5 Marketing Strategies to Try for Your Business Today

 

If you are looking for handy marketing strategies to experience a positive turnaround in your business, you must first be aware that about 137,000 businesses are launched daily. This number makes it over 50 million new businesses per year. Now, you need to pause and ask, what percentage of these businesses still remain relevant to prospects and consumers after a seemingly optimistic and glorious launch? According to data from United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 20% of new businesses fail during their first two years.

As an entrepreneur operating a good or service-enabled business, you might be at a critical stage and your optimistic launch is transitioning into a shutdown point. You are probably thinking your business which at a point had a potential outlook might be closing down in a couple of months.

This article is just what you need to get a boost to manoeuvre this stage. The thing is no business gets it right at first, there are a couple of luxurious lows and minimal highs. Yeah, you read that right. The beauty that exudes from successful brands and businesses worldwide lies in massive efforts and wild investments. And an integral element of their wild investments is MARKETING and mind you, not with the adjective - ‘ordinary’ but with‘ strategic’.  STRATEGIC MARKETING.

Maven brands like ‘Coca-Cola’, ‘Nike’, ‘Airbnb’ and co are leveraging a combination of modern-day marketing strategies to build their authority, grow their consumers, expand their reach, gain traction and increase profits. ‘Coca-Cola’ is making use of social media and influencer marketing. With these strategies, they also ensure they address the emotional needs and quests of their consumers. 'Nike' leverages influencer and sponsorship marketing to achieve their objectives. They partner with brands that connect their products to their ideal consumers. Mind you, they also spend a big amount of time on product design and development.

Why does this matter to you? These brands are big names anyways. Right? I am trying to make you understand that as a business, arriving at a place where marketing works for you means that you engage in a periodic sequence of testing.

You have to test a couple of strategies to identify and ride on what works. But you don’t have to ride on every wave. There are guides to help you identify the right marketing strategies to position your business for success.

ONE, understand your product.

TWO, who is your product for? Who does your product appeal to?

THREE, what relevant and demanding need those your product solve?  

FOUR, engage in detailed market research.

FIVE, draw a business plan comprising your value proposition, consumer behaviour and other components.

Once you have answered these questions, following through with these marketing strategies will not result in wasted efforts.

By the way, what’s Marketing? Before we dive further into strategies, you might need to address your poor orientation on the subject. I will be sharing some misconceptions you have about marketing. Some folks (maybe you fall in this category) believe that marketing is a fraction of a whole operation in a business. Meanwhile, for a fact, marketing is a holistic view of a business whether product ideation and development, user testing, market research, advertising, selling and distribution, product management etc. You might wonder why but the highlight is that whatever goes on during your business is a key input for employing marketing that works.

"Marketing involves multiple actions launched out and used by a brand to produce receptive reactions and responses required to meet key performance indicators."

Funny enough, some still think marketing is an expensive dream. If you still think marketing your products and services, having consumers glued to the value your product has to offer costs an arm and a leg, you will be losing out on a huge deal of advantage. Remember that we are no longer in the age of the print media, everything now goes on in the palm of our hands. Do you get the idea? If big players are thriving with their proficient use of strategic marketing, you can change the present reality of your business if you imbibe these marketing approaches. They are Five (5) in total.


Having a business is not the same as growing the business. A lot of people today have businesses that are not growing, however, they are not aware of this because they have no structure in place to measure their growth. All they are after is sales and probably followers. Great sales don't equate to business growth.

While a lot of business owners are just concerned about the logistics and other running around for the business, they need to be intentional about their visibility.

Who are your target audiences? Where are they? What do they want to buy? When do they want to buy it? And How do they want it? These are the questions that you should ask yourself as a business owner. Do you even know you're why? I mean, why that business? All this here helps define business and set it on the path to greatness.

There are different marketing strategies you can utilize for your business, but if you don't have answers to the brand questions asked earlier on, the strategies won't yield desired results. A marketing strategy is a step-by-step method utilized to move a business from where it is to where it should be. This will involve creating visibility, sales awareness, generating leads, and so on.

