Marketing is essential to the survival of any business. Even as a small business owner, you must have a clear business marketing strategy to guide your every move. But marketing is ever-evolving, and your small business’ marketing strategies should keep changing, adapting, and improving too.
Your small business marketing strategies need to produce outcomes in terms of leads, engagements, and revenues. All these contribute to the growth of your business and must be a priority in every marketing campaign you employ.
If your marketing strategies are bringing in people and sales, then there needs to be a major adjustment in your marketing plan right away.
Here are some key steps you can take to improve marketing outcomes for your small business today:
1. Remove Unprofitable or Underperforming Products and Services
The top-performing products and services bringing in the best gross margins are the most important to focus on. Begin diverting your marketing efforts into promoting them well because they bring in the bacon, so to speak.
In the same manner, you need to identify underperforming products and services that may just be siphoning money from your marketing budget without producing desired results.
You can choose to pause these items or services and put them back on at a more strategic time or remove them altogether so that you can come up with better product or service lines.
2. Conduct Quality Market Research
Before initiating any marketing campaign, you need to ensure you have done your due diligence in market research.
Marketing research is a crucial element in creating any marketing strategy. It is about gathering information that provides insight into customers’ mindsets, buying habits, and location. In addition, market research can also help you create an initial sales forecast, track market trends, and observe what your competitors are doing.
If you spend time on market research, you actually ensure better outcomes for your campaign because of data, not just wishful thinking backing your Action Plans.
3. Concentrate Your Marketing Efforts on the Most Effective Strategies
You can do so many things to market your product or service, but that does not mean they will work every time. Every small business is unique, and sometimes, specific strategies work well for you that won’t work for competitors and vice versa.
So don’t just start a campaign just because it’s trending or it sounds good. Results or revenues is the crux of the game, and you need to discover what campaign strategies work best for your brand and your target market.
Some foundational strategies include content marketing, email marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO).
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Content Marketing
A content marketing strategy aims to attract, engage and retain an audience by creating and sharing relevant content on the web, social media platforms, messaging systems, podcasts and the like. It establishes you as an industry expert, strengthens brand awareness and keeps your small business top-of-mind brand for your target audience.
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Search Engine Optimisation
An SEO strategy is simply the process of optimising a website or its pages to rank on search engines for audiences to discover via keywords in line with their search intent. The goal is for your website to rank on the first page of search engines for unique keywords to increase the chances of acquiring leads and conversions.
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Email Marketing
Email marketing is still the most reliable form of marketing today. It puts your small business’ brand in front of a target audience with a solid intent to buy. Because they subscribe to your mailing list by choice, they are more likely to follow a new content you release, check out a new product you are promoting and recommend you to their circle of influence.
Jumpstarting your marketing strategies on these alone would generate a buzz around your business successfully. Depending on your target market and company objectives, you can also add other methods to boost marketing outcomes. You can add social media campaigns (especially if you are targeting a younger audience), podcasting (for more mobile audiences) and affiliate marketing (perfect for eCommerce businesses).
Conclusion
Once you’ve chosen the strategies that will make your business more profitable, you should focus on them in order of importance. Write down your goals and the corresponding strategy for achieving them, as well as how Action Plans for implementation.
Affordable business education is also within reach, whether you have just started a business or are still contemplating it. When you get the best help, you ensure your business’ success in today’s highly challenging and competitive market.
Building a business is not easy, and that’s why we at New Business Centre commit to helping new business owners navigate the complex world of starting a new business. We can help you out from operations to systems, sales to marketing, and so much more. Each company is unique, so your first year should be too. Get a free business Action Plan today!
