Marketing is the name of the game when it comes to pushing your business to new heights, but many business owners are still woefully unaware of this fact. There's too much information out there to discredit the need for maximizing your business earnings or performance through advertising to ignore its function. Any good business can be proud of things like product or service quality, excellent safety record, employee satisfaction, etc., but if these achievements go ignored by the general populace of potential customers, then it leaves much to be desired. This is where the potential of advertising becomes a stringent need.
Changing up your business' approach to advertising comes in multiple ways that will be discussed moving forward. The important thing to know is that it has to be discussed in even the slightest capacity. Choosing to adopt these changes will be a deciding factor in how much you want to grow or if you're complacent where you are. Being open to adapting to an evolving market is always a sign of a great business owner, and marketing is a primary source of change that will help you turn your struggles with attracting new clients into success.
Utilizing Traditional Advertising
There's a growing trend to buck traditional advertising to the curb, but that's counterproductive to many businesses. First and foremost, you need to understand that not every business is built the same, and not every one of them is going to benefit from just digital marketing. For example, a business in a smaller town with less Internet traffic shouldn't be pouring resources into online marketing if the core demographic is unlikely to even see the advertising materials. There's always going to be a good middle-ground for most businesses, as a dynamic marketing campaign is good at attracting engagement from as many sources as possible.
Budget is also a concern, and more on this later, but bigger businesses like yours potentially can afford to splurge a bit on traditional ad spaces. One of the most apparent sources of advertising in a traditional sense is building wraps, which are pretty much impossible to miss and provide incredible advertising value. These are great ways to draw in attention, but a small business likely wouldn't use this technique because it doesn't suit their strategy. They might opt for something subtler and budget-friendly for their size, like a nice neon sign or storefront label/logo. Traditional advertising is still an amazing source of marketing potential, but it needs to be tailored to the scope of your business' budget and strategy. Otherwise, it can be wasted potential.
Budgetary Allocation
Choosing where to put your money is a make or break factor in running any marketing campaign. Spend too little, and no one knows you exist. Spend too much, and you run out of money for other areas, so there's a very fine sweet spot that exists to be exploited by your budget allocation. Determining your budget depends on a lot of factors, naturally. What's the size of your business? How much capital do you have? Are you redistributing earnings into the marketing budget? What industry are you in? These all need to be asked before you even start thinking about putting money into any kind of advertisement or campaign.
For most small businesses, you can hover anywhere between 2-5% of operating cost for marketing, and it grows upwards of 10% for medium to larger companies, in relative size to your operating budget combined with earnings. The distribution of marketing budgets is a very valuable metric to keep an eye on, as another good factor of a business' marketing strategy is to evaluate the competition. Obviously, it's hard to get all of the data on them, but if you can, then it only helps you to see how they spend their money when it comes to their own budget. Anything you can do to save money on this budget is important as well. Word of mouth and social media are (mostly) free, which means you can take advantage of some much-needed advertising without spending a dime.
Marketing Strategy and Campaigns
Those two terms have been thrown around a lot so far, and it's about time to explain their importance in case you're unaware of what they mean. You probably already know that a strategy is a goal-oriented plan that requires action to complete, but what exactly is a campaign? Good question; a campaign is just an ongoing strategy, really. Set goals that are regulated and adapt to changes in your business plan or the overall marketing goals of the market and competition. You can start buying ad space on billboards, benches, bus stops, and buildings, and that might work for a bit, but there's no goal, so you're dumping money into something without figuring out how to transition to something new or when to stop spending your budget. This is the purpose of developing a strategy and an overall campaign.
Starting a strategy and eventually, a campaign, is about goals. What kind of demographic do you want to attract, and what's your current demographic? The most important part of any marketing campaign is understanding your customers, and beyond that is understanding that they are the keys to your success. They buy your product or service, so you need to focus on that first and foremost as a key driver in developing any goal. Why do they choose you over other retailers or service providers? What do they like about your current marketing? What factors go into their decisions in shopping in general? Getting feedback on your website or through comments on social media can help you gather data to process, and figure out where you're getting traffic from, and you can implement that into your plan. Demographics are key to creating a strong marketing strategy.
Importance of Digital Marketing
It really goes without saying that digital marketing is important, but for the most part, it needs to be stressed that every business should be taking advantage of the Internet and other digital channels. As mentioned earlier, social media is a mostly free form of marketing that can be used for ad space and exposure, but it goes beyond that. Email marketing is still a prime example of how to reach customers and clients directly at no charge. The effectiveness depends on things like brand awareness, but newsletters and emailing lists are important for keeping within your budget and marketing quickly. Speed is something that traditional advertisement does lack in comparison to digital marketing because it needs to be seen before it can become effective, while digital marketing is in people's homes or on their phones. Digital marketing has streamlined the way we can reach our demographic base.
It gets more intricate once you start to consider how you can use SEO and PPC (search engine optimization and pay-per-click, respectively). These terms and techniques aren't new, but they are certainly useful to know moving forward. Using the Internet with the written content on a blog or website to garner traffic and boost your site engagement can bring in potential customers very efficiently. Making a site is also something that goes without saying. Many local businesses lack a reliable digital access point to view products, business information, and contact information. This is a big problem as the Internet is being used to produce greater sources of success for small and big businesses alike, so there's no excuse to not be taking advantage of it. The reach of digital marketing, especially when combined with traditional advertising, can lead to some pretty spectacular results.
Branding
Short and sweet is the last point about branding your business well. Typography, font, color schemes, and other visual elements go into making a solid, legible logo for people to make a judgment call on what you represent. Branding goes beyond just the visual element and relates to how people perceive your business in terms of customer appreciation and responsibility to quality. Brand awareness has never been more important, and crafting a likable and respectable image of your business goes hand in hand with furthering your marketing efforts.
Your business is your lifeline. It's the source of your income and your pride - something that has no price tag. If you want your business to be treated with as much respect and engaged with as much as you do, then you need to up your marketing game. Some of the bigger mistakes that any business owner makes is assuming that they don't need to commit to marketing and ignoring their core base of customers. These issues are both intertwined into committing to a strong marketing strategy, which involves demographic research, understanding budgetary restrictions or freedom, traditional advertising, strategy building, and digital marketing. All of these factors need to be accounted for to help push your business to new heights and maximize its potential.
