10 Marketing Strategies Which Will Transform Your Business

How you market your products or services could be one of the most important factors deciding how successful you are. Think of it this way: is it possible that the cheapest and best quality business could be ignored for other businesses offering a worse deal? Yes, is the answer – it's entirely possible if they've never heard of your business or they don't know what it's offering them. So, read on to find out how to get your name out there in a clear way that potential customers will remember.

Website

Your website needs to tell customers, at a glance, who you are and what you can do for them. Firstly, you need to make it simple for users to navigate the website – that means having a navigation bar in a visible place near the top of the homepage. Secondly, you need to have your products or services divided among subordinate pages in a relevant way. Some infographics will improve the appearance, but choosing them is a branding decision.

Branding

Think about your target market – is your product or service general, in which case it needs to apply to all users, or are there any specific demographics to whom you need to make your appeal come across as authentic? This should guide decisions when it comes to your logo, your name, the name of your products or services, colour-coding, as well as any theme that comes into your marketing strategy.

Marketing Online

Your online marketing strategy needs to be multifaceted, and it needs to deliver greater brand recognition, more customer and client leads, and ultimately more sales. This means that you need to take a broad approach consisting of several sub-strategies; namely, content marketing and social media marketing.

Evergreen Content

Whether you produce your own content or you use a marketing company, the content which promotes your site needs to remain relevant for a long time. If the content is seasonal or relates to current affairs then, even if you're able to expose your brand to a higher number of users, the improved business won't last long and, to keep generating these results, you'll more than likely have to produce more content than you have the capacity for.

High-Quality Content

If you're not yet convinced of the benefits of content marketing, you could produce a blog on your website to see if it makes a difference. If you decide to try this then bear in mind that the content needs to be useful and relevant to users if it's going to have the best results – so include images and videos where possible. However, you can also improve your search engine ranking by providing links to high-quality websites. You may worry about directing users away from your site, but if you're providing them with worthwhile links, then they'll remember that your site was useful to them. Linking out has been shown to improve traffic in both directions.

Social Media Marketing

To start off, it might be worth setting up a social media page for your business. This will improve your search engine ranking and will give you another forum to entice users with high-quality content, but there's more you can do. Approach a social media blogger with a high readership, and if you can get them to share your content, then this will have a marked improvement both on traffic to your site and on your search engine ranking.

Resources

Don't forget that you aren't alone, and the internet is a great place to get any extra help you need. It might involve using an external company to write content for you, or it might involve using a consultant or Freelance SEO Specialist to help you get the right strategy in place for your business.

Network

Networking is another way you can avoid struggling to get by in a vacuum. Every business needs as much support as it can get, and you don't always have to pay for it. Make a list of contacts both in your area of business and outside it, and see if you're in a position to help each other out. This might involve getting in touch with old friends who you studied with or worked with, but it's often most helpful to make contact with businesses which operate in your area or share your demographic as a target market. One way of doing this is making sure your business has a presence both at local business events and meetings as well as at regional events that specialise in your industry.

Collaboration

Once you've done some networking, and you've built some useful contacts both in your industry and with non-competitive businesses who operate locally, it might be possible to come to some mutually beneficial agreements. For example, you could provide each other with beneficial products or services at reduced rates or simply in exchange for the products and services of the other. Even if your products or service aren't relevant to each other's strategies, there are still ways you could work together to cut costs and improve business.

Sponsor an Event

The idea behind the strategy here is similar to the idea behind content marketing – that, if you can provide useful services to potential customers, you'll generate more leads, turn more leads into sales, and turn more one-time customers into loyal patrons. Get together with local businesses and put on an event in your local area, perhaps a concert, and this will give you the opportunity to get your brand out to a large audience of people. Plus, you'll still have the contacts for next time – it could even become a yearly event if it's successful. This is a great way that businesses can work together to reduce each other's costs and improve each other's branding exposure.