Photo by William Iven

Originally Posted On: https://www.letsbegamechangers.com/business/key-ways-to-enhance-your-businesss-marketing-potential/

 

Businesses, big and small, all rely on marketing to get the word out regarding their products and services to their target customers. For big businesses, marketing their products is easier since they can allocate more resources for their marketing plan. However, the same cannot be said about small and medium businesses.

Businesses that have just started out or are just planning to reach out to more customers often have limited budget and resources to execute their marketing plan.

If you’re one of those businesses who are finding ways to market their products or services better, here are some ways to enhance your business’s marketing potential.

1. Evaluate Your Business

Before you plan your marketing strategy, it’s best to first evaluate your business. Gather the data that you have available. For example, what are the demographics of your customers? What are the suggestions or feedback from your customers regarding your customer service or products? If you have more data, like analytics on the source of your website’s traffic, then that would be better.

Evaluating these data and fixing them first is essential in improving the experience of your customers. For example, does your business have a local phone number or a toll-free number that customers can call for questions? A professional phone presence is essential so people feel are at ease since they know they’re dealing with professionals. If you’re using a personal phone to deal with your business’ deals, then people might get the impression that they’re dealing with newbies and it could be detrimental for your business.

There are many options to address this issue. The easiest is to get your personal phone to be used as a professional phone through an application like call cowboy. This will allow you to streamline your business’ marketing plans, which include the use of phones to contact customers. Apart from that, your customers will also have a professional phone number that they can contact.

Knowing the demographics of your customers also allows you to adjust your marketing plan appropriately to better cater to their taste. This way, you can reach out to them and suggest other products that they might also be interested in.

Knowing how your current customers were reached can also help you determine which marketing plans were working and you need to develop. Based on these data, you can adjust your marketing plan accordingly.

2. Keep your Clients Up to Date

Businesses have to keep their clients up to date with the events in their brands or businesses to get more people to come and consider the event successful. For the most part, social media is currently the place to reach the younger generation. However, if you’re targeting an older audience, contacting them directly is a more effective way.

If your target audience is not adept at using social media, you’ll have more chances of communicating with them directly using the mainstream print media, which could cost you a lot. However, through the use of technology, you can now send a mass text to your loyal and valued clients and potential customers to keep them up to date with your events or informing them of current discount sales and more.

Contacting them via email through email marketing can also be effective if done right. The key is to get them to subscribe and enter their email address for your email list. To get them to do this, you can give out free things like tips, a seat for a webinar, or access to any ebook that you wrote.

Constant communication through email may eventually make the potential client buy your product or service.

3. Make Your Business Known In The Community

There are many ways that you can make your business’ presence known to more potential customers in your local area or other venues. The first thing that you can do is get your business ranked in Google My Business (GMB). What GMB does is put all your google profiles and listings in one place. This includes your Google profiles in Google +, Google maps, reviews, and all other accessible Google data.

All of this information combined will determine your rank in Google My Business. If you rank in the top three, your business name will be displayed by Google’s searches when people look for services or products that you offer in your area. Ranking in the top will also boost your business’ integrity and credibility, too. It’s also a great way to get more clients to know about your business without spending too much on marketing efforts.

To get better in touch with your community, it would also be helpful to join local business groups. This will allow you to get to know more people sharing the same passion for business. Meeting these people will also allow you to make connections and find more opportunities to partner and collaborate with brands that can complement yours.

Collaborating with brands that complement your product or services allow you to get more exposure and reach out to more potential clients. Both brands and businesses can also find a way to cater to both their audiences that’ll benefit everyone involved.

There are many opportunities to be explored and there are no limits to the possibilities as long as you can find a creative way to collaborate.

4. Respond on Social Media

These days, businesses and brands all have social media accounts in all major social media platforms to communicate and talk to their audience. Social media really has become the place to promote your brand and keep customers informed of any upcoming events or discount sales. Indeed, social media is a powerful tool and knowing how to use it can greatly affect your business’ sales.

For the most part, many businesses often fail in growing their social media following because they use the platform just for promotion. They don’t use it to communicate with their followers and they don’t respond at all.

These days, people spend a lot of time on social media and they often use it to give feedback on negative experiences regarding a brand or a business. This is the age of call-out culture where people blast celebrities, people, companies, and businesses for what customers perceive as a negative experience.

So, when a customer complains on social media about your brand or business, it’s essential that you respond in a timely manner to communicate with them. Whether the response is going to be helpful or not, is not that necessary. According to research, 33% of people who experienced a timely response regardless of whether the response was helpful would still recommend the business to a friend.

Communicating with customers on social media, then, is important but it shouldn’t be just one-way. You also have to respond to the comments, suggestions, and even complains of your social media followers. This way, they know that they’re heard when they speak to you, making your business more professional.

5. Continue To Produce Quality Content

Content marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies. In fact, 86% of businesses use content marketing to reach their customers. Although content marketing takes time and effort to make, it’s worthwhile. It’s also capable of bringing in more leads and potential customers in the long-term.

To make a content that would be effective to use for marketing purposes, it’s imperative that it’s timely, relevant, SEO optimized and most importantly, it must be good enough so readers actually finish reading or looking at the content until the end.

Content doesn’t need to be in the form of articles or blog posts. You can also do videos, podcasts, webinars, and more. As long as you’re sharing information that are relevant and timely for your audience.

If you’re already doing these, you can also try guest posting on other authority blogs. If you’re doing vlogs or video blogs, you can also guest on other vlogs or even podcasts. Collaborating on making content will also help you expand your audience and create more varied content with other content creators.

If you’re given opportunities to speak at events or seminars to share your thoughts, it would be best for you take these opportunities as they’re avenues that allow you to expand your audience and spread the word about your brand and business.

Conclusion:

Enhancing your business’ marketing potential is an unending process that you have to do. As a business owner, it’s imperative that you do your research and keep a pulse on the new ways you can enhance your relationship with your customers and improve their experience.

Keeping track of which marketing plan is more effective in reaching new customers or leads is also important. This way, you can eliminate the ones that don’t produce results so you can save money. The money saved can be spent elsewhere, either create a new marketing strategy or spend more on the strategy that’s already producing positive results.

In the end, different businesses have different marketing strategy that works for them. There’s no marketing plan that fits all businesses. So, as a business owner, you have to be creative and don’t stop trying until you find the best marketing plan that suits the nature of your business. When you find the best plan that suits your business, continue to re-evaluate it and modify it so it is up to date on the new trends that can help your business.