Running your own business is something that requires a lot of time and dedication to get it operating smoothly. There are so many elements to take into consideration and not enough time to give all of them the light of day. One thing you should strongly consider is marketing your business correctly. And I use the word correctly because you don’t want to waste money on broad marketing strategies. You want to focus your efforts on your audience and make sure you tailor your marketing to that community of people. Let’s take a look at a few things that could really get your marketing going in the right direction.
SWITCH IT UP
There are a lot of marketing tools out there for you to utilize, however you may not have the big budget that these Fortune 500 companies do. That is okay. There are plenty of free or lost cost tools that are at your disposal. Maybe the most common and widely used tools are social media channels. Everyone uses social media nowadays to further expand their reach and you should too. They are easy to set up, and allow you to create a voice for your business.
Another route to go, depending on your business, is guerilla marketing. This could include a wide range of things, and this is where you can get really creative. This style of marketing could range from simply passing out flyers at local events to creating elaborate structures to capture the attention of people walking by. A good definition of this tactic can be summarized as “ In marketing, guerrilla techniques mostly play on the element of surprise. It sets out to create highly unconventional campaigns that catch people unexpectedly in the course of their day-to-day routines.” (Amanda Zantal-Wiener).
These are just two ways to change up your strategy in terms of marketing. The key point here is that you do change up your plan. It is never a bad idea to try something new and experiment with different tools to see what you like and what works for your business.
TRACK EVERYTHING
Now that you have some tools in mind and want to start implementing them, how do you know what works? Analytics can play a big part in determining what strategies are working and which ones are wasting your money and time. Some tools have great analytics built in. Things like Facebook and Twitter have all the stats you could ever want. This allows you to see what content is generating engagement, which ads are pulling in customers and so on. This gives you the data you need to make adjustments and continue to tweak and improve your efforts.
Some things may be a little hard to track. For example, the guerrilla tactics may be harder to see exact numbers but you could have it set up in a way that allows for you to see if it is working at all or not. In the end, the important thing is to have analytics set up on whatever you use to market your business that way you can see how effective your strategies are.
MAKE IT UNIVERSAL
While you are planning out all of your marketing material, you should always keep one thing in mind. That is to keep your message the same throughout whatever medium or platform you use to promote your business. You want your audience to get the same memo about your business across the board. You do not want one campaign to differ from another in core message and intent. This could leave your audience confused about what you are trying to say and in the end, leave them disinterested.
It is important to have creative ways to market to your audience but more important is what the message is to your audience. Usually having a clean and easy to understand the message is a good way to start then you can build off of that.
HOW WE CAN HELP
Figuring all of this out is a daunting task. It can be a headache to try and create campaigns, build a strategy that will work all while running your business. That is where we come in. We have experience working with companies to build and deploy all types of marketing campaigns that help bring in customers. If you are looking to kickstart your marketing efforts to better serve your business we would love to help you! Please feel free to get in contact with us today!
