can work really well. The type of product or service you sell also can have an impact on how effective this form of marketing is for your brand.
6. Use Analytics
In 2020 there is no excuse for not using data analytics to track website engagement, backlinks, time on page, email open rates, and various ppc data. Using data to plan your ad campaign eliminates a lot of the guesswork, but it can take time to refine your campaigns. Sometimes people are impatient and kill or alter a campaign too quickly, thinking it isn’t working, while in reality, it works fine, it just needs a larger sample size or takes longer than expected to start seeing effects from it. Google analytics and google search console provide a wealth of completely free information that can be extremely beneficial to planning future marketing and content.
7. SEO makes a difference
Having a website that is properly set up for SEO and then building blog content with SEO keywords in mind is a great way to start building website traffic and generating inbound leads. Your SEO should be a data-driven plan to help your rank for relevant keywords and phrases with content created to capture searches. SEO can take multiple months to really start working, but once it does, is one of the most cost-effective tools you have. For local businesses, SEO planning and optimization is a competitive advantage since many local businesses don’t effectively use SEO.
Google, yelp, and facebook reviews are a great way as well to generate more in bound leads.
Make sure your website is setup to convert inbound searches into customers. Your website should be designed to get users to signup for your mailing list and input contact info etc. These will form the basis of your inbound leads. Retargeting in particular can help convert visitors to your website to actual paying customers by displaying relevant ads on social media channels to people who have visited your website.
If you need help with SEO, give us a shout.
8. Youtube
Most small businesses don’t use youtube, but the ones that do have a huge advantage! A youtube audience will not only convert to paying customers in many cases but also help you to build more website traffic and help your google search rankings. Making simple youtube explainers, tutorials or just niche-specific information are common types of youtube content that can be easily made by local or small businesses. Making very simple social media youtube videos doesn’t have to be that expensive or hard!
9. Understand why your customers buy from you
So many businesses don’t have a good understanding of why their customers actually buy from them. Make a point of engaging with customers through email surveys, phone calls, in-person talks, whatever it takes, to understand why people chose you over competitors. Knowing this can help to align your marketing content with the purchase reasons of your audience, increasing ROI on marketing plans.
10. Always be Experimenting
It’s easy to get in the rut of putting a marketing plan on autopilot, but it’s rare this works well for long periods of time. Even if it is working, you are likely not capturing as many leads as you could, and therefore not generating the best ROI on your marketing budget. An easy way to get in the habit of experimenting is to try something new in your marketing plan each month. It doesn’t have to be expensively or heavily involved, but experimenting with a new type of offer, a new keyword set, a new visual design, or even just a different type of youtube content can expand your audience and test the waters. Many times it can be quite surprising what works .
Volan Media provides comprehensive marketing services and is a top Knoxville Tennessee video production company, top Knoxville Tennessee website agency and top Knoxville Tennessee advertising agency. We’ve worked with clients large and small both locally and abroad to create marketing content and plans that create action. Give us a shout if we can help!
