All business owners can benefit from having a keen interest in marketing and the way that marketing works. After all, it does play an important role, no matter what the nature of your business is. Without proper marketing, it is much less likely that your business will go to the great extremes that you hope for it. However, many people have a poor understanding of what it really takes to market a business. The truth is, there is much more involved in the process than you might think. In order to really market a business well, you need to be able to use a variety of tactics. These are so varied that it is unlikely that many businesses will be able to make the most of them all in one go. However, it is worth getting to grips with as many of them as possible, if only to gain a deeper understanding of how marketing really works. With that in mind, let’s take a look now at some of the essential tactics that all business owners could benefit from knowing about.
Let’s start with something that suffers a similar fate to many other marketing strategies. That is, it is such a commonplace tool that people utterly forget about it altogether. It is amazing how many marketers forget that email is an essential tool which they should be making the most of. If you want to make a start today on improving the marketing for your business, then getting to grips with your email is a great place to start.
Email marketing is surprisingly powerful, and that is why you need to get to grips with it as well as possible. 91% of consumer worldwide check their emails daily, so it is clear that using email can be an effective means of getting your message delivered straight into somebody’s home. If you are curious as to the effectiveness of email marketing, it might help to know that 66% of consumer have made an online purchase at some point in their lives as a result of an email marketing campaign. That is a pretty healthy figure, and it makes email into one of the most powerful marketing techniques around.
So how do you make email marketing work as well as possible? The first thing to bear in mind is that you need to give your customers a real reason to follow your email list or sign up for your newsletter. Offering a freebie, or simply delivering emails packed full of information, are two great ways to do this. Secondly, you need to think about the actual process of subscribing. You want to make it as easy as possible – ideally, just to type their email address and click on a button. Anything more than that, and the percentage of people who stick it out just to receive an email from you is likely to diminish pretty quickly. You should also make sure that you are honest and direct in letting your subscribers know what they can expect from your emails. If you are not, then you will soon find a backlash in the form of people unsubscribing from your list, and maybe even negative word of mouth being spread. This is definitely a situation to avoid, so make sure you are honest from the start. Finally, something that will really make a profound difference is if you make your emails mobile-friendly. 48% of emails are opened on mobile – and only 11% of emails are mobile-friendly. If you make yours suitable for mobile devices, then you are doing a huge favour to yourself.
The Importance Of Focus
We have looked so far at one particularly specific form of marketing, albeit one which is likely to do any business a whole number of favours. However, in this article we also want to look more broadly, more generally, at the way in which to approach the whole subject of marketing so as to improve the effectiveness of it. There are a huge number of these wider tactics, but one of the most important is that of applying the proper focus.
Focus is incredibly important in marketing, as it largely dictates how many people your marketing reaches and who they are – and who they are is the most important function of all. In respect, the aim of marketing is to know the customer well enough that the product suits them so well that it basically sells itself. When you apply the right kind of focus, this is much more likely to be the case a lot more often. But what kind of focus should you have, and how do you actually achieve it?
In general, you want to try and adopt a focus which is situated only on one particular demographic. This means that you need to know exactly who your marketing is meant to be aimed at, and what it is that makes them tick. The more you know about them, the more likely it is that your marketing will land in the strongest way possible. The way to make this really work is simply to carry out as much research as possible on the demographic you are focusing on, in such a way that you feel like you know the people as well as your close friends. This means that you will then be able to update your marketing to make it much more effective immediately. The power of adopting the right focus really can’t be overstated, and you should make every effort to make sure that you get this right from the outset.
SEO
You are probably well aware of the importance of your web presence. Your business needs to present itself in a certain way at all times – this is an essential of branding – and nowhere is this truer than online. Your business’ online presence says a great deal about the brand, for a start, but it is also true that the website is where most people will first come across your business. With that in mind, it makes sense to put every effort into ensuring that your website is as successful, professional and polished as possible. It is also a good idea to try and include a variety of marketing techniques during this process – and one of the most powerful of those is SEO.
If you are unsure of what it is, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a series of techniques and strategies for converting a certain figure of people carrying out certain actions into the figure you would like to see instead. The most commonly desired outcome of SEO is to draw in more visitors to a webpage or website. This is achieved in a variety of ways, but a couple of the most important methods are link-building and meta tags. Link-building is exactly what it sounds like, improving the number of links pointing to a page. This increases that page’s ranking on search engine results pages, therefore making it much more likely that people will visit that page. Meta tags achieve the same result by having hidden tag words on the page which are phrases that people commonly search for. This is a basic example of the difference between white hat and black hat SEO techniques.
It can take a long time to become a true seo hero, but one thing is for certain: it is something that you absolutely must consider for your business. This is one of the most useful marketing methods going, and it is likely that you will benefit greatly from using it, in only a short amount of time. The more people that visit your business’ website, the more likely it is that your business will flourish.
Social Media
We all know about social media, how many millions of people use it everyday. Given this, it is frankly shocking how relatively few businesses really take advantage of it. Put in simple terms, a social media website is like being given the opportunity to stand on a soapbox with your brand and shout it as passers-by. You can reach a huge number of people this way, but to increase the amount who actually respond – and respond positively – you need to make sure you are doing it in the right way. The truth is, there are some basic rules for ensuring that your social media marketing campaign really lands as well as it can.
Social media needs to be as personable as possible, otherwise there is little point. You need to know who you are actually messaging on the whole, otherwise it is much less likely that your messages will land. It is also particularly powerful if you host social media events. This might sound grand, but it is actually just a simple case of inventing a hashtag or holding a Q & A online – anything that gets people actually actively listening and responding to you. This is the goal, after all – to make it so that people want to talk to you, not just listen. That is when you know that you really have their attention.
