How to Market Your Business the Right Way
Building a successful business means you need to market your business the right way. That includes your product, the services you offer, and your brand itself.
There are far too many organizations that try to cut costs on marketing and underspend where it matters the most. Conversely, some organizations overspend on advertising by using a single medium and targeting only a specific audience instead of broadening their efforts and appealing to more people.
For this reason, every business needs to have a comprehensive and concise marketing strategy in place with actionable steps to make their business grow.
For many business owners, modern day marketing can be a bit of a complex subject to dive into, with so many variables that come into play. This article aims to make your business’s marketing process simpler by highlighting what matters the most.
Market Your Business the Right Way
5 Actionable Strategies
1. Year-End Business Planning
Time passes quicker than you realize and it can leave you playing catch-up if you are not ready in advance for the year heading your way.
For business owners, the ending of any year is a crucial time to double down on their business planning efforts and prepare for the year ahead.
From ensuring that their finances are in order to managing the inventory, looking back on how your company has performed and what you can do going forward is a vital step for employers.
In short, year-end business planning allows you to evaluate everything that the business has undergone so far which facilitates proper goal setting for the future.
Budget in Advance for the New Year
After successfully evaluating the previous year, you need to look forward and analyze what's in the books for the year before you by setting new goals. Visualize what and how you want your business to perform in the future.
Once you determine your business goals, you need to start designing a marketing budget based on those goals. Ask yourself:
What are my business objectives going to be for the quarter?
What are my business objectives going to be for the next year? Or the year after that? Or even three years from now?
How many of those objectives need to be fulfilled by my marketing team and be turned into conversions?
You should always remember to put aside a chunk of your budget for marketing. Many new businesses allocate what is remaining of their budget to marketing. This simply does not help.
Marketing is just as important as any other aspect of the business and therefore, should have a sizeable revenue allocated to it in order to make it successful and effective.
Create an Annual Marketing Strategy
Putting an annual marketing strategy in place is going to help you take the right course for your business to achieve its growth goals. It guides the direction your marketing team is going to take in terms of marketing campaigns, advertisements, and so on.
Creating an annual marketing strategy includes the following steps:
Conduct a thorough analysis of your current situation. What are your strengths, weaknesses, and threats? What are the current market conditions? What can you offer to set your brand apart?
Define ideal buyer personas. Make sure you know who your target audience is, what drives them, and their pain points.
Write SMART goals. Your goals should be: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.
Set your budget. Know your budget and the marketing tactics that fit inside of that budget. If you don’t have the budget for something, exclude that marketing tactic from your campaign.
2. Create Brand Messaging That Works
Brand messaging is going to set the foundation for your business and the way people interact with it. It essentially builds your brand’s character.
Representing your brand and putting your best foot forward is a major part of marketing your business the right way. While it is okay to include a little bit of your personal voice in your marketing efforts, your primary goal should be to represent your business.
In creating your brand messaging, you need to ensure that your tone of voice, your language, and your marketing visuals accurately communicate the kind of business you are. With every piece of content you create, stay true to that messaging.
Always remember that if you cannot articulate your brand message to others then you don’t know your business as well as you should.
Apart from recognizing your target audience, one of the most important steps in building a brand personality is by describing what your marketing message is.
Describe Your Marketing Message
Every aspect of your brand messaging will have an impact on how a customer perceives your business. At every single point, you have the opportunity to make or break their loyalty to your business.
Which is why you need to thoroughly take into account what and how you are going to put out with your marketing message.
Describe your marketing message to position yourself in the market. Instead of pointing to a single feature or service that you are offering to people, tell people how those services can change people’s lives. Keep the focus customer-centric.
Here, knowing your audience can be powerful. If you know your audience, you are better able to create your marketing message that targets their struggles. You are better able to show them how your product or service can solve a problem for them and improve the quality of their lives.
Determine and Establish Your Competitive Advantage
Identifying the different ways you can add value to a customer’s life and articulating them in your marketing message can lead to better conversions. This could include things like:
Better prices and reduced costs
Increased employee satisfaction
Sustainability and societal and environmental benefits
Confidence boost
Convenience
Improved productivity
You should craft a marketing message with care and responsibility. Your main aim with the messaging should be to catch the eye of your target audience, first and foremost.
Present your business as a solution. Speak to your customers’ needs and inspire customer retention.
3. Identify Your Target Market
As mentioned above, knowing your target audience is crucial to marketing your business the right way. It has a plethora of benefits and can guide your business to achieve the right goals.