You should get your pen and notepad at this point because in this article, you'll learn 5 basic and easy-to-follow ways to scale up your business growth.

 

1. Product Development

This might seem out of place to you but this stage in your business is a critical threshold if you want to get optimal results from marketing. Compared to what you have been used to, marketing isn’t just about selling, pitching, and distributing to gather a pull towards you at the detriment of your competitors. In fact, if you are going to sell and meet your revenue goals, you have to invest in product development.

Start to see this stage in your business as an integral element of marketing. If you build an excellent product for your market, selling and distribution will not be much of a hassle at least. Don’t build something ordinary and expect marketing to work. No, it wouldn’t. Marketing a poor product will utterly damage the possibilities of making a come-back as your consumers already have a poor firsthand experience thus getting them to try a second time would be a herculean task.
 

2. Craft a Message

Your message should be created around the problem you solve as a business. Why do you need a message? Creating a clear message for your brand creates consumer understanding and once your consumers understand the problem you help them solve, there is a better chance that once they encounter that problem, their first resort would be you.

When Athletes, whether those hoping to be on the big stage, trainees or professionals think of sneakers, what brand do you think they tend toward? Yeah, you are right, “Nike”.

When Tourists go on tours and couples go on vacations, who do they tend to? “Airbnb”, Obviously. And their brand message goes thus: “belong anywhere.” Asides from having an excellent value proposition, they have a clear message.

A clear message gives a voice to your brand and voices amplify and articulates your product, right? Isn’t that what we all aim to achieve with marketing?

 

4. Maximise Content Marketing

Content marketing is a semi fraction of ‘social media marketing. This is no longer news. Content is a vehicle that drives consumer engagement. Consumer engagement drives marketing. Wait, are you still sleeping on this though? According to a recent report, 46% of businesses are pushing for an additional increase in terms of content creation budget. So, you should bring your doppelganger to the content marketing playground. Once done rightly, you will be giving your business a nice shot. Trust me.

What type of content marketing works? As expected, follow steps 1, 2, and 3, highlight your brand goals (SMART GOALS okay?), do market research, understand your consumer behaviour and fashion your content to your target audience. Custom-made.
 

5. Improve Consumer Relations and Management

Consumer/customer relations is a big deal in marketing. Please, don’t underestimate the benefits of a great consumer relations strategy. Investing in other strategies without paying close attention to this necessity can be likened to continuously fetching water into a leaking bucket.

As a business, you should prioritize consumer and user experience. It consummates all of your efforts. When you put systems and structures to ensure that consumers are satisfied from the inception, you would be opening up something called viral marketing- ‘Word-of-Mouth’ i.e. your consumers will pitch the value you offer to other prospects spontaneously and that’s a great win. Isn’t it?



1. Use Social Media Marketing

In the world we are today, everyone is on social media, either to learn, sell or buy. Billions of people daily are doing these three things on social media. So, you should consider social media as leverage for your business. Marketing is also revolutionized and it’s constantly evolving. If you will stay relevant, you have to feature your product in the consumer space and Social media that ideal consumer space.

However, some businesses exist on social media without hitting their targets. To thrive on social media, you have to possess organs and systems compatible with it and since social media is not a ‘stationary’   ecosystem, you have to be on the lookout, and stay abreast of changes and modifications to avoid going extinct. You have to consistently employ and leverage working strategies to get the best out of it.

Social media marketing encompasses research, choosing a suitable platform, creating a content strategy, planning content, engagement strategies, online ads and campaigns, and so on.

Earlier on, I mentioned certain brand identity questions you should answer. Those will give you a guide as to what social media platforms your business should be active on. Social media is grouped into two, organic social media marketing which is free and paid social media marketing. The type you choose for your business depends on how much money you are willing to spend. Although, paid social media marketing is great as it involves the use of paid ads from algorithms and research automated by the platforms. However, it is often better to grow your page organically.
 

