How do I apply Marketing to my business?
Business marketing is the process of garnering appeal and interest from potential customers in your product or service. First of all, marketing involves a few components that must be taken into account. Within marketing, there’s selling, the distribution of your service or product and research. The main motive of marketing is to gain and retain a growing base of satisfied customers. Within this article, you will learn about some of the ways in which you can market your business without completely hurting the bank. As a result, your knowledge on business marketing will flourish!
“I don’t want to pay an arm and leg, but I want my business to be out there. How do I do that?”
– Average Business Owner
What is my first course of action when thinking about marketing?
- Questions to ask yourself
- Who is the owner of the business? Are they the Head Engineer at a Web Development Company or a 45-year-old working mom with two kids?
- What social media platforms would I typically find these specific demographics of people on?
- Do you want to begin promoting your business when their buying cycle begins?
- Do you want to promote your business to them when they are about to pull out their credit card and make the purchase?
Cost-effective ways to market with Social Media
- Devise a marketing strategy
- I completely understand the confusion. How does one “save money” on marketing just by planning out the way they market? Well, first of all, coordinating how you market your business saves valuable time and money. By coordinating your marketing through unstructured and random means you can waste precious resources. Furthermore the key to start with is to first identify the individuals that would serve as your best prospects to target. Due to the marvel of social media you will be able to filter through potential clients with ease. From there you just determine the best things to say to reach them.
- Use Social Media Platforms
- We are currently in the digital age which means most if not every potential client business you could attract is online. The greatest advantage that social media has given today’s business owner is a direct line to the consumer. We have the ability to market to virtually anybody. Consequently, setting up a Facebook or Instagram business page will not only give you access to all mediums of communication with the consumer, but it also adds a professional aesthetic to the company. Within these platforms, you can find a plethora of specified groups. These communities can range from simple casual users to powerful CEO’s and business owners. Lastly, one way to manage your page is to keep the content flow of your site consistent. It’s important to post up events associated with your business and promotional advertisements for your services.
Cost-effective ways to create Brand Awareness
- Have your business listed on search engine local directories
- Many free online listing search engines allow for your business to be available to the public. For instance, Google has one of the most prominent local business listings. There are also the ones that you have to pay for, but it adds on a few more perks. For example, Yahoo’s local business listings can run you about $8.25 a month, but with that, you can have a single location to enter your data. Consequently, this fact makes their business listings consistent and available to a multitude of online business directories.
- Get business cards and hand them out
- Simple, right? But trust and believe something this basic will count in the long run. Of course, you don’t want to hand them out to everyone even though you could do that and you might gain minimal success. Above all, the best way to do it is to go to events specifically catered to business networking. In these scenarios you might not even be looking for clients, you may require funding or even gaining a partnership. Networking events can open up your business to new facets of support. A great example of a site to find these types of events is eventbrite.com. As a result you will be able to put on filters that will cater to your preferences for the most optimal event to attend for you and your business.
- Pay the cost to boost your posts on social media sites
- First of all, one thing that’s more important than using social media to market your business is to utilize those services correctly and efficiently. Boosting your posts on social media allows you to maximize your outreach entirely. This process works even better when you target the boosted posts to groups of individuals that fit the characteristics of your optimal client. Therefore, getting your business in front of potential customers and targeting specific locations will increase the amount of interest in whatever product or service that your providing.
Cost-effective ways to market with a Website
- Make a website
- A website provides a great deal of marketing potential for your business. Above all, a website acts as the first introduction for your business. The way it aesthetically looks, how easy it is to navigate and what information is being provided are all heavy factors in potential customers intrigued in your product or service. Whether your business website acts as a catalog, information source, lead generation tool or an online brochure the way you utilize it is up to you.
- Another aspect that a website provides is an online store accessible to anyone with internet access. Finally, the days of customers traveling to a specific location and getting their services met are ending. In our fast-paced society, customers want 24/7 availability. A business website garners to that need.
- Utilize Basic SEO for your website
- The term SEO can be translated as Search Engine Optimization. With this software, your website will have the ability to gain complete optimal visibility. SEO is a process of increasing your website traffic which is done by increasing the visibility of a website or web page for people that use a web search engine.