Being the top competitor in your industry is always a goal to have but you need competitive marketing strategies to make it all possible. Every opportunity in your field is an opportunity to utilize a strategy to reach your goal or ideal client.
Growing a business isn’t easy and keeping it at the top of the charts is even harder. Your business is your heart, your passion, your niche.
This article is designed to help you explore the best marketing tactics for any business situation. Identifying the right strategies to market your business can often feel like you are trying to do rocket science.
You are looking at countless ways to reach the right audience effectively. Trying to increase traffic to your website or store. Making decisions to create a better return on your investment, better sales, and sustainability of your business. There are so many businesses out there attempting to do the same thing and competing to stay on top. It’s a lot and as a marketing agency, we recognize that.
Whether you’re just starting or have been in the business and industry for years, the key takeaway you have to know is that you have to evolve and stay ahead of the times. 2021 is in full force and companies are using everything they know to stay ahead. What skills and knowledge you knew to get you started can’t be the same you use to keep going and growing.
WHAT IS THE BEST STRATEGY YOU CAN USE?
To answer this question. You have to ask yourself or your team, what is the goal? Is it to bring traffic to your store. Virtually or in-person? Is it to increase revenue in a certain part of your business? Is it to build your business? Build your team? Educate your clients? Grow your client basis? Find your ideal clients? The list goes on.
We’ve created a list of our top 8 go-to strategies that we use everyday and know will help build a business in almost every situation. No matter how you approach these, as long as you are using sound and fundamental business principles you will add value to your business.
1. Personalize your marketing content and messages
When you personalize your marketing content and messages, you are sending the right messages to the right people at the right time. It creates a personal touch but also sets you aside from the robotic messages that some companies pump out.
What is personalized marketing content and messages? It is when your company delivers individualized content to recipients through data you’ve collected from your contacts and clients.
This gives your clients a more personalized and satisfying experience. Challenge yourself to implement personalized content in virtually every aspect of your marketing. Effective personalization turns your leads and inquiries into real-time clients and income.
When you deliver a personalized experience to a customer, it tells them that you understand their wants, expectations, and needs. It makes their whole customer journey easier, and it transforms the buying or booking process from transactions into lifelong customers.
How do you personalize your marketing?
- Gather data
- Generate customer personas
- Organize and plan content
- Get creating
- Personalize the experience based on the customer persona you created
2. Use social media
You can’t deny that social media is essentially a part of your everyday life. You can count on the fact that it’s the same for your customers too.
Social media is everywhere. It’s how we communicate, update, and even shop.
According to Wordstream.com here are a few social media marketing stats:
– Facebook has 1.5 billion daily active users (DAU), 2.3 billion monthly active users (MAU), and 300 million Stories DAU.
– Brands that reach consumers on Instagram enjoy a relatively high engagement rate of 1.73% per post.
– LinkedIn has 260 million MAU.
– The average LinkedIn visitor-to-lead CVR across industries is 2.74% (vs. 0.69% on Twitter).
– LinkedIn drives 80% of social media B2B leads.
– 37% of consumers find purchase inspiration through social media. No other channel (digital or otherwise) inspires consumers at such a high rate.
This speaks to how much a Facebook Ad could have to you. This means your company also needs to be on Facebook with updated and relevant content to your followers.
The amount of people on social media is tremendous and could have a major impact on you and your business. Some businesses have been built solely on the backs of social media and shares.
Building your social media presence takes little time and once you build the momentum you’ll soon find posting on social media to get easier and easier over time.
When you post, be authentic and personal. You can use social media to post about your business or anything related to your business. Post on holidays, special occasions and even share your company’s events or products.
Don’t forget to provide a seamless, cohesive visual experience when posting ads or content. Relate your ads to your website and make them correlate to provide a smooth transition from social media to your online site.
Use direct messages on all social platforms to reach out to other growing or successful businesses. You can use direct messages to communicate with potential customers who might be looking for your products and services.
You can also use hashtags on every platform to gear more visitors to your page.
3. Understand & use search engine optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of increasing organic traffic to a particular website by making sure it appears among the top unpaid (or “natural”) search results on search engines like Google, Bing!, and Yahoo.
Optimize your pages for humans, not search engines. The mistake is often one of the biggest ones companies make when they try to boost organic traffic to their sites, and after Covid, and in 2021, this is one thing businesses must look into.
If your site isn’t optimized for the clientele you are trying to reach then you risk them bouncing from your site, which leads to lower rankings in search results and less organic traffic.
To prevent them from bouncing out of your site, start gearing your writing towards the client you want. Writing for humans will lead to improved rankings, and as a result, will help you increase organic traffic to your website. Optimize for informational keywords and improve your search ranking by writing resourceful and detailed content while supplementing it with descriptive meta descriptions and title tags.
