Marketing is so important, without it you simply won’t make enough sales to sustain your business. You might have a fantastic company that sells products and services that people love, but you need the right promotion for them to be able to find you (and reason to choose you over your competitors). Here’s what you need to know.
Content marketing
These days, as marketers our efforts need to be smart. It’s just not enough to put a big flashing banner under someone’s nose or spam links at them, all this will do is make your company look amatuer and annoying. Instead, you need to be more subtle, and content marketing allows you to do just this. It’s not designed to push an ad or product, and instead is material created to inform, amuse or generally provide something that people want to read anyway. From there, you add a link or a mention to the product or service you’re selling and allow the customer to check this out themselves, as additional info. It’s a much less aggressive approach to advertising and is one area you should be investing in in marketing, because as a reader you don’t feel as though you’re reading an ad that’s desperate for custom.
Door to door marketing
Canvassing, or door to door marketing is considered an ‘older’ marketing method these days, and many modern businesses tend to overlook it since it can be more time consuming and expensive than other methods. However, for some companies it’s still a great way to go about things, if you’re selling a high-value product then you only need to make a few sales to cover your costs. It’s useful for products that are more expensive and may require a little more explaining. It’s the reason that double glazing companies and similar often use this tactic.
Social media marketing
Research has shown time and time again that social sites aren’t actually people’s preferred ways to buy, but many businesses make the mistake of using them in this way. This doesn’t mean you can neglect your social media as it’s still incredibly useful when it comes to marketing, Instead of spamming links and trying to make hard sells, social networking sites should be used for increasing brand awareness and building buzz around your company. You should run competitions and games to encourage interaction with your customers, and make your businesses feel warm and welcoming. Of course, have a link to your shop and share things like customer reviews of your products, but don’t use it to try and target people into buying as it can come across as a little desperate.
Flyers and posters
This is another type of advertising which is overlooked as we do live in a very digital age these days. But again, it all depends on the kind of business that you run. For example if your company only sells to people in your local area then you won’t want to spend your entire marketing budget promoting across the internet. Instead, a few well placed posters and flyers can grab people’s attention and bring in new custom. As with any kind of marketing, it needs to be done correctly if you’re going to make it worth your while. For many kinds of businesses, especially those run online this won’t be the best option.
Hire a marketing agency
Marketing is complex, it’s not something you can just guess at. If you don’t understand how specific techniques work then simply ‘having a go’ could cause more harm than good. Poorly executed marketing can not only turn off customers but also get you banned with the likes of Google if you’re inadvertently using banned methods. Hire a marketing agency who will be skilled in all forms of outbound and inbound marketing, and different techniques that suit your particular company.