What Does It Take To Market Any Business? Here’s Our Secret!
Today, we will be revealing the 6 steps to market any business.
Have you been listening to other marketers on how to market your business and noticed nothing is working?
To see success when marketing your business, you need to have a plan.
Business is a sport, and the best sports teams make a plan well in advance to beat their competition.
The 6 steps we’re about to share with you will help you develop a marketing plan to ensure your marketing efforts are successful.
- Define Your Company Goals
- Understand Your Customer
- Assess Your Marketing Strengths
- Focus On One Marketing Channel at A Time
- Perform Competitor Research
- Optimize for Sales
Let’s jump right in!
6 Steps On How To Successfully Market Any Business
1. Define Your Company Goals
The first step in our marketing plan process is to define your company goals.
Goals help you to know what success is.
- Do you need more leads?
- Do you want more revenue?
- Are you looking to grow your following on social media?
- Do you want to increase your website traffic?
Also, you will not understand what steps you need to take to get your business where you want it to be without clearly defined goals.
Not to mention the wasted time and money on processes that don’t actually accomplish goals.
Remember, when you set a goal, you can build the process to reach it.
Not that you know why goals are important, let’s talk about how to set goals.
The best type of goals are SMART goals.
While yes we do mean smart as in intelligent goals but what we’re more so referring to is the acronym SMART.
The “S” in S.M.A.R.T goals stands for specific.
You must make sure your goals are specific. The more specific they are, the more effective your planning will be.
Now, the “M” in S.M.A.R.T stands for measurable.
Measurable means you can point to evidence that will show you that you’re making progress towards your goals.
This is so you can measure your success and make subtle tweaks when necessary.
The “A” in S.M.A.R.T stands for attainable.
Your goals must be realistic enough to be attainable.
This doesn’t mean that your goal should be easy. The best goals stretch you to become better but are also achievable.
The “R” in S.M.A.R.T stands for realistic.
Realistic means that your goals should be within reason.
Set reasonable, realistic mini-goals to get you to your overarching goal.
Lastly, the “T” in S.M.A.R.T stands for timely.
Your goals need to be timely.
To help with task prioritization and motivation, you must set a clear, realistic, and ambitious deadline to meet your goal.
With all of that said, be sure you don’t rush through this phase. Take the time you need to define your goals.
Doing this will set you up for success with the rest of the tips we’re about to share in this post.
2. Understand Your Customer
To market any business, you need to put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers.
Understanding your customer doesn’t mean identifying that you have a product or service that someone needs or who that someone is.
To truly understand your customer, you have to dig deeper.
Think about why someone would choose to do business with you over one of your competitors.
What are their goals and pain points related to your product?
This level of understanding will boost your marketing efforts.
And that’s because you can leverage what your potential customers are looking for in a business, in addition to a product or service.
So you might be wondering, “how do I get to this level of understanding?”
Well, it’s not something you have to come up with on your own.
You need to talk to your customers!
And you can do this through the following methods:
- survey them online
- connect with them via email
- talk with them on the phone
- respond to their comments and DMs on social media
Regardless of the method, you need to connect with your customers so you can get their opinion.
Opinions on what you might ask?
On everything!
Your website, your products, your ads, your customer service, and so on.
Another way to better understand your customers is to determine their goals and pain points.
We’ve explained this in more detail in the ‘What To Post On Instagram’ so be sure to read it next.
3. Assess Your Marketing Strengths
So let us start by asking you this simple question.
What are you good at?
You may be great at social media marketing tactics but not SEO.
You may be great at writing copy but not graphic design.
You may understand Instagram but not Twitter.
Just because there are many different marketing channels available today does not mean that you should take all of them on at once.
Of course, at some point, you’ll want to take an omnichannel approach which means you’ll include all marketing channels in your strategy.
But in the beginning, you need to leverage your strengths.
If you take what you are already great at and master it, you’ll see much more success spending your time on what you are good at, and outsourcing the rest.
4. Focus On One Marketing Channel At A Time
After identifying your key strengths, the next step is to pick a channel.
By identifying your key strengths, you can now pick a channel that will optimize your marketing efforts’ success.
Depending on your strengths, you may pick SEO, content marketing, PPC, Instagram, or something else.
If you’re starting with social media, then here’s a great post tackling the best social media platforms for business.
The important part is to be sure that you are picking out only one channel.
By picking one channel based on your strengths, you will be able to optimize your success.
This is because by focusing on one channel that appeals to your strengths, you will see greater results faster.
And that’s compared to when you would try to learn and implement every marketing channel all at once.
5. Perform Competitor Research
When researching your competitors, it is vital to identify what is and isn’t working for them.
By identifying these two things, you’ll have an understanding of what your business should replicate and what it should avoid entirely.
You have to realize that your industry’s top competitors are already making money off of their marketing efforts.
This is because they know what works best with the target audience that you somewhat share.
If everyone in your industry is doing tutorial videos, you might want to get on the bandwagon.
Now, the message here is not to steal but to take what works and add a sprinkle of uniqueness.
You may be wondering, how do you determine what’s working well for your competitors?
A good place to start would be with the secret tool we shared in our post about what is PPC, which you can read afterward.
But to summarize, we revealed a tool called Semrush.
What makes Semrush so effective is that just by entering the website URL of a competitor, you can see all of the ads they are running.
And, you’ll also see the keywords they target for both Google ads and SEO.
With all of this information available to you, you’ll easily be able to see what is working for your competitors and what isn’t.
6. Optimize For Sales
An increase in traffic and leads does not automatically mean an increase in sales.
In fact, even if you drive traffic to website and get new leads, it is only half of the battle because you still have to convert the traffic.
We want you to think through your customer buying journey and optimize it.
- Do you need a sales associate that can follow up the moment a lead comes in?
- Do you need a funnel that can upsell traffic and get them to convert?
- Is your checkout process too long or unclear?
The answer to these questions will help you understand how to turn traffic into revenue.
Now You Know How To Market Any Business!
That’s all for the 6 steps to marketing any business.
If you want to learn more about the specific marketing strategies mentioned in this post, our blog is a great resource for all of this information.
Or, you could also work with one of our digital marketing consultants for more specific advice involving your business.