04 Aug 5 Small Business Marketing Tips to Help Grow Your Business
LDN have put together a document labelled ’25 small business marketing tips to help grow your business’ from which we have chosen our top 5 which we believe are most important for our Collins234 Retailers.
Download their full e-book here: http://ldn.net.au/ebook-25-small-business-marketing-tips
1. KNOW YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
Having an understanding of who your business caters to will not only create winning marketing plans, but also a successful business. Know who you are targeting, stay informed and keep in touch with your clients.
- Who are your customers? Think about your best customers. Your best customers may be a combination of regular, seasonal and high spending customers. What are their common traits or trends? Are they male or female? How old are they? Do they live close by your place of business? What drives their buying behaviour? Do they have a higher or lower income? Knowing specifically who you customers are, and what they are after will allow you to build and deliver the right message and offer to best meet their needs, and keep them coming back.
- Look beyond your existing customers. When considering your target market and your marketing strategy, don’t forget to look at not only who your customers are right now, but also what types of people your products and services could potentially be attractive to in the future (opportunities). Be daring and think big on the possibilities here. Remember, big goals drive big achievements.
2. STAY INFORMED
Know your industry and more specifically know what your competitors are doing. Whether it is through speaking with your industry contacts, or your customers, knowledge is power. Be open to new ideas and stay informed to be sure you are ahead of the competition.
3. EYES ON THE PRIZE
1. Set goals. Know what you want to achieve, have realistic objectives and set a timeframe. This gives you something to measure your success against. Set an objective such as improve total sales by $200 for the next four weeks, obtain 20 hot sales leads, grow invoice value or a grow website visits by 500.
2. Draw a benchmark If your goal was to have 100 more people come into store as a result a letterbox drop for example, count how many people dropped in the week before to set a benchmark that you can measure against. Or how many sales you obtained this time last year. You can only make a judgement knowing what you are comparing against.
3. Be realistic Remember to keep your objectives realistic. The truth is, no advertising will work 100% of the time every time. 500 emails will not equate to 500 calls. Like anyone, your target audience is busy. They have more going on in their lives than reading every piece of advertising material they receive, let alone remembering your message in particular
4. CALL TO ACTION
Give customers a reason to react to your marketing. Think back to what your objective and key message for your advertising campaign is and create a compelling call to action. Build urgency around your campaign with a redemption deadline. Be creative with your offers and entice potential customers with seasonal discounts, sales with limited quantities or availability. Remember to keep your target audience in mind and add value through offering something that customers will want.
5. MEASURE
Measure marketing success against objectives At the end date of your offer, use your benchmark to review your campaign and measure your returns against the objectives you have set. Success does not happen overnight. Don’t give up if no one calls the day after your campaign starts. Timing, frequency and relevance again play a very important role. The truth is, customers will often only respond to your advertising when they have a need – in our experience, some customers have received responses six months after their distribution. In some cases, it’s literally stuck on their fridge waiting for that time of need.