Member Article

Marketing tips for businesses.

Never underestimate the power marketing will have on the success of your business.

Make marketing your business: Consider it as part of your business strategy from the start. Every business, however big or small needs a robust and clear marketing strategy from the beginning to drive it forward. Successfully getting your product or service out to your customer base is as important as the product itself. Marketing innovation is crucial to the continuing success of any organisation.

Get good at marketing early on. As a CEO, consider it to be one of your core competencies. If you are not a natural born marketeer, learn how to become one. Communicate with your customers. Listen to what they want and need from you or your product. Know what your marketing needs are. For example, learn copywriting skills. You are the expert on your subject, share that expertise in blog posts. Create content. Think about what content works for your audience. Do they ingest information visually by video, aurally by podcast or verbally via articles? Consider social media content. Make your product real for your customers. When creating content ask yourself what would make someone buy your product. Tailor your content to that. Work out what marketing channels are growing your customer base and concentrate on those. It is often wise to concentrate on two channels to begin with. Social media channels have different audiences and uses. For example, a fashion business is going to perform better on instagram than any other channel.

Existing companies can still revamp their marketing strategies. If you are an existing company it is not too late to reassess your marketing strategy. Businesses everywhere are resetting. Take your business back to basics, find out what is working and what is not. Rebuild it from the inside out. Allocating time to work on your business rather than in your business is key to growth. When you are at a stage to hire experts, choose someone who has a proven track record in that area. If you are hiring experts, do not just choose the cheapest, pick the best you can afford. It is a false economy to buy in less experience for more time.

Analytics and why they are so important. Keep assessing where the strengths in your marketing strategy are. How many people visited your site, how long did they stay, what was the conversion rate and most importantly where did these customers come from? Then you can start allocating money to maximise these areas and grow your customer/client base. Keep learning about marketing. It is constantly evolving. Do not get left behind. Allocate some of your time per week to listening to business growth podcasts or go to ‘YouTube University’ and learn what is fresh and new in the marketing world. Some of what you learn you will be able to apply to your own business. Ultimately marketing will produce leads which will turn into sales to drive the profit of your business. A product or service without customers or clients will fail. Marketing is a tool to educate your customers on the product. This means less time needs to go into sales pitches. Through clever marketing content your customer base will already know what they need to know about your product. Marketing does the selling for you.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Lucy Hood .