Without a doubt, search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best ways to achieve consistent, long-term results. As long as you rank highly in Google, you’ll be able to generate organic traffic to your site.
Keep in mind that a very important part of SEO is understanding and monitoring the bounce rate of your website. A poor website results in a high bounce rate of around 60% to 80%. A good website results in an optimal bounce rate of around 20% to 35%. The lower the bounce rate the better your website and the more sales potential you have for your business.
4. Create video content
Creating any content will drive customers back to you but creating video content can help drive more and create more clients. Video content creates conversations and connects your business with your customers.
Companies using a professionally produced video have increased sales by 40-60%, with those same customers reporting that they are 85% more likely to purchase the product after they’ve viewed a product marketing video.
Video is the closest form of advertisement to word of mouth available today. Building your brand power starts with you, and what better way to express your brand to the world than video? There isn’t one.
To set your expectation on what each service can provide for your business, here are a few things to keep in mind.
A video production/marketing company will begin by researching and understanding your target audience. Who are you trying to connect with? How old are they? What do they enjoy? What are they struggling with? A video production/marketing company will also take the time to understand your business and your products. A great marketing video is like a salesperson ready to offer their best pitch. It is impossible to make a compelling and focused case for your product or service without a clear understanding of what you are offering and what your audience is looking for.
The most important work in creating an effective marketing video occurs before the camera is used. A solid script. The right locations. Voice actors, talent, images all need to be chosen carefully.
Video production/marketing companies have far greater service offerings compared to a guy with a camera. The key reason for this is that video production/marketing companies have an extensive staff of highly skilled professionals while a guy with a camera works on their own.
5. Use paid media advertising
Paid media is a tool that companies use to grow their website traffic through paid advertising. Your business or company can promote its content through sponsored social media posts, display ads, paid search results, video ads, pop-ups, and other promoted multimedia. Paid media can seem archaic or old school but it is still an effective opportunity to expand your brand reach, get more clicks, and generate more traffic and customers.
It is one of the quickest ways to drive traffic. It opens doors or gives that nudge a customer was needing.
You will be able to reach audiences that would otherwise not have come across your business.
Your content, even if paid for, will still get clicks, followers and clients, leading to earned clicks in the future and a return on investment for your paid content.
Using PAID MEDIA ensures that your content gets picked up on, shared and in front of the right customers.
6. Use data based tools
Data is vital to a company’s growth, no matter the size. Data is emerging as not only a way to track growth in a business but also campaigns, websites, email marketing, social media marketing and much, MUCH, more.
Mass un-targeted branding messages or campaigns are becoming a thing of the past. Now, companies are able to use a variety of data and analytic tools to see not only who their customers are but what they are clicking on, looking at, gender, age, where they are and beyond. Data-driven marketing can help you create highly targeted campaigns with unique, personalized messaging for each customer. This allows businesses to reach the right people.
DATA CAN HELP YOU FIND YOUR ‘IDEAL’ CUSTOMER
Utilizing data tools can help your company to identify specific content that is leading prospects through your sales funnel, website and more. This will help you determine where exactly your time and budget should be spent. It will also help your business see any weaknesses in your digital marketing that you may need to strengthen.
This in turn can help you save major $$$ if you have money funneling into advertising that isn’t working.
7. Conversational Marketing
Conversational marketing isn’t your old-school door-to-door sales. It’s still just that — a conversation but all online. It is a real-time interaction via a chatbot or live chat that gets the right information in front of customers at the right time.
For businesses who have been in the industry for decades, the idea of a chatbot or live chat can seem daunting but it has proven itself to be an effective tool in 2021. This technology uses messaging to chat in real-time, day or night, with your customers or site visitors. It powers customer service and keeps customers on your website longer.
Our customers need answers about products and services immediately and in real-time. Utilizing live chat and chatbots can give immediate answers and gives the customers personalized, relevant engagement that improves their experience.
It also gives your business the chance to keep a customer around because if a client can’t get the answers they need ASAP then they will move on to the next competitor.
View chatbots like virtual assistants. They offer exceptional customer service by meeting customers’ expectations and deal with repetitive questions and tasks – which means that you can focus on more important work.
Purchases, bookings and more happen quicker because relationships are established quicker.
8. Build trust
Building trust with customers is the utmost important thing you can do as a marketing strategy. If your customers don’t trust you right out the back then you just lost revenue.
Consumers are looking to spend money with brands that share the same values and that they can trust.
Because of the pandemic, consumers have changed the way they buy, the things they buy, and the mindset in which they buy them. This means businesses are changing the way they approach customers and market to customers. It will look different for every industry and company.
The post-pandemic consumer is looking for businesses that have the safety and well-being of the customer in mind.
Recent Comments