Marketing a small business is absolutely essential. Whereas larger companies tend to have already made a name for themselves, it’s usually the case that smaller companies have yet to achieve widespread recognition. Marketing your business is the best way of growing your company’s reputation and winning more customers.
Keeping the Customers You Have
Before you go off hunting for new customers, it’s important to make sure you’re retaining the ones you already have. It’s actually much more cost-effective to keep existing customers than it is to try to gain new ones, so you should concentrate some of your efforts on improving and maintaining satisfaction and loyalty. A great way to track the success if your efforts in this area is by using retention marketing software of the sort provided by Phorest. Not only will using software help you to keep track of statistics, but it’ll help you to streamline policies company-wide.
Getting Started with Your New Marketing Strategy
The best way to begin a new marketing strategy is to carefully examine your company needs. Ask yourself the following questions:
- What types of products or services do you offer?
- To whom might they appeal?
- What are your competitors doing with regards to their own marketing?
- Are their efforts successful, and how might you be able to improve upon them for your own campaign?
Your next step should be to begin thinking outside of the box. Your marketing campaign will only be as successful as it is interesting, and in this day and age marketing needs to be interesting to catch the eyes of increasingly savvy consumers.
Finding Inspirational Examples
Perhaps the best way to come up with some really interesting ideas for your marketing campaign is to examine some notable strategies which have already been implemented by other companies. Many companies actually come up with their best marketing campaigns by reacting to real-time events or news stories. In this respect Oreo is a great example, as their ‘Dunk in the Dark‘ Super Bowl ad went viral after being put together in just a few hours. But even if you’re not in the food industry, you can still use this example as inspiration for your own marketing strategy.
Make sure to look outside of your own niche or you may miss out on some great tips and advice. Reading online marketing blogs will make sure you’re up-to-date with all the most innovative techniques.
Include Your Whole Company
Marketing isn’t just about whipping up a great TV ad or taking out space in a newspaper. Modern marketing is both comprehensive and inclusive, incorporating many different types of resource across multiple channels at once.
If you really want to come up with some interesting marketing ideas, you might want to think about reaching out to your different company departments. Each department will approach problem-solving from a different angle, and may have a unique perspective on how to approach your marketing strategy. This is also a great money saving solution, as most small businesses won’t have the funds to hire marketing professionals to brainstorm on their behalf.
Photo credit: TCL 1961 / Flickr