Of course, not each one of your customers will fit a single profile. But for any business, their marketing strategy just cannot start without identifying their target audience. It streamlines your services and offerings while providing the best experience to your customers.
Simply put, to serve your customers in the best way possible, you need to know who they are.
What is a Target Market?
Target market is just another way to describe your core customer base. Your target audience is essentially the people for whom your services are most suitable for.
You cannot just make assumptions about your target audience. There is a concrete set of steps you need to take to analytically determine the kind of people that are best for your business.
Here, demographics, gender, occupation, age, and likes and dislikes are some factors that largely come into play. These help you figure out what your customers are willing to spend money on and what their needs are.
How to Identify Your Target Market and Create Your Ideal Buyer Persona
Determining your target market could be a complex process as it is not a guessing game and involves doing research. It also requires you to take a deeper look at your offerings and the place you currently hold in the market.
To identify your target market, you need to:
Analyze your products and services and how they can be improved
Conduct market research with analytics tools such as Google Trends and Mixpanel
Create market segments based on demographics and other important factors
Perform a competitive analysis
Once you have done the right research, you should then establish and define your niche markets, possible expansion opportunities, pricing strategy, and finally, your marketing.
4. Choose the Right Medium to Market Your Business
One of the main challenges that new businesses face is choosing the right marketing medium for their needs. There are just so many to choose from nowadays.
As a business, your focus should be on choosing a platform that targets your ideal audience while still staying within your budget and providing you with the best return on investment. Here, you need a mix of both new and innovative digital marketing platforms as well as the tried and tested traditional marketing methods.
Find and Explore New Marketing Platforms
Nowadays, brands cannot rely on a standalone campaign to work for them. Instead, optimization needs to be done on a set of different marketing platforms to provide customers with a personalized experience across the board.
Marketing strategies need to be applied across all touchpoints such as:
Social media marketing
Influencer marketing
Online advertising
Exploring new and different marketing channels lets you know which platforms are performing the best in terms of conversions so you can focus your efforts on those platforms.
Don’t Forget the Traditional Marketing Platforms
To make the best out of your marketing strategy, you need to use the best of both worlds. This means not forgetting what works and has always worked in the past.
Some traditional marketing platforms and strategies are listed below.
Television commercials
Billboards
Flyers and posters
Print ads in magazines
5. Develop and Implement Marketing Best Practices for Your Business
According to a study conducted by MarketingSherpa, 79% of marketing strategies do not lead to conversions. This is a massive waste of time, effort, and costs.
To keep your conversion levels high, you need to focus on implementing best practices in your marketing efforts.
Develop a System to Increase Conversion Rates
A system built to increase conversion should involve the following marketing best practices:
Strategically placing Calls to Action (CTAs)
Using smart pop-ups
Creating content around your services/products
Use social media advertising (based on your target age group)
Use images and videos to demonstrate your services
Use FOMO campaigns
Build an Effective Team to Generate Conversions
Building the right team can get you the right results. To maximize conversions, you need to build an effective team with the necessary expertise.
Let your marketing team know your expectations from the get-go. Hire the right people who are fluent in marketing and keep the success of your product at the forefront of their marketing campaigns.
Break your team down into smaller groups of specialized individuals that focus on a specific number of tasks. For example, one group can handle driving organic traffic to your website and SEO whereas the other can take care of offline ads.
Ensure that you provide your team with the right tools along with dedicating ample time to their training.
5. Invest in a Business Consultant
Hiring a business consultant is a move that is going to benefit you ten times over what you invested. It is an important step in many small and medium-sized businesses' marketing strategies. Particularly for startups, this can be a great learning experience.
Contact KM Business Solutions for your free consultation. We will help you realize your strengths and weaknesses, allowing you to move forward with useful knowledge by your side.
Keep Your Marketing Campaigns Sweet and Simple
No one likes reading tons of copy. Instead of trying to cram as much information as possible in your marketing campaign, keep it short, simple, and straightforward.
While online marketing is certainly innovative, it has also paved the way for increasingly distracted customers with short attention spans. This is mainly due to an ever-increasing number of brands with their eye-catching campaigns popping up on people’s feeds.
While you may think that the right way to go about holding a customer’s attention is by providing as much information as possible, that simply isn’t the case.
Your marketing campaign should focus on making the decision-making process simpler for the customer rather than providing too much information and confusing them.
Simplify the user experience and you will get the customers that stick by your brand!