When it comes to the products or services your small business offers, what degree of marketing efforts do you put into them?
If the answer to that question is minimal at best, your brand stands to be set up for potential struggles.
On the other hand, stellar marketing promotions give your brand the ability to be healthy and bring in much revenue.
So, would you give your marketing a healthy rating or one where the prescription for success needs to be increased?
Brand Promotions Can Never Be Taken for Granted
In order for your brand to be a cut above the competition’s products or services, make sure you are doing the following:
- Promoting regularly – Imagine if a professional sports team only promoted a handful of dozens and dozens of their games each season. Do you think their attendance numbers would be solid? Sure, some fans would come just because they follow the team on a regular basis. Others, however, would be unaware of the schedule of games without reading about them online or seeing them in the newspaper, hearing about them on radio or TV, etc. The same holds true for your brand. Regularly promoting it on a variety of media channels is key to selling more. Whether you are looking to market real estate services, home improvement furnishings, life insurance, pharmacy lab equipment, auto parts, or a wide variety of other products and services, regular promotion is not a choice, it is a necessity. When consumers have a brand drilled into their heads (without being overly pushy when it comes to sales), they will be more inclined to remember and consider buying your product or service;
- Go easy on the sales push – Remember that item about being too pushy with sales a moment ago? It is crucial that you don’t come across in your marketing promotions as all about the sale. Sure, you’re in business to make money, much of which comes from making sales. That said consumers will be turned off if that is all you are interested in doing. Show consumers (current and potential customers) that you are there for them besides just making another sale. Answering their questions about your product or service, giving them quick customer service, and offering them rewards for being a regular customer will go a long way in cementing a longtime relationship between the both of you;
- Making mobile sales a priority – As more consumers opt for browsing and buying products and services off of their mobile devices, it is crucial that your brand is a player and not a spectator. Face it; the world of technology is both a blessing and a curse for businesses. On the up side, you have so many more opportunities now to reach out to shoppers. On the down side, you have so many more opportunities now to reach out to shoppers, opportunities that are going by the wayside if you’re not active when it comes to mobile marketing. Be sure that your brand seizes the opportunities that exist with mobile marketing. Your mobile marketing efforts (content marketing, images, videos etc.) all must work cleanly and smoothly on mobile devices. If consumers have trouble viewing all of your marketing pitches and/or have issues downloading material, they may just say the heck with it and go to one of your competitors. In that same window of thinking, it is important that you are able to provide them with a mobile connection to your social media efforts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.
Today’s world of marketing is different to a large degree from the world of marketing even a decade or so ago.
Many more consumers are shopping on-the-go than ever before.
As a result, you need to have a marketing plan that takes advantage of this, giving consumers the ability to browse and buy pretty much whenever they want.
Whether your business does its marketing initiatives in-house or outsources such needs, it is critical that you can look back and give those initiatives a healthy grade when all is said and done.
Just as drug prescriptions are there to cure what ails patients, your marketing efforts should be healthy too.
About the Author: Dave Thomas writes about marketing topics on the web.