Figuring out how to market your small business can be a tough job, and if you don’t have any marketing experience, it can feel overwhelming.
As with any other task, marketing isn’t all that complicated if you take a methodical approach.
Know your audience
The first thing you need to do is know who you are aiming your marketing campaign at.
You can approach defining your target market in a few different ways:
- If you already have a customer base, do some analysis on who is buying your product currently. It’s likely that other people who are similar to your existing customers will be interested in your company, so it can be a good strategy to aim your marketing campaign at them.
- If you don’t have a customer base, think about who is the most likely to benefit from your product. Ask yourself, who has a problem that your product solves?
- Check out who your competition is aiming their marketing at, and try to capture a different niche market.
Once you know who your audience is, think more deeply about their values and interests and what kinds of things are likely to appeal to them.
Personalized marketing
Sending out a generic mailshot or writing a generic social media post isn’t likely to get you all that far. People will engage more with your campaign if it contains content that they actually want to read.
This is where your work defining your target audience comes in.
Think about how best to communicate with your audience based on what you know about them. For millennials and Gen-Z, social media is an effective platform. For the older generations, you might want to experiment with other approaches.
Whichever method you use to communicate, ensure that what you’re saying is valuable to your audience.
Pattern interrupt
The most effective marketing tools are those that get someone to sit up and take notice. Perhaps you say something funny or unexpected, or perhaps you provide a real-life distraction.
One great example of a real-life distraction is using a custom magic 8 ball with your company logo on it. They make such unusual gifts that people are bound to remember the company that sent them.
Build community
Building a community around your brand can be really effective as part of a marketing strategy.
If you can create a dialogue with your customer base, you will increase loyalty to your brand. More than this, you’ll have a pool of people to go to when you’re testing new ideas.
An excellent way to build community is by using blogs and social media platforms. If you can publish content that your target audience genuinely wants to read and feels strongly enough to engage with, you are on your way to creating a valuable community.
To keep your community going, you need to be posting regularly with consistently good quality content. It’s also essential that you engage with users in the comments, as this is where they will feel as though they meet you on a human level, which is where loyalty comes from.