You’re ready to take your marketing to the next level? Here are a few tips to help you reach your goals.
1. Set and Post Goals
Marketing goals are critical and will help you to define what you need to focus on and achieve. Your goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based and POSTED for all to see.
You will also need to allocate a budget to your marketing activities. Your marketing budget will need to include elements such as:
- Website development and maintenance
- Website search engine optimization (SEO) & Keywords
- Design of branding
- Printing of promotional material (business cards, brochures, signage, etc)
- Advertising (google, social media, email marketing)
- Donations and sponsorships
- Employing staff or hiring an agency to undertake marketing activities
Click Here for a Marketing Plan Template
2. Market Research
Market research is a key part of developing your market strategy. It is about collecting information that provides an insight into your customers’ thinking, buying patterns, and location. In addition, market research can also assist you to undertake an initial sales forecast, monitor market trends and keep an eye on what your competition is doing.
3. Profile your Target Markets
Trying to promote your product or service to everyone can be costly and ineffective. Grouping or segmenting your potential customers based on certain characteristics will help to focus your marketing efforts.
Generally segmentation is based on factors such as:
- geography – location
- demographics – age, gender, education level, income, occupation
- behaviour – loyalty, attitude, readiness to buy, usage rates
- lifestyle – social class, personality, personal values.
Your target market should have a need for your product or service and be willing to pay for your offer.
4. Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
A USP is the unique reason your customers buy from you and not your competitors – it’s what makes your business stand out from the crowd. It is important to define what you do differently and be able to convey that to potential customers.
Your USP may be having a new or unique offering or providing exceptional service. Start developing your USP by answering the following questions:
- What do you love most about your products and services?
- What special skills or knowledge do you have?
- What makes your customers come to you instead of your competitors?
- How do your customers benefit by purchasing your products or services?
- Which aspects do you generally highlight when you describe your business to strangers?
5. Choose Marketing Avenues
Use a CRM. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. The goal is simple: Improve business relationships to grow your business. A CRM system helps companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability.
Your website and CRM should be working seamlessly together. Your website collects data and your CRM for managing and reaching your customers. The most popular CRMs on our websites at Reach are Constant Contact and Keap.
6. Nurture your Customers
Your customers are the key to your success so it is important to look after them. Providing exceptional customer service can keep people coming back and set you apart from your competitors.
Strategies to build loyalty in customers include:
- communicating regularly with customers
- providing after-sale automated and personal follow ups
- delivering on your promises
- go the ‘extra mile’ and exceed initial expectations
- using feedback and complaints as an opportunity to improve services
- listening to customers
- training staff in customer service and basic sales processes.
Read more on providing effective customer service.
7. Optimize your Website
Your website should be a fine oiled machine working 24hrs a day bringing in $ and saving you time. Your website should be glamorous on the front end and a work horse behind the scenes (SEO, Keywords, Meta Tags, Backlinks, etc…). Websites should inform of your services, give testimonials, show your products/services, introduce yourself and your mission, allow purchasing and booking options, and provide valuable insights and best practices. If you need a personalized website audit click here or use a generic service here.
8. Content is King
Quality social media and website content is essential to bringing in and maintaining clients. Content helps people find you, builds trust, and keeps customers coming back. Be sure to frame your content in a positive light. Example, if you’re selling ground beef, is it better to focus on 25% fat or 75% lean beef? Also, do a google search for ground beef, scroll to the bottom to find other related search terms that should be included in your content.
Use tools like Hemingway to grade your text on readability and grammarly to further edit your writing. Or Canva to make eye-catching graphics.
9. Monitor and Review
It is important to regularly monitor and review your marketing activities to determine whether they are achieving the desired outcome, such as increased sales. Initially you should review your marketing plan every three months to ensure your activities are supporting your strategy. Your website should provide plenty of analytics for this process. What products did your customers buy, how did they find you, what aren’t they buying, what content gained a lot of traffic?
Be sure to also evaluate your website, CRM and social media analytic tools to determine the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Need help with an effective website, creating content, managing your social media or CRM? Reach is a website and marketing agency on a mission to help businesses reach their goals. Check out our range of blog posts, our talk to an expert advisor.