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Marketing can be challenging for new business owners, but it is essential for finding and retaining customers. Here are 10 marketing tips from business owners and marketing professionals:
Social Media
1. Get the Timing Right
Social media is the best free way to market your business and posting regularly on your social channels is the best way to attract and retain your customers. To get the most out of your content, you need to consider the timing of your posts. This varies by industry, target audience and social media channel.
There is a lot of information based on averages across different types of businesses. But you should also search for more specific data about your industry and adjust your posting times to compare the outcomes.
The good news is that you don’t need to collate your own data or be logged into social media at these exact times. There are several tools within social media channels themselves designed for businesses that give you the opportunity to schedule posts and anticipate the reach and the audience engagement for your content.
There are free platforms such as Hootsuite, bit.ly and Sprout Social that offer a way for businesses to manage their brand on multiple social networks all in one place.
2. Analyse Content
One benefit of social media advertising is that you can reflect on and improve the effectiveness of your content.
Most businesses analyse their content after it has been posted. But tools such as BuzzSumo and Google Trends offer insight to what type of content has proven successful in attracting audiences.
This way, you can publish content that has a higher chance of success on each social networking site.
Keep track over time of which posts have gained the most views, shares and interactions. Try to identify patterns among the most successful posts, whether it is the content, the wording, the images, or the time they were posted.
3. Engage with Others
Increasing your visibility on social media isn’t just a matter of posting advertisements for your products and services. For instance, in Real estate industry, the social engagement plays a big role. Many real estate agents and property managers like to advertise their properties not just on their site but also on social media. This makes it easy for many users to communicate or enquire about the properties.
Sharing and commenting on other types of content will help you establish a good reputation, learn new things, and generate interest around your personal brand.
Your social media activity should extend beyond your own posts promoting your business. For example, you can engage with other companies and respond to customer feedback in the comments. When using Twitter, re-tweet other posts and add your own thoughts. Incorporate this principle throughout your business social media accounts, including LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+.
SEO
4. Optimise the Site for Search Engines
To expand your business, it is very important not to ignore the website traffic from Google. Users look into Google to find the local businesses and search online before buying a product. So, it is very important for your business website to rank in Google. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a process to optimise the sites for search engines. Take help of an SEO professional to get your site ranked on the first page in Google to improve your business enquiries.
Check out our SEO Brisbane page or SEO Sydney page if you’re looking for help in SEO.
5. Gauge Your Competition
If you want to improve your ranking for a particular keyword, put a little time into researching
Nathan Tanner, Creative Director of Foxtail Insights suggest creating a Google Alert for your competitors’ brand names. This will give you a good idea of where they are being mentioned and help you develop strategies for increasing the visibility of your own company.
6. Optimise for Mobile
You may have heard about the dramatic growth in mobile phone internet usage over the past few years. In October this year, more users accessed the web from mobile devices like smartphones and tablets than they did from desktops or notebooks.
This trend is expected to continue, as mobile phones and data become more affordable.
Google’s algorithms consider ‘mobile-friendliness’ when it comes to search engine rankings. This means that a high-ranking site that is not mobile friendly may be ranked lower when the same keywords are searched from a mobile device. As the use of mobile devices increases, websites that are difficult to navigate from a phone or tablet will miss out on traffic.
So, how do you know whether or not your website is mobile-friendly? Luckily, you can check this through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
When deciding that you want to make your website mobile-friendly, it’s important to understand the distinction between a mobile site, and a responsive design.
A mobile site is a copy of the website where the server delivers a page that is easier to navigate from a mobile device. This can be beneficial if you want to target different keywords for mobile searches.
On the other hand, a website with a responsive design will be easily accessible from a mobile device and will have the exact same domain. This allows business owners to keep their mobile rankings relatively up-to-date with their desktop rankings. The shared domain also helps you avoid any complications with re-directs and makes it easier for users share links to the site.
Once you understand the purpose of your mobile site, you will be better able to make decisions about the technology and the design.
Direct Marketing
7.Know Your Audience
Before you start to develop a marketing strategy, it’s important to understand your target audience.
A great place to start is by reading industry reports and market studies that are relevant to your product and audience. Try to find research that is relatively recent, and which focuses on consumers who are in a similar location to your target audience.
When you reach out to potential customers, place yourself inside their shoes and imagine yourself reading or hearing your own words for the very first time.
Another useful strategy is to look at other products and services used by your target audience, even when they are not related to your industry. Ask yourself what these brands communicate about themselves, and how they get their messages across.
8. Tap into Emotions
There are a number of different ways to tap into the emotions of potential customers. Some strategies, such as invoking a sense of curiosity, can be effective across a range of different audiences.
There are also a number of desires that drive customer behaviour, often referred to as emotional motivators.
Large companies in retail, healthcare and technology are gaining a detailed understanding of their customers’ emotional motivators and using this to attract and retain customers.
Emotional motivators can vary across different audiences. For example, the desire ‘to stand out from the crowd’ and the desire ‘to feel a sense of belonging’ have both been identified by researchers as high-impact emotional motivators.
But once you understand your target audience and what is important to them, you can find ways to build interest in your brand.
Public Relations
9. Build Good Relationships
A great way to grow your company is to spark interest in your brand or your own persona through media organisations.
Understanding what piques the interest of journalists and building a good relationship with the media is a key part of successful public relations.
Following media professionals on Twitter or lik ing their public Facebook page is a great way to gain a sense of what stories interest them. Even when a journalist covers stories about your industry, you should take the time to build a positive relationship before bombarding them with information about your business. Engage with their posts, including those that have nothing to do with your industry.
Be helpful where possible. For example, you might be able to connect them with a source they are seeking for a story.
Positive and memorable interactions will make others more receptive to your content and story pitches.
10. Pitching a Story
When pitching story ideas to news and media organisations, make sure the story you pitch relates to your business but is also of interest to the journalist and the audiences who read, watch or listen to their content.
Craft a personalised pitch, using the reporter’s name and mentioning their website or media outlet in the email.
Include data when it fits the story, and offer an angle. The more unique and newsworthy your story idea, the better chance you have of it being picked up.
Your pitch should be intriguing, clear and concise. The subject line should spark their interest, and the body should be no longer than 3 paragraphs. It’s likely that your pitch is one of many this person is reading through, and if you take too long to get to the point, they are more likely to move on to the next email.
When you have a lot of knowledge on a topic, it can be tempting to write a lengthy pitch. Instead, send a succinct pitch and include a link to your website or a press release, so that once the reader is interested, they can explore the story in more depth.
Vikas Rana
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