5 Ways To Improve Your Marketing Strategy
As a growing business, it is essential to continually review, revise and improve your marketing strategy so as to meet up with the changing market conditions.
Remember, sales and marketing are two sensitive and important components for achieving success in your organization.
The alignment of these two aspects of business will go a long way to determining how well your company attracts and sells to potential customers.
Here are some ideas that you can use to improve your business marketing strategy for the overall purpose of generating more sales:
Define your marketing goals
Start out by defining SMART marketing goals (specific, measurable, achievable, result-focused and time bound) for your business.
Your improved marketing strategy should be aligned with your key business goals; and it should use market, competitor and consumer insights to present the plans in the context of what they will deliver to your business.
Set important milestone for measuring the success of your marketing endeavors at different stages of implementation.
This implies that you must have already identified a clear means of measuring success. So, what does success mean to your business? More sales, more enquiries, more subscriptions, more website visits, etc.?
And be sure to avoid the temptation of setting unrealistic objectives.
Have a marketing budget
At the center of your marketing strategy should be a well thought out marketing budget.
Your marketing budget is an estimated cost of how much it will cost you or how much you are willing to spend to get your customers and potential customers aware of your products and services.
Depending on the needs, capacity and willingness, marketing budgets vary across industries.
Don’t divert your marketing cost to other sales funnels or day-to-day costs of running the business. Maintain it.
And equally important is the allocation of this scarce resource into the right marketing channels and the percentages to allocate to each channel, whether online or offline.
Carefully research where your target customers are and the best channels to reach them. This will guide you accordingly on how best o allocate your marketing budget.
Have a customer database
This is a golden rule. Build a database for reconnecting with your customers. It allows you to communicate consistently with them; strengthening their confidence; and encouraging them to move toward a sale.
Important details including email addresses, phone nos. and other relevant information should be contained in your database.
Don’t make the mistake of assuming that the only way to improve sales is to find new customers.
It’s much easier to get an existing customer to buy from you than to convince a new customer to take the plunge. And the way to reach your existing customers is by using your database.
Use your website to generate leads
Typically, most small businesses don’t know how to make use of their online presence for generating new leads. In fact, many businesses never care to update the content on their sites following the initial setup.
Whether your business is online or brick and mortar, you can use online marketing and social media to stay in touch with your customers and prospects.
At the very least, you should have an appealing and informative company website. I’m still amazed at how many people don’t even put a phone number or email address on their site.
Aim to turn your website visitors into customers. Write helpful articles regularly. Help your customers to make informed decisions and you’ll be amazed at the results – wider awareness, increased trust, easier referrals, and more sales!
Take advantage of free marketing
Free marketing is possible. The advent of social media sites present the most lucrative free marketing opportunities.
Create a Facebook page and start a Twitter account.
Then, consistently update your social media accounts with shareable or share-worthy content and you will be surprised at how effective these marketing channels can be for generating more leads.
My advice to all business owners is to stop doing marketing the old way. Get involved and committed. You will surely reap the rewards.
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