10 Steps To Market Your Business Like A Pro

You can’t sell anything if you can’t tell anything

~ Beth Comstock

Wise words by Beth Comstock and they really home in on the significance of marketing in the modern business world. Marketing is a conveyer that takes your business to its target audience. Without marketing, there’s very little chance of growth and scaling beyond your present boundaries. However, it isn’t that straightforward. You can’t expect the strategies that work for a multinational behemoth, work for you as well(provided you can afford to implement them).

Marketing is about playing on your strengths, strutting your stuff and at the same time, making your audience feel valued. If you’re a startup entrepreneur and struggling to get your marketing act together, this blog is for you. You’ll learn some of the most effective hacks in marketing and how to move things at a rapid pace without losing ground to your competition. So let’s dive in straight into the guide:

1. Know When The Timing Is Right

The early days of the business are exciting. You’re full of energy and optimism. But what most businesses do wrong at this stage is get ahead of themselves. They try incredibly hard to attract more customers and acquire more clients. There’s everything wrong with that approach. Before you can even think about growth and expansion, you need to take a hard look at your current situation. How much staff do you have? What are your key resources? Can you afford to take more work without ensuring any quality compromise? Clients at this point come few and far between and if they’re not getting what they pay for, you risk hurting your reputation. Also, an overworked staff is going to get iffy about its orientation.

2. Create Buyer’s Personas

There will obviously come a time you’ll feel the outside world needs to hear a thing or two about what your business is doing. That’s when you’ll turn to social media. But before you do that, you’ll want to study your target audience’s behaviour and preferences. Once you have that information, you can better decide how to present your services to them. LinkedIn remains the ideal choice for finding B2B clients, whereas for the general public, Social Media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram prove to be the most effective.

3. Weave A Web Of Your Presence Online

You can create all the buzz on the social media but it’ll be to no avail if you haven’t got a comprehensive online presence. By that I mean, a website and one or two landing pages. That will ensure there’s an end to your efforts. If people really like what you’re doing, they’ll want to find out more about you and a website will serve exactly that purpose. Make sure your website has detailed information about your business, services offered by you, and an online buying store where they can make the purchase.

4. Take Baby Steps Before Going Big

You can’t hope to market your business to every person on the planet. Marketing needs to be done in a planned and concerted manner. Take small and steady steps by selecting a decent sized area/audience that you can effectively target and have success with. As you begin to get the hang of the things and learn how people react to your marketing, you can plan to target a somewhat bigger audience next time.

5. Call Upon Tech When Needed

There are countless things going on in a business and if you’d try to perform each one of them manually, you’ll end up winding yourself with fatigue and indecision. That’s where businesses should look to flex the technology muscle. At the very least you should automate the most basic and recurring tasks mainly Social media Management, online purchases etc. Then you can set alerts for whenever your brand is mentioned on the internet. This will allow you to immediately respond to that curious question or comment made by someone about your business.

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6. Offer Free, Informative Content

Whatever it is you’re doing in your business, there’s always something that you can share with your audience. Say, if run a technology company, you can showcase your inventions and describe how they make people’s lives easier. Or you could also offer your say on the current state of technology and where new innovations might come from in the near future. By creating and circulating your message, tips and suggestions in the form of blog, videos and graphics etc. you’ll attract vast number of followers. These same people can then pass on information to others and you avail the benefit of ‘word of mouth marketing’. This can drastically increase your audience reach.

7. Generate Excitement With Contests

Contests work great for creating some buzz about your business. With social media, it’s easier than ever before. Businesses employ a very cunning tactic of encouraging tweets and shares from users in promise of some lucrative or grand prize. You will no doubt have to be careful about the terms and conditions of the platform used for the contests as acting counter to them can get you into unwanted trouble. So play by the platform’s rules and ensure your prize is big enough to get people excited about it.

8. Go Out Network

Networking has become a sort of byword for growth. Indeed, in the business world, it can prove to be a game-changer. That’s why entrepreneurs should look to attend local events and conferences where they have a chance of meeting various industry experts and other influential personalities. There’s a good chance that they may refer you to people who are looking for products and services offered by you.

9. Create Email List

Email marketing is, without a doubt, an effective form of marketing. Once you start getting people making online purchases on your website, you can think about collecting their email addresses. But it has to done very subtly as people are reluctant about sharing their personal details. Make it clear that, you’ll only be contacting them to send information related to special offers or new product updates and releases. Once you’ve got a long enough list of emails, you can consider segmentation. This will allow you to send curated message with a care for customer’s taste and preferences.

10. Listen To Your Customers & Revisit

Your initial marketing efforts will either pay dividends or teach you a few lessons along the way. No need to worry if things didn’t turn out as you were expecting them to. See it as a learning curve that you can improve your skills upon. In any business, customers are of prime importance. You need to learn about their needs and how better you can go about fulfilling them. If your customers are happy, there’s no reason why your business won’t succeed. Marketing really is a never-ending process. You work so hard to establish a reputation and then you have to work even harder to maintain that.

Final Thoughts

So that concludes the blog. The basics of marketing aren’t really that complex to understand. Your efforts should be concentrated around offering premium customer service and backing that with excellent products and services. Keep repeating that and your customer base is bound to grow. I hope this blog helped you get a better understanding of where you stand and what needs to be done to get your marketing act together. Share your thoughts and opinions in the comment section below: