Do you have a business and find it difficult to market your products? We’ve all been there one way or the other, either through the companies we work for or our small businesses. A recent study shows that 42% of small businesses fail because of lack of demand. In order to increase the demand in your business, you need to know how to boost your marketing.
Do It Yourself
DIY, a popular acronym known as Do It Yourself in this context means learning the ins and out of your target market and doing the marketing yourself. Research different methods, attempt and fail at them until you get it right. This is the bootstrapping way of doing it.
Dedicated Team
In order to save money, businesses try to keep things inhouse, but sometimes you just have to trust the professionals. Find a team, specifically a creative design agency that will take over every aspect of your marketing.
Marketing is a full-time job and as interesting as that sounds, if you are a crafter who has to spend all day using their hands, there is little time left to explore the ideas you have for your business every day. A dedicated team whose sole purpose is to do everything you wish you could do but don’t have the time to do might your best bet.
That team should have experience with:
Design
90% of the world is projected to be online by 2030, which is a great advantage for marketing. A good team would know how to craft the pictures to fit your audience and frame your product or service in the best light possible.
They will indubitably change the outlook of your social media pages. You’d be surprised at the percentage of people who make purchases based on the design of the page rather than the product itself.
Custom Videos
Everyone is watching videos. It makes them laugh, cry, or at the very least, tugs on their emotions. Videos changed everything in our personal lives and in business marketing too.
These videos could be simple behind the scenes pieces of how you create your craft or stories the audience would like to see. People connect more to stories, especially when it resonates with them. Or you can go with short, hilarious clips with viral potential, kind of like Old Spice does with their ads. You don’t need a million dollar budget to make a good video.
Referrals
One client can turn into an audience if they promote your business for you. They mjight do this because they loved the product (which is an organic and free way of doing this), or because you have an affiliate or referral program that they’re getting some sort of kickback from. The best marketing is free though and you want to do your best to over-deliver so that your customers have a reason to recommend your service to friends, family and others online. You can add a bit of incentive by offering small referral bonuses if they promote you on Facebook or Instagram.
Content Marketing
Content marketing has a slightly different definition based on who you ask. Generally though the concept remains the same; You’re creating online content – which can be video, text, audio or any other consumable format – and spreading that online. In SEO (search engine optimization) it usually refers to written articles which are then syndicated across the web for backlinking purposes. The goal two-fold in these cases – to grab some backlinks to your web page and hopefully increase it’s rankings in the search results, and to get some traffic from people reading the article and clicking through to your business.
However, content marketing doesn’t have to be about SEO. Creating tutorial or other promotional videos, podcasts or even simple photo’s to share on instagram are all a form of content marketing. You want to create free content that people will consume, with the expectation that some of them will check out your product.
George is the CEO of Expat Group Limited, based in Hong Kong.