The key to a successful business is first to have a great product or service. Congrats! You’ve done that. Now that you have created something people will want to purchase, how do you get it to them? How do you ensure that your product or service will stand out from the rest and cut through all the noise?
The answer to those questions is marketing. Put simply, you can’t sell your products if people don’t know they exist! Marketing is a key piece of any business model and if you have a business you’re looking to grow, you’ll need to develop a strong plan to market your product or service.
So, to help you with that, we’ve compiled a list of 8 effective and successful marketing tips to promote your business and set you up for future success.
Paint A Picture With A Story
When it comes to marketing strategies, storytelling certainly deserves special mention. When you paint a picture in the reader’s mind through a story, you’re more likely to create a lasting impact on your audience. Storytelling allows businesses to connect with their audience by creating a shared experience.
Not only does it allow businesses to showcase their real voice, but storytelling also gives others a chance to better understand how your business or product has the ability to change and impact lives.
You can tell a story through video reviews, photos, and testimonials to name a few.
Ensure An Active Online Presence
The importance of social media cannot be understated. The social media platforms Instagram and Facebook alone have a combined total of approximately 4 billion users from around the world! In order to reach your intended audiences, it is crucial to maintain your online presence.
Having an active social media presence is an effective way to build your brand’s awareness, generate leads, and secure that coveted spot in your audience’s mind. From posting photos to entertaining, relevant, and informative content about your product or services, a strong online presence is your direct link to your consumer base. When used efficiently, social media can work wonders for your business.
Showcase Your Products In A Unique Manner
A picture is worth a thousand words. When it is a picture of your product or business, you want it to make a great first impression. In other words, you must invest time and effort into product photography so your audience understands instantly what you as a brand have to offer.
Professional-looking photos and original content can help you stand out to prospective clients or customers, keep you top-of-mind to current ones, and set you apart from competitors.
You’ll want to capture eye-catching images followed by unique captions that provide relevant and specific information about your business or products.
Give Influencer Marketing A Shot
Ever seen your favorite blogger or influencer wearing your go-to shoe or clothing brand? Doesn’t that get you excited and make you want to buy the same items?
That’s the power of influencer marketing: influencers can offer a great deal of credibility and promotion that your small business might need.
Building an influencer program is a great way to market your product or service; however, you’ll want to do proper research first and work with the right influencers whose content will complement your business and whose audience is in line with your target market.
Have Your Own Blog
While this might sound like a lot of work, having your own blog is one of the most useful marketing strategies for any brand or business.
Blogging not only provides you with a great platform to share information and value with your audience, but it also improves SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and drives website traffic toward your brand.
From business and product updates to product usage guides, there’s much that you can blog about!
Create A Mobile-Friendly Website
We all know that a large part of online traffic comes through mobile devices, but many people still fail to create an optimized mobile-friendly website for their business.
Although many websites are viewable through a mobile phone, they aren’t exactly optimized, which often results in issues like site speed. If your website takes a long to load on a potential visitor’s mobile browser, you are likely to lose them and many others!
So, if you wish to up your marketing game, be sure to create a mobile-friendly website that is optimized so that your current customers (and new ones) know where and how to find you online.
Online Reviews Help A Great Deal
When it comes to brands and businesses, word of mouth plays an important role.
For instance, when you are looking for, say, the best massage therapist in town, the first thing you probably do is ask a friend or family member. The next thing you are likely to do is run an online search on Google. From there, Google takes you to online reviews of the particular massage therapist you searched for, and you can read what others have to say about their practice, making you more informed (and thus more confident) about your decision.
Your customers go through a similar process when looking for a particular product or service. It’s no surprise that a large percentage of people seriously trust online reviews and recommendations given by others.
So, what steps should you take as a business? All you need to do is build up the ‘reviews’ section of your business’s online page, claim your accounts to build an online reputation, be responsive and active, and lastly, get your existing clients to leave a review on your page and put in a good word for your product or service!
Target the Right Audience
A common marketing mistake made by businesses when promoting products or service is that they tend to target too broad of an audience.
If anything, this approach simply stunts the growth of your brand because by targeting everyone, you may as well be targeting no one. It’s more beneficial to focus on hitting the right audience that your product or service will resonate with.
So, a core marketing tip for any business is to create a highly targeted audience so that you can connect with the right people. In addition to finding the right audience, it is also vital to ensure that your posts, pictures, messages, and overall content directly speaks to the people that you wish to target.
Final Word
Marketing plays a huge role in the way your products or services are received and consumed by your audience. You want to be able to connect with your target audience on a personal level, engage them online, give them a user-friendly experience, and earn their trust by demonstrating you have something of value to offer them. Then, once you have gained their trust, encourage them to let others know they are satisfied with your product or service to help you leverage that trust to attract new customers.
Before you know it, you will have paved a successful path that will continue to guide you for years to come.
