Todd Sumamno
To help grow your sales quickly, it’s important that you learn how to market your products effectively. If you own a small business, success often comes down to the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, so it’s crucial that you employ powerful marketing strategies.
Considering how competitive today’s market can be, can your business stand out and reach out to many potential customers? The answer lies in the way you’ll promote your brand. Powerful and effective marketing in the 21st century should be comprised of these two factors: the traditional and the innovative approaches.
If your goal is to skyrocket your sales, here are eight tips for effective marketing that will get you there fast:
1) Personalize Your Brand
One of the basic tenets of effective marketing is determining who your target audience is. By doing so, you can personalize their experience of your brand and potentially lift your business results in the future.
The power of personalization starts with spending time doing competitor and market research to identify your potential customers and your existing competition, how they market similar products, and if the marketplace is swamped or not.
Here are some things that you should take into account when personalizing your brand:
- Build Emotional Connection To Your Brand
A brand that your audience will identify with—this is the goal. Get to know your audience by the way they engage in their social media platforms.
A traditional way of building emotional connection, for example, is when a restaurant owner would personally ask some of their customers for their feedback on the food that they’ve been served.
Getting personal with your consumers is fundamental in effective marketing. Double your sales by incorporating the traditional touch to a digital marketing approach by knowing your potential customers through their social media engagements.
- Don’t Work Against Your Brand Perception
Avoid getting too far from your market’s perception. If your brand is supposed to be eco-friendly or vegan-friendly, make sure that your products will always reflect such an advocacy.
2) Build Rapport Through Email And SMS
Start by adding a banner with an invitation for email subscription to your business on your website; this will help build your email list. You can also ask for their contact numbers so you can reach them easily in both channels.
If you want to save time and make things easier, you can send an email and have it received as an SMS. This enables you to interact with customers using the communication that is almost always read, no matter where they are at or what they are doing.
Utilize both email marketing automation and text blast software, for instance, to increase conversion rate exponentially. How is this possible? Well, email marketing automation will focus more on customers who often use their mobile Internet, whereas SMS marketing engages with a larger audience who only owns SMS-capable phones.
You can build rapport by sending timed promotional emails or texts to your customer list. Be sure that the content that you share with them are relevant to their interests. Also, you can record a ringless voicemail message with providers such as Drop Cowboy to reach more audience without disturbing them.
3) Improve Your Customer Support System
Never forget that your previous and existing customers matter. Long-term success will depend on how long you can retain your old customers and gather new potential customers.
Improving your customer support system can be done in three simple ways:
- Hire the right people to be present in all channels, and who can give timely response to customers, whether it be via social media, email, phone, or your official website.
- Make sure you’re there for everyone, even to those who just started to show interest in the products or services you offer.
- Help your existing customers solve problems they encounter. If they’re unhappy, try to offer them a refund or a small gift to compensate for their bad experience.
- Develop a cart recovery system that will follow-up with customers that have abandoned their carts. Life happens, so it’s important to remind people about their pending purchase.
4) Build Marketing Partnerships
Explore and utilize any potential marketing partnerships that can further expand your business. It’s recommended that you choose partnership opportunities that are beneficial to both parties involved.
Through marketing partnerships, you have the potential to expose your brand to a new audience. Start collaborating with individuals or other small businesses who share your brand perception, but aren’t directly your competitors. Remember, the goal here is to build alliances.
For instance, find your complementary niche, like how a small business selling sunglasses can potentially partner with a sunscreen brand. Develop your business connections and start expanding your audience exponentially.
5) Make Your Website Appealing
With the rise of the digital world comes an innovative approach on marketing. Make sure to reexamine how you handle your online engagements, especially your official website since it’s the face of your business. It has to be appealing, responsive, and easy to navigate.
Here are some things that you can do to make your website appealing:
- Improve Your Landing Pages
If your potential customers don’t like what they first see on your website, chances are they won’t continue doing any business with you. Spend a little more time making your web design more user-friendly and one that loads up at lightning speed.
Also, optimize your landing page that can have an immediate impact on converting readers to take more action. Simply put, your focus should make a reader from your landing page click on a link that will lead them to another page of your website, which can probably be a page of other products or services you sell.
- Produce High-Quality Content
One of the best ways to drag traffic into your website is through content marketing. As one of the most powerful marketing strategies, effective blogging should focus more on the quality of your content rather than quantity. Create engaging and brand-enriching content that will gain you attention, help build trust, and keep your interested users informed.
Also, you can promote your business by link building through quality guest blogging. Through ads found in blog posts, you can remarket your product by making sure that the link your customers click can take them back to your website or a product you’re selling. If you can, add a buy button for the products you mention on your blog posts.
- Invest In SEO And Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Keywords is crucial to keep your business relevant. By investing in search engine optimization, you can get your website featured on the first page of search results. Invest in tools that can help you find high-ROI keywords, which can drive high-quality leads directly to your website.
If you’re having trouble learning SEO, then you can opt to invest in pay-per-click advertising instead. This will ensure that your website will stay on top of search engines and can potentially produce great return on investment. Take a look at the photo below to see how pay-per-click advertising works in a Google search engine.
6) Boost Social Media Influence
Recent innovative marketing strategies define social media as the most reliable tool for brand promotion. By boosting your social media influence, you can connect with your customers more at an intimate level. Keep your social media profiles alive by posting relevant content regularly and engaging with your customers through games or challenges, wherein they’re encouraged to participate.
Other ways to boost your social media influence include:
- Partnering with social media influencers is an option. However, be careful on choosing them. Assess their types of engagement shoutouts and how they’ll share your products.
- Leverage on video marketing by creating unique videos that are relevant to your brand and appeal to your target audience. Post them on your website, social media channels, and other large video channels, like YouTube, Vimeo, and Metcafe.
- Add customer reviews on your website and social media, and don’t forget to tag them so they get shared more often.
- Also, don’t forget to add posts on your social media profiles on any new blog posts, products, or discounts that your business is offering.
7) Build A Mobile App
For business owners with larger budget, creating a mobile app can be a great investment. In fact, 62% of smartphone users have made online purchases via their mobile devices in the last six months. Take advantage of this by building a mobile app that can get people absorbed with your brand’s environment.
Remember, the goal of building a mobile app is to let your customers envision that they own your products. Develop it properly by making sure it’s user-friendly.
This option is perfect for businesses who sell numerous products, like an online furniture or clothing store. With the help of a mobile app, it becomes easier for prospective clients to visualize your offerings with them.
8) Be Consistent
The most basic yet most effective marketing strategy, consistency establishes the trust of your customers to your brand. If you’re consistent with your branding and how you manage your customers, it leads to a long-term success for brand recognition. You may not hit big with your first product or post, but if you stick with it by being consistent on the marketing activities you engage with, eventually, you’ll get to see positive results.
Are You Ready To Boost Your Sales?
Arm yourself with effective marketing tips outlined above and transform your business into one of the most trusted brands in your target marketplace. Remember to set your marketing campaign goal and make sure it can fit a realistic budget.
If you’re ready to boost your sales, start with establishing your brand and personalizing your customers’ experience. Incorporate traditional and innovative approaches to your marketing strategies. Plan ahead, get to know your audience well, and keep in mind that long-term success in business can take some time and, above all else, requires consistency.
