Ten Key Principles You Can Use to Improve your Marketing Score.
1) Maintain an Online Presence
Having a website is imperative to marketing. An online presence no matter what size of your business or how long you have been in business is required to remain relevant. All your customers are online and all your competitors have a website. You have many choices in achieving this affordably and with high quality, you can have a do it yourself website for which you maintain control, or you can have a custom designed website.
2) Check Your Website Analytics
A well designed website is not all that is required to market your business on the internet, you need a search engine optimized website, you can tell if your website is search engine optimized by doing a simple search on Google for a term your website should appear for, for example if you own a bakery, you should come up for the term bakery + your town. There are many tools you can use to check your analytics, you can hire someone to monitor your website analytics for you or you can do it yourself using a tool such as WordTracker or Google Analytics.
3) Facebook Business Pages
Facebook has overtaken the world, everybody and their mama is on facebook. You want to fish where the fishes are. You would be hard pressed to find a successful business on facebook that is not utilizing a custom Facebook page. A facebook page represents your business and can be used to showcase your work and grow your audience. Visit our facebook page and see how we have customized our introduction to promote our Blog.
4) Attend weekly or monthly Networking Events
People do business with people they know and feel comfortable with. So get out there and make it a goal to attend a few networking events per month, bring your marketing tools, business card, promotional products and handouts and build relationships and connections and let the world know all about you and your business.
5) Communicate weekly via a Newsletter or Blog
Maintaining a presence and being top of mind, is one of the reasons you want to maintain a Newsletter or Blog, by being a constant, and a good source for reliable information your clients or potential clients will always know where to go for their products and services, and bonus even though they may not need your service today, they may need it tomorrow and they will also be able to refer their friends and contacts to you.
6) Identify your Niche Market / Target market
Knowing your Niche Market / Target Market is Key to success. If you don’t know who you are looking for how will you find them? Know who your target customer is and advertise where they are, what groups are they attending? What Facebook groups are they a member of? What websites are they reading?
7) Clearly identify your Competitors
Knowing who your competitors are is a key principle to increasing your marketing score, and enabling you to reach more customers. Know your competition intimately. If you own a bakery then you NEED to know who the other bakeries in your town are. What are their specialties and price points? Where are they located, what special offers are they presenting? Are they sending out special offers via newsletter? Are they promoting their business on Facebook? By knowing these things you can see how you can capitalize on your competition, stand out from the crowd and get more customers.
8. Have a measurable marketing goal
A measureable marketing goal can help you to extend your reach, for example is your goal to get a specific number of orders, a specific number of new website visitors or a specific number of email subscribers? These specific type goals can help you laser target your customers and achieve your marketing goals.
9) Have a written Marketing Plan
Just as with a Business Plan, a Marketing plan helps you pull together all of the above principles and goals, it is a document that can be as simple or advanced as you like, it should state what your marketing goals are and how you plan to achieve them, just as a road map is required to get to a place you have never been before, a Marketing plan can take your business to places it has never been before.
10) Have a marketing budget and checking your return on investment.
With all the seemingly limitless ways to market your business that exists, and you can read all about them on our blog ts-bs.com/blog, many of these methods can be absolutely free and some cost money, so once you have created your marketing plan, decide on what it will cost you to achieve your marketing goals, and set aside those funds. Once your marketing budget is set, for example if you’ve decided to attend tradeshows as a maketing method then you must check your return on investment. You can do this for example by setting up custom landing pages for specific events or promotions or provide specific coupon codes to track where your visitors are coming from. Also ask your new customers where did they learn about your company, with this information in hand you can successfully allocate money to the right marketing avenues.
Bonus Tip:Increase your marketing score by increasing your knowledge and strategies, and using the right tools, Tristate Business Solutions provides a compelling and fresh approach to marketing. You can’t afford to miss this, sign up for our newsletter or feed and be in the ‘know’.