Marketing Tips to Explode your business
The right marketing tips can have significant impacts on your ability to attract customers to your small business. To dominate in business, you need effective marketing to identify and reach your customers. These 4 powerful marketing tips for small business can give you the much needed edge over your competition.
There are different types of marketing tips that we could discuss. Many only choose to look at the purely tactical marketing tips, but this is a mistake. The tactical pieces of marketing are necessary, but they only come into play after we’ve appropriately identified and clarified our customers, with a keen desire of their needs.
This is akin to doing and knowing what the greats in basketball, football and other sports already know: it’s the fundamentals that win championships. We don’t have to get overly technical or try to do all things glittery and shiny. Our goal as business owners is to be fundamentally sound in our approach to marketing. Get the basics first, then we’ll add in the fun, sexy stuff….Or not.
With that being stated, Here are 4 Marketing tips to Mangle your competition:
Customer focused Marketing Tips for small business:
Really, the buck starts and ends right here. Many businesses will fail simply because they refuse to take this important step.
Be value oriented. This means that you must be in contact with your customers to fully understand their needs. You must identify who your ideal customer is, what it is that they truly desire, and fulfill those needs. We’ve touched on this before in several videos including this one: We discussed in depth what it means to provide value as well as questions to ask in order to determine that value. If you’d like to read the article about how to provide value then click here.
Don't forget, if you're a local business, here's how we get Google to send us and our clients more customers! Try our SEO Consulting.
Anticipate future needs and desires. This step can only be done after close and intimate contact with our customers. Think about what problems or issues they are likely to have in the future and provide solutions. This increases your value and also increases customer switching costs. In the above blog and video on providing value, we discussed how to do this.
Note that these first two marketing tips for small businesses can only be accomplished by communicating with your customers. As entrepreneurs, we must be intentional about questioning our customers. If you’d like further examples, in this video, we looked at it from a different angle. You will often find both large and small opportunities to separate yourself from your competitors.
Sales and Marketing tips and tricks
There are many overlooked opportunities to change the value or perceived value in the eyes of your customers. One such opportunity involves pricing.
3. Change your prices to increase market share or profitability. This price change can either be an increase towards premium branding (possibly higher profit) or decreasing price so as to broaden your market. Be careful: price can be a perception of value, and you must be lowering your expenses while lowering your prices or else you’ll erode your profit.
Many entrepreneurs inherently believe that by lowering prices, they will increase volume and thus profitability. One must be very careful and deliberate in running the required cost/benefit analysis to ensure that profitability and the required return on investment is in fact being reached.
If you’d like a more thorough discussion of pricing strategies, check out this video:
4. Provide the one key benefit, while mitigating risk. All customers have fears associated with purchasing. While communicating with your customer, seek to understand their fears and develop methods of diminishing them. This could include excellent customer service before, during and after the sale, an outstanding return policy, or no/little risk guarantee.
Sales and Marketing tips and tricks
Here’s a bonus to add to our marketing tip for small business owners:
Take the time to develop a sales process. Practice it daily. Go out and effectively secure the business. Simple enough right???
This is another Achilles heel to many entrepreneurs. Most don’t like sales and even those who do, don’t take the time to develop a well thought out sales process for each of their products or services. Even us seasoned entrepreneurs can make that mistake. More on that in a coming article…..
Unfamiliar with the 7 steps of the sales cycle? Then watch this video where we discuss the basics which you can use to help grow your small business.
These 4 tips can absolutely help you to hone in on your customers’ desires and increase market share. Bear in mind that this only matters if you’ve taken the time to develop a truly excellent product or service. Not perfect, but excellent.
No marketing tips will work if you haven’t taken the time to get out and talk to customers. Talk to them on the phone. Go visit them where they are. Meet them in the streets. Talk to them online. Use social media like facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. Take a look at forums where people ask questions and give answers such as Redditt, YahooAnswers, Quora, etc.
Yes! It can be a lot of work.
Yes! It’s absolutely worth it. The insights that you will find can either help to differentiate your product offering, provide competitive intelligence or more.
Having said that, the marketing tips and tricks will absolutely work if you’ve identified your ideal customer. If you haven’t taken the time to do this, then it is akin to speaking a foreign language to someone while trying to sell them something. You likely never will and almost certainly, you won’t get repeat business.
Let’s not waste our time and energy. Let’s not waste our resources, nor the valuable time of our prospects.
Let’s identify our ideal customer, then employ these small business marketing tips.
If you like the article please share with friends and family.
If you prefer to watch a video summary of these points, click here.
It’s my pleasure to be a part of your success.
Dale Myers www.leadingadvanced.com
www.visionshaperconsulting.com