If you want to ensure stable sales and a constant influx of new customers, simply creating a website for your business is not enough. To succeed, effective promotion is essential. So you need to develop marketing strategies tailored to your business. In this article, we will discuss what you can do when creating such strategies.
Step 1. Define Your Target Audience
The first thing to consider when promoting is who you are selling your product to. Perhaps you have a complex product that only companies are interested in (B2B). Or, conversely, you offer products for ordinary customers. In any case, you can definitely create a specific profile of your buyer.
Consider the following:
- Who is interested in your product? What is their gender and age?
- Why are they interested in it? What are their pain points?
- How can your product or service solve their problems?
- Are they looking for your product only in a specific location (for example, city) or worldwide?
- What can motivate them to make a purchase?
- How do they search for information and make decisions? For example, do they read reviews and recommendations? Do they use social networks?
Based on this information, you can proceed to the next steps.
Step 2. Develop a Unique Value Proposition
To convince a potential customer to buy your product, it’s not enough to simply show what you sell. You also need to explain all the benefits of doing business with you. To do this, you have to develop a unique value proposition that will set you apart from competitors and be attractive to potential customers.
First, you’ll need to analyze your competitors. Study competitors in your market niche and analyze what products or services they offer, as well as their strengths and weaknesses.
Next, highlight the advantages of your business. Consider what makes you unique. This could be special offers or higher quality products compared to competitors, personalized service, or 24/7 support.
Always keep in mind the main problems and needs of your target audience. Think about how your product or service can help them solve these problems better than your competitors.
Then formulate your UVP. Based on an analysis of your competitors, the strengths of your business, and the needs of your target audience, formulate your unique value proposition. It should be specific, clear, and concise so your potential customers can easily remember it.
Step 3. Optimize Your Website for SEO
If you want to receive organic traffic from search engines, you need to think about SEO. Here are the most important aspects to consider when optimizing your website for the search engines:
- Page loading speed: Modern customers are not used to waiting long. If a page loads slowly, they will simply close the tab and move on to another website.
- Keywords: You may know everything about your business, but people may surprise you with the terms they use to search for your products or services on Google. Study all the keywords users might use to find you, create pages for these keywords, and make sure to incorporate them into your content.
- Backlink profile strength: To rank in the top 10, your website needs a strong backlink profile. This profile is built on the strength of backlinks your site receives from other sources. Backlinks are links that other websites place on their pages, linking back to yours. To develop your backlink profile, you should devise a link-building strategy and create high-quality content that people will want to share.
- Meta tags: Meta tags are not visible directly on the website but are important for search engine results and crawlers. To see them, you can simply enter any query into Google search and look at the results. The meta title is the headline in the snippet, and the meta description is a short description below it. Make sure to mention keywords in your meta tags and adhere to the recommended length: 50-70 characters for the meta title and 150-160 characters for the meta description.
- Competitor analysis in search results: Study the pages of competitors already ranking in the top 10 for the keywords you are interested in. Analyze whether their sites have any features that you should apply to yours and whether there are any flaws you can avoid.
Step 4. Don’t Forget About Email and Marketing Campaigns
Email remains one of the most effective tools for customer acquisition and retention. Here are a few tips to help you succeed:
- Define your target audience and develop personalized email strategies for different customer segments.
- Create high-quality and informative content that will be of interest to your subscribers and address their problems or needs.
- Design your emails with an attractive layout and user-friendly format to give them a professional appearance and attract the recipients’ attention.
- Attention to detail: Optimize the headlines, text, and images in your emails to capture and retain readers’ interest.
- Testing and analysis: Conduct testing of different email variants and analyze their results to determine the most successful approaches.
Step 5. Utilize Google Analytics
Many marketing experts agree that Google Analytics is an excellent tool for assessing the efficiency of your marketing efforts. Even entrepreneurs with limited technical knowledge should incorporate Google Analytics into their strategies for making informed marketing decisions. Similar to other aspects of your small business, marketing data provides valuable insights to guide your decisions regarding future marketing initiatives and helps determine the most effective strategies for maximizing returns.
Below are some examples of the website metrics that can be monitored using your Google Analytics account:
- Visitor volume: Track the daily and monthly volume of web visitors, observe trends, monitor changes during marketing campaigns, and compare traffic performance year-over-year.
- Average time on site: Monitor the duration visitors spend on your website and which pages they visit.
- Bounce rate: Measure the percentage of visitors who quickly exit your website after viewing only one page. This indicates a potential lack of interest or engagement with your content.
- New vs. returning visitors: Analyze the ratio of new visitors to returning visitors. This can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your marketing efforts on prospects versus existing customers.
- Traffic sources: Identify the sources of your website audience, including different websites and geographic locations.
- Conversions: Implement conversion tracking to measure the percentage of website visitors who complete desired actions such as making a purchase or filling out a contact form.
These metrics represent just a fraction of the tracking capabilities available to small businesses through Google Analytics. One notable feature is its comparison tool, which enables year-over-year data comparison to identify trends and inform long-term marketing strategies. By leveraging Google Analytics, businesses gain valuable insights into visitor behavior, empowering them to make informed marketing and sales decisions.
Regardless of technical expertise, business owners can harness the power of Google Analytics with the appropriate guidance. Numerous resources are accessible to help small businesses navigate this tool and interpret data effectively, enabling them to make data-driven decisions and drive business growth.
Consider Delegating Marketing Tasks to Professionals
Building a successful strategy, creating quality content, and optimizing it is indeed a complex task that requires the expertise of professionals. Marketing agencies like Epiic.com offer full-cycle marketing services for projects of various orientations. You can be assured of the quality of work, as the agency has a multitude of employees with various competencies, including content creators (copywriters and designers), as well as individuals with technical knowledge who provide website optimization services — identifying and rectifying errors on the site that hinder successful SEO promotion, as well as assisting in creating new pages and determining what should and should not be done.
In any case, if you want to ensure a good increase in traffic and customers, developing a marketing strategy is a necessary and important step. The marketing strategy should be flexible and adaptive to account for changes outside your company and respond to new opportunities and challenges. It is also important to establish mechanisms for measuring and evaluating results to regularly monitor the effectiveness of marketing actions and make adjustments as needed.
Photo credits: Coworking London