Marketing is a pretty important part of your business. Marketing is very different to sales. While the two go together, they are very different processes. Your marketing is the process that leads to sales. Your sales are about making money! Marketing is all about communication and showing the consumer what you are offering them to get that money!
You need to know your customer and be able to reach them. Don’t try and keep your options open, selling to anyone you can. You need a target audience and to find this, you need to get out there and engage with them. You can make this process fun by using interactive devices to have consumers fill out surveys or play with your products online. Tablets are a great way of doing this and work as well in your shop as they do out and about. Having an iPad wall mount with interactive surveys will be a fantastic way to generate quality leads and help you avoid marketing your product to a customer who isn’t interested in what you have to offer. Analyzing your product, becoming familiar with who it will appeal to and then research how to reach them will result in far stronger leads and prevent you from wasting your time forcing a product onto someone who may or may not is interested.
People want to know what they can get out of what you’re selling. Even though highlighting the features of your product and service are important, stopping there isn’t going to leave a lasting impression because all of your competitors are also doing the same thing. The key to differentiating your product when marketing is by creating narratives as to how the features will benefit the customer – will it save them time? Money? Make their life easier? Make them happier?
Your product may have a whole host of features that can benefit someone, but there should always be a set of signature traits that you should repeatedly promote; this repeated focus on your Unique Selling Point across different marketing platforms like social media, your blog, website, etc., is what will start to create a strong brand reputation.
Everyone knows that marketing plans are necessary and putting one together isn’t the most challenging part – it’s sticking to it that is! As a small business entrepreneur, it’s likely that you will have so many things going on; work will be demanding and time will be limited and distractions at a peak. To see results from your plan, (a plan which will be overseen by your business adviser to ensure it has the potential to be effective) sticking to it and following through with consistency and resilience is a must.
It all sounds simple but knowing the very basics of marketing, what it is and why it could make all the difference in your business, will give you the confidence to move forward and generate stronger sales leads. You will also understand your customers better so will hit sales targets. So get to grips with it and change your business future today!
