More Marketing Strategies
In marketing your business it’s easy to find a way that produces many leads or potential clients for you, but is it wise to only use that one avenue? It is important to diversify and find several outlets to market your business. It’s important to use many ways to market your products and services, both online and offline. Achieving a good balance should be the key.
Create synergy, find others that serve the same audience but are not your competitors, hook up with them and promote each other. Two are always better than one! In the case of web hosting – this could be local web designers or even computer repair shops.
Today’s society is bombarded with advertising and marketing messages. Email (SPAM), Telemarketing, regular mail, solicitation at your front door. Out of this flood of marketing messages – How can you make your marketing and advertising stand out and be effective to your target market? Take the time to listen and relating to the pain of your clients. Keep in mind that it is much easier to sell a good solution to a problem than to sell just a positive benefit or specific features. What problems are your potential clients really facing? What can you offer to make those problems go away? A great way to find out is to spend more time networking and doing market research by contacting potential clients. Find out what their real needs are by spending time asking questions and listening to their answers taking mental note of their needs, problems, and pain points. If one or two clients have certain pain points, you can safely assume that there are more clients with similar problems.
Once you see a (recurring) problem that your product or service can solve, study that problem, and adjust your marketing so that it is offering THE benefit and THE solution to that problem. If you properly identify a problem and make the necessary adjustments, the success will be yours. When drafting your new marketing plan be sure to describe the problem and the solution. This will assist your marketing efforts from heading into the wrong direction.
After implementing a new marketing program, entrepreneurs must evaluate its performance – or they risk to waste money. Every program should have performance standards to compare with actual results. Researching industry norms and past performance will help you to develop appropriate standards and therefore will help you to find out if your new marketing campaign is really successful.
It is very difficult to get your potential customers to notice your ads, let alone to even respond to them. Because advertising is so expensive, you should use a clear strategy to concentrate your advertising impact in the most effective manner for your business. The only exception to this advertising rule might be for advertising in the Yellow Pages or other yearly publications (e.g. business directories).
Especially when starting out it is critical to reach the masses and to gain a solid customer base. In a situation like this – one strategy could be spending a big chunk of your advertising money for one big campaign. A concentrated campaign on some very busy websites can do the trick. Imagine advertising on Sitepoint and WebHostingTalk at the same time for one week. Using a highly visible spot and your sign-up web page could become very busy.
Quarterly recurring advertising campaigns are quite common and a very good tool. They will allow you to concentrate your advertising dollars heavily during specific times, while also affording you a better chance of maintaining a place in your targeted audience’s minds throughout the whole year.
Many small businesses completely spend away their advertising money throughout the year by placing a continuous stream of small ads all over the place. This kind of approach never creates enough impact to deliver significant results. What do you think will be noticed better? A large advertisement placed in a highly visible spot for one week per month or per quarter or a small, hidden ad at the bottom of a newspaper page every day? If you operate this way, stop it – now. Drop all advertising for a while and see if the number of new sign-ups really falls off. It probably won’t, and you can then feel confident in adopting a new advertising schedule.
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