Marketing today is different than it was a few decades ago. It’s not about just reaching the masses anymore through radio advertisements, screen time, and billboards. Now, you’ve got email lists, blogs, and social media to take care of to make sure you’re a presence worth noticing.
If you’re a little lost on figuring out how to market yourself, then take a look at these ten marketing tips we have for you and see if they can’t set you on the right path.
Marketing Tip #1 – Think of the Customer
The absolute golden rule, and yet sometimes it seems so hard to follow. You’ve got your ideas on how things should be done and that’s great–you’re entitled to your own tastes and opinions. But you’re not selling to yourself, so plan to market your business as what the target demographic wants and not what you think your company is. There is a big difference between the two.
2. Keep a Finger on the Pulse
Pay attention to what’s going on in the world. A great example here from somewhere long ago: if you’re a camping store and there’s a recession going on, advertise your budget brands and money saving gear. Likewise, if a new technology has emerged that can make you more efficient then embrace it, even if it means change.
3. Buyer Personas are the Holy Grail
How do you get to know what the customer wants? You get to know the customer, that’s how. Put research and resources into figuring out exactly who your customer is and what they want from you, and then make those buyer personas the staple of every project from then on. Just make sure you keep updating them.
4. Train Your Team
It’s not enough to be self-sufficient anymore—you have to be efficiently self-sufficient. Make some room in the budget for training courses for your employees to teach them the best practices for marketing. That’ll save you both time and money in the long run, especially when you consider the money saved by not bringing in consultants or hiring additional workers.
5. Get Your Blog Interactive
Like we’ll discuss in the social media section a bit further down, you want to be an interactive entity with your online marketing. You want people coming to your blog for information, but you also want them to interact with it by posting comments or connecting them to a forum where they can openly discuss the industry. Become a portal for interaction, and your blog is the best way to do it.
6. SEO Is the Best EO
It’s ever-changing but it’s ever-present, so it’s time to learn about it, SEO is a must-have in your marketing. Everyone uses Google, and you have a website that Google can list in its search results. Your goal is to get your name up to the top of the search results page and not in the annoy-blogs of pages two and down. To do that, you need to maintain best SEO practices for everything you do on your site from indexing to content generation. SEO training would roughly be near the top of the list of what all of your employees should have.
7. Keep in Touch Now, Ya Hear?
Social media is the new way to make a presence. Gone are the days of billboard posts and faceless names, and now every company that does business with the general public has social media professionals perpetuating their brand through community interaction 24/7. It works, and it’s absolutely free marketing.
8. The Gift of Giving
Reward your subscribers for being a part of your email list. Send out exclusive emails offering promotions and behind-the-scenes content every so often to keep them interested in your site for more than just your business. Perks, rewards, giveaways, competitions; anything and everything is an incentive.
9. Get Google on Your Team
Sign up with Google Places if you haven’t already. Don’t argue, just do it. It’s a free SEO boost, plain and simple.
10. Make Your Business Be a Person
Businesses went through a parabolic evolution over the decades. The mid-1900s saw mom and pop shops with spunky advice-giving owners who spawned some of the most famous TV shows of all time. Thirty years later hit the mega marts and the Giga stores and suddenly businesses were buildings that gave you stuff in exchange for money. Now, with the aid of social media and the internet, businesses are back to being entities you can interact with and joke around with. It’s a warmer time and people respond to personable businesses, so do what you can to make it that.
There are tons of tips and tricks that can help you gain an edge in marketing, but these ten are some of the foundational rules that almost every successful marketing campaign employs. If you get a hang of these, you’ll see your relationship with your customers grow better than you ever thought possible.
