Marketing helps your business to maintain a good relationship with customers by making you remain relevant. This limits your options. Having options is comparable to having a nice war chest. Having options will give you the courage you need to penetrate new markets. You will have the freedom to start letting go of customers who are too demanding to your sanity and well-being. Without marketing, you will be forced to continue working with clients who you have outgrown and are paying you peanuts.
Every business is confronted with problems such as to what, when, for whom and how much to produce. As a result, businesses heavily rely on marketing mechanisms to make these decisions. Why should you rely on marketing mechanisms? These mechanisms serve as a reliable link between your business and society. The only way to gain a competitive advantage over your competition is aggressive marketing. Simply conduct research on what your target market is expecting, and then find ways to deliver better products or services.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Hassan Mansoor. Learn how to publish your content on B2C. Being a small entrepreneur, He successfully executed many digital marketing campaigns for startups, boost online traffic, and business growth.
He has a considerable experience in online marketing and business development. Join over , of your peers and receive our weekly newsletter which features the top trends, news and expert analysis to help keep you ahead of the curve.
The best of B2C in your inbox every Monday Sign up now. Toggle navigation Business 2 Community. Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flipboard 2. Perhaps the simplest and most important benefit of marketing is the most surface-level one. Effective marketing will boost your sales. Sometimes you can get so obsessed with all the secondary effects you are trying to create that you forget to look at the simple sales figures.
More marketing platforms spring up every year, and many of them will be worth your time. Decide where your target demographics spend the most time, and advertise in those places.
Run promotions that show off your merchandise. Whatever you decide to do, make it creative, and make it visible. People like working with and purchasing products from companies that seem empathetic and human.
People do not like dealing with stiff, robotic, automated customer service machines or out-of-touch ads that seem to have little to no understanding of current trends. Do not present yourself as a faceless organization who has an unwavering facade of professionalism unless that is absolutely necessary. Instead, run your social media accounts and advertising campaigns as if you are an individual.
Some people will see through the facade, but as long as it comes from a place of genuine caring, your customers will be appreciative. Once you have run your marketing campaigns and have begun gathering data on what your customers respond the best to, you can analyze that data to decide the best steps for your company in the future. You will likely have some idea of the kinds of products that your customers respond to, so you should try to expand your business based on that information if you have the means to do so.
Many small business owners are always looking for ways to expand, and if you are ambitious, it could benefit you to be looking for ways to expand as well. Marketing is arguably the most important part of running a business. After all, even if you have a product to sell, you will not be able to sell it unless people know that it is available.
If you are a small entrepreneur without a formal education or a staff of employees, like many people are, these tips are a great way to start on your journey of learning how to market your company. Small businesses are vital to local economies because of the competition and sense of community they provide, so never underestimate how important your business may be to the business ecosystem.
Once the content has been finalized, the search engine crawlers also need time to digest and rank the content. Over time great content will rise in the rankings. The key to strong content ROI is creating a content marketing strategy that really understands your target market, what they want to read, and where they want to consume this content. Your ROI is maximized when a strong content marketing strategy is created for your target audience.
When you understand more about who you are speaking to, you can create content that exactly targets the questions they are looking online for answers to. There are a growing number of studies showing the importance of content marketing to business growth. Over half are reading content marketing titles at least monthly. As a business, you win when you respond to what the market is saying it wants. It wants great custom content that answers their questions about your product or service.
It wants valuable information to help them at each stage of the buying cycle. Valuable information is provided through content that is judged as high-quality by the search engines. Having Expertise can be defined as having suitable credentials. For example, a certified nutritionist writing an informative article about proper diet. Authority would be defined by the quality of the content, how detailed it gets, and how well written it is.
Lastly, Trust pertains to the validation of the information given, whether that is through citations, links to customer service information, or simply the volume of expert content on the website. Trust is built over time.
Ensuring that your content covers all of these areas is a sure way to get rewarded by Google and increase chances of giving your audience content that is likely to get noticed. Today there are so many opportunities to create content — through blogging, Youtube, or over social — to educate and entertain consumers in showing them what your business is all about.
So go ahead and get going: show your personality and why your business is a great place to do business. Consumers read your content, and from it, gain an understanding about your business, your values as a company, your brand. As they read, they form opinions, and will align with your brand if they like how you are presenting yourself. Your brand comes to life for them. Developing great content builds your business reputation over time. Of course, once you start, you need to maintain consistency with content creation.
