7 Key Marketing Strategies And Marketing Tips to Help Your Business Thrive
Joel Sussman
How do you grab people's attention, arouse their interest, trigger their desire, and motivate them to take action? Answer that four-part question correctly and you've identified the secret to achieving tremendous sales and marketing success in your chosen business or field. To complicate matters, however, the potential answers are as numerous and multi-faceted as the growing number of niche markets, products and services, and marketing trends in our culture.
While not all inclusive, the following list of priorities, marketing strategies, marketing tools, and small business marketing tips can help establish a marketing framework that can put your small business on a faster track to growth.
Small Business Marketing Strategy #1: Gain Customer Confidence. Customer indecisiveness, skepticism, indifference, or confusion are among the top sales killers in the business world. It's up to you to project an image of experience, quality, dependability, excellent customer service, and/or added value to your prospective customers in order to win their confidence. If you haven't clearly communicated the advantages and solid reasons for them to do business with you, then they'll be hesitant to commit and the sale will go to your competitor.
Business Marketing Strategy #2: Penetrate awareness of your target audience by using some form of integrated marketing. In other words, the more ways the public hears about you, the better your chances are for achieving brand recognition, credibility, and greater market share. Effective marketing is partly the result of exposing your target audience to your name and your selling points (unique selling proposition) as often as possible(frequency), in as many ways as possible, and as cost-effectively as possible.
Marketing Strategy #3: Sincere enthusiasm, in both print and in person, is contagious (and I'm not talking about using multiple exclamation points after sentences!!! That detracts from your credibility and perceived professionalism.) If you deeply believe in your products, services, your company, and yourself, then your prospects will pick up on that passionate attitude and feel confident and optimistic about doing business with you.
Small Business Marketing Strategy #4: Purchasing is an emotional decision. Instill in your prospects good feelings about your company, your business relationship with them, and how you can improve their lives or solve their problem. Accomplishing that is at least as important in the sales and marketing process as focusing attention on product features and benefits.
Business Marketing Strategy #5: Dispel distrust. Gain customer confidence and overcome potential feelings of distrust by offering written guarantees of satisfaction whenever possible, customer testimonials, references, and by joining respected and well-known professional organizations, such as the Better Business Bureau, Chambers of Commerce, and industry associations.
Marketing Strategy #6: Impose a deadline.Counteract one of the biggest obstacles to closing a sale known to mankind: procrastination. To overcome the natural human tendancy to deliberate, postpone, and delay, it's often necessary to inject a sense of urgency into your ads, sales presentations, and marketing messages. Whether supplies are limited or prices are going up at the end of the month, some prospects need to have a deadline or an incentive to motivate them to take action now.
Business Marketing Strategy #7: Create a small business marketing plan to identify and capitalize on your strengths and opportunities. Your marketing strategies should also take into account factors such as your weaknesses (and possible remedies), external threats (competition, economic factors, etc.), your marketing mix strategy (products/services, promotional goals, pricing strategy, and distribution decisions), media strategy, sales and expense budgets, target market analysis (know your customers), and readily available marketing tools, as well as marketing tools that you need to research or acquire.
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Joel Sussman is web site publisher, newsletter editor, and Internet columnist. After more than 20 years in public relations, freelance journalism, and corporate communications, he launched a web site and email newsletter called 'The Marketing Survival Kit'. In addition to to featuring small business marketing tips and articles by a variety of business writers and marketing experts, the site also focuses on proven marketing tools, templates, and recommended marketing software. http://www.marketingsurvivalkit.com/
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