Marketing is an area that many business owners struggle with. And while marketing can be valuable if you do it right, it can also be a drain on resources if you don’t utilize the right approach.
If you’re looking to maximize your marketing budget, here are ten marketing solutions every business owner should consider:
1. Establish Your Brand
Before you begin marketing your brand, you first need to establish it so you know what exactly it is that you’re trying to promote. Your marketing should reflect your brand values and image, so it will be quite difficult to come up with a marketing strategy without this information.
The first thing you should do to establish your brand is to come up with your value proposition. What do you offer, to whom, and what makes you different from your competition? From there, you can come up with a brand personality based on a few different adjectives that you would use to describe your brand.
2. Learn About Your Audience
Once you have established your brand, the next step is learning about your audience. Even though you may have a general idea of your target audience in terms of demographics, effective marketing needs to go beyond simple demographic information.
The best way to target the right people is to come up with a buyer persona. A buyer persona contains in-depth information about your target buyer that resembles an actual person. You should include information like hobbies, fears, goals, and more. This information should be based on your existing customers rather than making it up yourself.
3. Build an Amazing Website
The next marketing solution is an amazing website. So much of our lives are conducted online that your business needs a legitimate website in order to be a relevant player in the industry.
If you’re a small business or are just starting out, this doesn’t have to be anything too fancy. There are website design tools and templates that you can use to quickly and easily create a professional business website.
Bonus Tip: Make sure to include an “about” section, a section about your products or services, a section for customer reviews, and a place where interested customers can contact you.
4. Use Social Media
Social media presents a unique opportunity for marketing that allows you to target potential customers based on a whole host of information, including demographics, location, life events, interests, and more.
If you don’t want to pay for advertising, you can build your organic social media presence through your own profiles. Consistently post interesting content and incentivize your followers to share it to grow your reach. In terms of different social media platforms, you may want to utilize Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and TikTok.
5. Work With Influencers
If you’re having trouble reaching your target audience on social media, you may want to consider working with influencers to help you achieve this goal. Influencers are individuals on social media who have large followings and are trusted by these followings for their expertise within a specific industry.
You can work with influencers to tap into their followings and transfer trust to your brand. Find influencers that have authority within your field and mesh well with your brand values and mission. From there, partner with them by offering them free products or a commission on sales made from their efforts.
6. Don’t Forget About Email and SMS
While social media is definitely important in the marketing world, that doesn’t mean that you should discount other methods like email and SMS.
Email marketing is still useful as it allows you to stay in contact with your customers and present them with valuable information about your brand. SMS marketing is a relatively new marketing concept that allows brands to contact customers in a more personal and straightforward manner through text messaging. SMS marketing offers higher open rates and higher conversion rates than email marketing so long as you keep your messages short and targeted.
7. Promote Social Proof
If you want to boost your marketing strategies’ success, you need to promote social proof. You can do this on your website and your social media pages. You can also do this with paid advertising.
But how do you obtain valuable social proof in the first place? It often helps to provide customers with a small incentive to leave a review, for instance, a coupon code for their next purchase. While written reviews are good, more engaging examples are video reviews.
8. Embrace Search Engine Optimization
Search engines offer something that social media does not — intent.
Those using search engines are looking for specific products and services that you can provide. On the other hand, social media is primarily designed to engage with friends and family — not purchase products from businesses.
It can be hard to stand out on Google with so much competition — which is where search engine optimization comes into play. You can boost your ranking on Google by building content and backlinks both on and off your website.
9. Prioritize Data and Analytics
Marketing is all about return on investment. If a marketing strategy isn’t working, you’d want to know before you continue to waste money on it. For this reason, you need to prioritize data and analytics within marketing to maximize your return on investment.
Using data about conversion rates, engagement rates, and reach, you can learn what works for your brand and what does not. You can then focus on the good and ditch the bad. Doing so will save you a lot of money on marketing costs that are constantly rising.
10. Consult With Marketing Experts
The last marketing solution that you should consider involves consulting with marketing experts. Maintaining a comprehensive and effective marketing strategy that will grow your business is a lot of work. You may not have time to dedicate to marketing. By working with experts, you can focus on other more important areas of your business while experienced professionals tackle your marketing game.
Not only will this get you better results, but it will save you money in the long run by maximizing your return on investment.
Wrap Up on Business Marketing Solutions
If you’re looking for the best marketing expert to help grow your brand, look no further than Greg Gillman. He specializes in growing direct-to-consumer brands and has helped his clients generate more than $4 billion in revenue thanks to his omnichannel approach to growth and marketing.
Reach out for a consultation today to see what he can do to boost your brand awareness, reach, and conversion rates.
Sources:
Buyer Personas: What They Are, Why They Matter and How to Best Build One | Entrepreneur
