You may have an intelligent business idea, offer the best services or goods in the world, but that won’t help you if your target customers can’t find you. You need compelling marketing techniques to match your excellent services and goods. You see, it doesn’t matter whether you have been in business for 20 days or 20 years, there’s always room for improvement. Here are brilliant marketing tips and ideas that will help to bring new customers your way.
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Make data cleaning a habit
Data cleaning should be a habit. It is not something you should be doing once per year. Make data cleaning a routine. Otherwise, your entire marketing strategy could be off-balance. Marketing decisions are data-driven. Therefore, if your data is inaccurate, your marketing efforts will not be effective. To make sure your marketing strategy is on-point, clean your data every month. Apart from better decision making, other benefits of data cleansing include:
- Improved revenue – clean data makes for great ROI on communication and marketing campaigns. Delivering consistent messages to the right audiences generates a higher response and interaction rates for marketing and communication campaigns. In turn, the higher response and interaction rates will help to drive revenue.
- Save money – physical marketing campaigns such as direct mail marketing would be much more effective if data is accurate. With an up-to-date list, you will only contact people who are genuinely interested in your message. This way, your mailing will not be shredded before it’s read. Also, data cleaning helps to remove incorrect data that may affect mailing accuracy.
- Save time – your marketing team probably spends so much time on calls and sending emails to people who are not interested in your services or products. By ensuring that data is accurate, you reduce the time wasted contacting invalid prospects either by email or phone.
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Your customers and employees can be walking billboards
When your customer or employee wears a t-shirt, cap, or a bag with your logo, they are advertising your company wherever they go. Partner with a quality screen printing company such as Thrives Screen Printing to make quality apparel for your employees and loyal customers. Let your customers and employees be your walking billboards. Where can you get such cheap billboards? You can also try other things that people use on a daily basis, such as notebooks and laptop stickers.
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Keep an eye on customer reviews
In this digital era, online customer reviews are more important than never. Do you have a review monitoring process in place? If you don’t, it’s time to have one. Customer reviews will help you know where you need to improve. Of course, it is likely you will get some negative reviews – you can’t please everybody all the time. But be careful when responding to such reviews, so you don’t provoke an already agitated customer. The best way to go about it is to speak with them offline rather than in the public online arena.
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Optimize your emails
Most people feel like they receive too many emails. However, most consumers prefer email communication for business purposes. Email marketing is highly effective and has no sign of slowing down. For small businesses, email marketing is essential but tricky. You see, great content does not guarantee that a recipient will open the email. However, you can use the following ways to increase audience engagement and open rates.
- Subject line – What is the subject line of your email? Does it tell the recipient what to expect next? Is it worth clicking?
- Sender address – Ensure your emails are coming from recognizable sender name
- Design – Your content needs to be optimized for mobile viewing. Additionally, it should be easy to read and visually appealing.
- Call to action – Your emails need to have a call to action.
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Use demos and free samples to promote product awareness
Demos and free samples are highly effective in building brand awareness. Let people try your products. Some business owners may think of free samples as giving away money or distributing products without compensation. But let’s face it – you have to spend money to market your products, right? Rather than seeing free samples strategy as just giving away money, consider it a marketing expense. With free samples promotion, you get in touch with your target market and let them try your product. If it satisfies their needs or wants, they will most likely purchase it in future. Some free samples ideas include;
- Providing free samples in your store
- Sponsoring an event and giving away samples
- Mailing free samples
- Hold a drawing for a free give-away
- Giving free samples on the street
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Have stand-out business cards
Be a brilliant network, and ensure you always carry a huge stash of business cards and give them out liberally. However, ensure your business cards are creative and unique, so a new contact will not forget you easily.
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Create a great website and understand the power of SEO
A poorly designed website will put people off your company. It can be very frustrating to do all the hard work of getting a potential customer to visit your website only to find it unfriendly, difficult to navigate, and not laid out logically. This is a simple mistake that can be avoided by working with experienced and reliable developers.
Another thing you need to remember is that Google searches are a critical way of directing traffic to your website. You need to keep your page keyword optimized to ensure you rank highly on Google searches. If your site shows up on the first page, there are high chances that you will get a click. So, do everything to ensure your website shows up on the first page of search engines.
Endnote
There are so many things and marketing channels you can pursue to reach your target market effectively. Don’t be afraid to try different marketing strategies. However, focus your energy on what works best for you. Remember to measure the success of each activity. This way, you will be able to identify the most effective tactic.
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