2. Understand Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the efficient ways to know your customer's minds, get feedback and create products for them the exact way they want them. You even get to be personal with your subscribers (if you chose to) which is advisable tho. The art of storytelling is also used here. Email marketing is quite easy as it can be automated, and MailChimp and others can be used to make this work.

Email marketing is a great tool for nurturing and converting leads. Email marketing, on the other hand, is a computer-assisted procedure that targets individual prospects and consumers to influence their purchasing decisions, so your communication isn't left to chance. You are sure to get results if due process is followed because open rates and click-through rates are used to determine the effectiveness of email marketing.

You can also try email marketing sequences. These Email marketing sequences are the automatic messages that users receive after subscribing to your mailing list and they help build a strong relationship with the subscriber. However, when you use automated Emails, it is strongly advised that you make your content genuine to help retain humanity in your message.

3. Use Blogging

In our article here, we talked about seven solid reasons why your business needs a blog. Blogging is one of the easiest ways to market products as a  lot of blogging platforms today offer free memberships. As a business owner, you should have a blog for your business. You don't have to be the only one posting there, you can invite other writers or come up with a plan like hiring content interns to work with you. Asides this, you can also blog on other people's pages as a guest.

The majority of people on the internet find blogging difficult due to a lack of visibility. The truth is that unless you know what you're doing, your site will just be another blog site on the internet that won't get attention. It is also important to know that blogging is not just about putting your thoughts. It is first about adding value and doing it in a very effective way. One thing you might first want to consider is your niche. What specific area/niche do you want to log in to? when you identify this, you then go ahead to get enough knowledge, from here you become an authority and gain visibility. Consistency is also another factor, you need to keep showing up. Certain platforms you can consider if you want to go into blogging are Medium, Quora, and so on.

4. Video Marketing

Video is a quick and effective way to get your message through to your audience. It can also be likened to blogging as it entails the same process of content development, only that video demonstrates to your customers exactly what your product can visually achieve for their company.

According to Aberdeen Group research, organizations that use video as part of their marketing plan see a 49% increase in income annually than those that don't. Your company should take advantage of video as it becomes an increasingly important part of content marketing strategy.

One of the ways you can utilize video as a marketing tool is by creating video tutorials to spread the news about your company. Aside from video tutorials, you can also offer free live webinars to explain how your products/services will make their lives better.

People are very inquisitive to learn and are always looking for help on the internet. When you consider teaching them something, then they will keep coming back. You can take them through step-by-step instructions on how to get things done. The better you are at it and the more value you provide, the faster you will be able to increase your visibility and, as a result, your sales.

YouTube is now the world's second-largest search engine, after only Google. People head to YouTube if they want to learn about something visually. You've probably done it a hundred times before. So, consider what you could teach in your business to assist customers in resolving a problem.

5. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

There are many fears when it comes to SEO as people believe it is technical and intimidating when you see your competitors. People almost always run away from Search Engine Optimisation because they feel it is too complicated. Although SEO could be technical, it is an effective means of getting conversions.

When it comes to SEO, there are no short routes. Some companies do educate people on how to "trick" Google with dubious PBNs and other link schemes. It may produce short-term results, but it will eventually land them in hot water in the long run. If you want to see results, you must put in the effort and time, just like in business.

Some tips on how to go about SEO properly are:

a. Don't overuse terms - this is one of the most common blunders people make. Create material that is both human-friendly and search engine-friendly. But, more importantly, be sure that whatever you're saying is entertaining, informative, unique and that it delivers value to your audience

Remember that search engines will direct your content to a user's search result page if you optimize the content you offer on your website, blog, or YouTube channel. SEO allows you to increase organic traffic to your website and improve your ranking in search results.

Conclusion

To grow a business is not so difficult if the right processes are followed and enough time and resources are put into it. Now, it’s up to you to get your drawing board and start to deploy marketing that works.





 

 

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