The trust you build helps your business establish a positive brand reputation. This can keep you top of mind when the consumer is ready to buy. In addition, when your leads and customers start to see that you are consistently publishing content across platforms, they may come to see you as a leader in the industry. Publishing content through third-party publications or sharing your content with influencers can also help you further build trust within your target market.
These are powerful reasons to nail your content marketing. It is a way of identifying and qualifying a sales lead, understanding the stage of the buying process that they are at, developing strategies to move them ever closer to the sale, and quantifying them at each stage in order to develop your sales forecast.
A new language has evolved when we talk about the marketing funnel. Imagine a funnel with lots of opportunities going in at the wide mouth end of the funnel, and a lower number of sales coming out the bottom end. In other words, you need many leads to produce one sale in any given period of time. We break this funnel into 3 regions for simplicity: Top, middle and bottom of the funnel. Content marketing is used to nurse them through the funnel to produce a sale.
At the TOFU stage, prospective customers are identifying a problem that they need to solve and begin their research for solutions. Here, we create content to educate them, and provide them with information to help them understand which type of solution is best for their problem.
Great content during this stage of the funnel educates leads on their various options. We nurture them as leads so they can narrow their options and come closer to a final purchasing decision. At this stage leads are ready to convert, or make a decision on what option is the best match for their problem. Some buyers at this stage just need a little push, which could be in the form of a special offer, discount, or promotion. At this stage the sales team is most involved, so content must align with what they need to close the sale.
To get a better understanding of content in each stage of the funnel, take a look at this graphic that shows the best content for the top, middle and bottom of the funnel:.
When creating great content for each stage of the marketing funnel, you want to be reaching the largest number of potential customers at each stage.
Prospects at the top of the funnel need general information that addresses the problem they need to solve and that helps them better understand challenges and potential solutions. The middle of the funnel leads want more detailed information that helps them to understand and evaluate their options.
While leads at the bottom of the funnel need content based on sales input, which provide motivation and incentive to select your offering within the current timeline.
Follow this recipe and then watch your analytics guide you to the logical next step in content marketing! In order to truly conceptualize who you are talking to with the content you create, you must first understand exactly who they are. Figuring this out is made easy with data and analytics. By looking at data, you can get a good visual behind the demographics of your website visitors. From there, a detailed interview should be conducted with the sales team to confirm in detail the types of people who are the typical or ideal customer.
This critical process provides essential information with which you develop your target audience, or Personas. Over time, analytics and conversions data pertaining to your content marketing can help you to better understand how your ideal customers are interacting with your content, and accepting your offers. Data is also a great way to see how your website visitors are moving through the customer journey and how you might adjust to better execute that journey. We look at engagement rates on social media posts, which videos people watch, which white papers and e-books people download, the blog posts they read and share with their networks.
This provides powerful insights about them. So investing in content marketing and then taking the time to become proficient with marketing automation tools and personalization are rewarded with huge advantages.
These can include:. Another compelling reason to create content is that it helps you to build and strengthen relationships with your current customers! But a good content strategy is also an integral part of strengthening your relationship with your existing customers.
Look at this research on customer retention:. It is a whopping 16 times more expensive to build a business relationship with a new customer when compared to cultivating the loyalty of an existing customer. The lifetime value of your existing customers can be increased when they purchase more from your business over time.
The average customer spends 67 percent more in their third year with your business as compared to what they spent in the first year. Loyal customers are critical to the success of your business. You must dial in your content marketing strategy, and incorporate great content and insights that your existing customers value. Then you will capitalize on the power of custom content to strengthen these important customer relationships.
One of the primary ways for increasing revenue is to launch new products and services in the market. However, this step would remain ineffective if customers remain unaware of the new products or services. Being a proactive marketing manager can help you improve the visibility of the company you are working for and engage with potential customers more effectively. Marketing management expertise can also help you assess customer satisfaction in order to optimise promotional campaigns for new products or services.
Marketing is an ever-evolving and dynamic domain. Marketing techniques have come a long way, from printed pamphlets to online banners and video advertisements. Marketing management involves thorough research into the latest marketing trends and techniques, which allows you to stay relevant and updated on popular marketing techniques being used in the industry.
Using researched marketing insights and time-tested techniques in your campaign can also increase the scope of your marketing efforts.
Sometimes, imperfect campaigns or marketing decisions based on inadequate research can backfire on a brand. Want to explore mind-blowing career roles within the dynamic field of marketing? The comprehensive curriculum of the programme allows you to develop your managerial skills along with the marketing acumen required to succeed in global markets.
The programme is awarded by the Grenoble Ecole de Management, which is a triple-accredited institution.
0コメント