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Marketing Strategies for Your Business
As a new business owner, everything is on you. Some businesses overlook one of the most important parts - marketing. Marketing is critical for your business, it is foundational for its growth and economic viability. You need the right marketing strategy because marketing is one of the chief foundations about business. How do you get clients or customers without having them know who you are?
Firstly, the question needs to be asked:
What is marketing?
The Cambridge Dictionary defines marketing as “the business activity that involves finding out what customers want, using that information to design products and services, and selling them effectively”.
I have a simpler definition.
Marketing is the act of aligning your product or service with customer needs through the art of persuasion.
Everything you do towards that end is the epitome of marketing. Marketing done right is done with the customer in mind. With customer focused marketing, you can tailor a solution that not only solves the problems of the customer, but rewards you with a quality revenue stream. These are the steps to developing a highly effective marketing strategy.
Find out what a market is willing to pay for.
You have to solve a pain point, or vastly improve the life of the customer in some way. This part can be expensive for some new product unveils, or relatively cheap depending on how data is collected. The key is solving a problem that is significant enough to where you can get high margins, which is dependent on whether the problem is something only you (or at most a small group of people compared to your customer base) can solve.
Before you launch your product
Gather excitement for your product by preparing for launch. Get a signup list, start creating a mystique about your brand. Partner with influencers if you have the budget for it. Your main goal should be developing a potential client list so you can create a warm approach. You should be able to develop leads to get people to buy your product or service.
A key metric to understand pre-launch is the estimated breakeven. This is the amount you have to sell to be profitable after all costs. The lower the breakeven, the easier it is to get to a profitable business. You need to keep your breakeven in mind as you develop a marketing plan to get to launch.
If your business is really good and solves a huge problem for customers, you can potentially pre-sell your services and items before launch. Various companies, from real estate to automobiles, sold their services and products pre-launch, which helped fund their future growth. An effective pre-launch marketing plan can go a long way.
Make sure you launch a website as quickly as possible and get effective SEO. Be available on the most popular social media apps and start generating content. If you don’t have access to capital, growth will be slower, but you can still have effective inbound marketing through an effective content generation strategy, it might just take a year for it to be effective.
Product/service launch
On launch day, it is critical to deliver. That means developing services that allow your customer to have support from the beginning when interacting with the product and service to the end, where the product and service is consumed. You need to develop customer statistics and see how long customers come back, repeat requests of product and services, and develop a strategy to extend the customer lifetime value - the value of all goods and services a customer buys from your company throughout the customer relationship.
Key metrics after launch are:
Click through rate - The higher this is, the more people are excited about your product just from an advertisement or post that comes in front of them
Cost per click - this is how much it costs for an ad to get a click and shows how well designed your ad is.
Customer lifetime value Customer service cost per customer - this is the net service cost it takes to keep a customer satisfied.
Customer acquisition cost - This is the cost it takes for one customer to accept your services should be less than the present value of the customer lifetime value minus average cost of servicing your customer or else you have a failing business model.
Gross Margin percentage - measure of profitability that shows your percentage of revenues after cost of goods sold or cost of services. This measures the efficiency of your company.
Contribution margin ratio - another efficiency metric that shows your revenues after variable costs divided by your total revenue. It is a key efficiency metric.
After your launch
It is important to get people to leave ratings and reviews on your services. A highly rated company on a review website establishes credibility and shows customers that you provide quality products and services.
As your business grows, it is important to not neglect marketing. Marketing is what makes the difference between mediocre firms, and profitable firms. As you grow, you can do higher level things that attract bigger clients, or do new offerings that have higher barriers to entry.
The important thing to do is to delegate. As you grow, your business becomes more complex. You need to hire or automate tasks and make sure you are getting talented people to help you. You need to envision your strategy and grow with your clients. You cannot be satisfied with the level of business you are currently doing; you must grow or die.
If you have any questions about marketing, Contact Us! Marketing is a critical part of strategy and in a consultation session, we can give more secrets to unlock your marketing growth.
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