An Entrepreneur’s Guide To Marketing: What You Need To Know
The word ‘marketing’ is thrown around a lot, and for good reason. It’s what gets your company’s name in front of potential customers and what turns them into repeat business. You’ll need to engage in it if you want to boost visibility and sales. With the right guide to marketing, that shouldn’t be an issue.
If you’re a first-time entrepreneur and early in your business career, figuring out how to advertise your business can be difficult. It shouldn’t be. It’s just a matter of getting the basics right and starting off properly. Once you do, you should see things start to take off.
When combined with great customer service and a dedication to improvement, you’ll see more and more customers come in through the door. It’s worth going through the basics with getting your marketing started.
Why Advertise Your Business?
Since marketing can be a complicated area, it’s worth diving into why you should do it, as it helps justify the time and effort you put into it. While some of the benefits are obvious, you mightn’t have thought about some of the more notable of them. These include:
- Improving Brand Visibility & Loyalty – The more you advertise your business, the more visible your company is. It’ll get your business in front of potential customers and encourage them to buy from you. Not only does that increase brand visibility, but it encourages brand loyalty. It shows customers why they should buy from you, as well as why they should keep buying from you.
- Attracting New Customers – Speaking of encouraging customers to buy, you’ll attract new customers to your business. The reason behind this is pretty obvious. If nobody knows about your company, they’re not going to buy from it. The more visible you are, the more customers you should get. In time, that leads to a decent customer base.
- Making You Money – You could see marketing as a drain on your resources, but it makes you money when it’s done right. With cost-effective strategies, you’ll make more money than you’d spend, letting you generate a decent return on investment. You should be more and more profitable because of it.
These should be more than enough to convince you to start marketing your business. That’s a lot easier said than done, though. There’s a lot to take care of, and some of this can be complicated at the best of times. With a guide to marketing, you should make this more straightforward for yourself.
It’ll get you started on the right foot, and should help you see the benefits marketing offers in no time. Five particular areas are worth focusing on.
Guide To Marketing: How To Get Started
1. Nail Your Website
Your website is one of the more fundamental aspects of your marketing strategy. If you’re considering any digital advertising, it’ll route back to your website, making this one of the more important areas to focus on at the start. Go beyond just setting it up and leaving it there, though. Put some actual effort into it so it works for you.
From your website design to search engine optimization, there’s quite a bit to look after with this. While a lot of this can seem complicated, it’s much easier if you outsource to various specialists.
It’ll take a bit of time and effort, but it’ll be more than worth it once you start generating interest through it.
2. Get On Social Media
Social media marketing is one of the most effective ways of developing a relationship with your target market. If your website is the face of your business, then see social media as its personality. Show yours off as effectively as possible so you can start generating interest among potential customers.
While it might take a while for your social media channels to take off without an upfront and ongoing investment, it’ll be more than worth the time and effort you put into it. You’ll not only get in front of new potential customers, but start building loyalty with your current customers.
They’ll be much more likely to stick with you long-term if you put time and effort into building that relationship through social media.
3. Use Direct Mail For Local Customers
If you’re a local business, you’ll need to target local customers. Thankfully, there are multiple ways you can do this. One of the most affordable, and effective, is to use direct mail. All you’ll need is a templated letter or pamphlet you can send out in bulk to potential customers, and then start sending them.
While you’re not going to convert all the recipients, you’ll get enough leads to justify the time and effort you put into designing and sending them out. It increases your brand visibility in a target area while encouraging them to buy. Doing this when you have sales or promotions on lets you generate quite a bit of business.
Like your website, make sure these are properly designed so you can generate a decent return on investment.
4. Set Up Your Email Marketing
Speaking of mail, email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to market your business. It’s one of the most effective ways at keeping your company in your customers’ mind and generating repeat business. While you’ll need to get their email addresses first, it’ll be more than worth the effort.
Set this up as early as you can so you can start retargeting customers as quickly as possible. Once you have customers’ email addresses, you’ll be in a much better position to sell to them over and over again.
While you shouldn’t send sales emails constantly, it’s an effective way of keeping your brand in their minds. Start generating interest among customers and then send a sales email, and you’ll see more results than you would’ve thought.
5. Consider Banner Ads
Your potential customers will visit some of the same websites relatively regularly, and this offers a great way to target them. With internet cookies and similar software, you can find out exactly what these websites are. By choosing the most popular ones among your target demographic, you can get your name in front of the right people.
The easiest – and one of the most effective – way of doing this is with banner ads. These literally put your brand in front of them, and you’ll increase your brand awareness because of it. It’ll also improve your click-through rate and get more people onto your website.
By taking a highly targeted approach with this, you’ll see a decent return on investment from it. While they shouldn’t be your main marketing strategy, it should be one of the core parts of it.
Marketing Best Practices
No guide to marketing is complete without a few best practices. Advertising can be hit-or-miss depending on whether or not you follow these. By making sure you nail them from the get-go, you shouldn’t have a problem seeing results because of your efforts. It’s worth going through some of the more notable:
- Know Your Target Market – Before you start marketing your business, you’ll need to understand your potential customers. The more you know your target market, the better you can craft marketing strategies that appeal to them. You can message your marketing better, and even figure out the right ways to advertise your business. Put the effort into this from the start.
- Appeal To Emotions – By appealing to customer emotions, you make them more likely to actually buy from you. Focus on the right emotions when you’re doing this, and you’ll see them interacting with your business more and more. Positive emotions are the more effective ones to target, as customers end up associating your company with that emotion. Once they do, they’ll be more likely to actually buy from you.
- Focus On Benefits – The products or services you offer have various features, all of which you’ll be proud of. These aren’t what sell your products or services, though. Customers buy based on the benefits they’re likely to see because of what you offer. Focus on these when you’re marketing your business, and you’ll be more likely to convince potential customers to buy from you.
These should help you make sure your marketing strategies are as effective as possible. You should see better results for your efforts, which is always welcome. By focusing on them from the start and refining them, you’ll see better and better results in time. There’s no reason not to put the effort into them.
Guide To Marketing: Wrapping Up
If you’re early in your entrepreneurial career, you mightn’t know how to start advertising your business. No matter what kind of company you run, an in-depth guide to marketing can help. It’ll not only help you lay the foundation for your strategies, but you’ll see more and more growth in time.
With the benefits advertising your business offers, you’ve no excuse not to put the effort into it. You’ll increase your brand awareness, see more customers, and generate more revenue because of it. In time, that should help your company grow and succeed.
