Tips and Techniques for Better Marketing Practices

Marketing is never an exact science. Although there are common guidelines that all marketers and companies should follow, every audience and every business is different. The best way for the latter to interact with the former depends on many different factors and can often change over time.

The eventual result of this is that every company, even the firmly established and successful ones, has room to improve on their marketing practices.

The following quick and easy tips any company can apply to their own marketing endeavors, whatever their marketing plans may be.

Opt for Original Content Over Reposts

When it comes to online marketing, content is king. This is especially important to remember when it comes to social media marketing, a major trend and powerful tool for businesses everywhere that is only going to get bigger.

As Forbes online marketing writer Jayson DeMers asks, why would a company want to share another brand’s content when they can share their own? As DeMers points out, research on online content marketing has shown that “created posts – as compared with shared posts – receive far more viral reach, organic reach and engagement than those that are simply shared.”

This, of course, does not mean that companies should take credit for content that they did not create. Instead, it means that companies that take the time to create their own blog posts, photos, social media messages and so on will experience drastically improved marketing attention as a result.

If you’re not sure what content to create, you can still take pointers and ideas from other companies’ content. For example, if you read a breaking relevant news article on a news website, don’t just repost it. Instead, write your own take on the story and reference the site that you heard it from. Your audience will appreciate a fresh voice on a subject more than they will your ability to copy and paste.

Follow and Favorite Content Sharers

Once a company has created and released social media marketing content to their audience that does not mean that they are done and can forget about it. Companies need to keep track of how their target audience reacts to, and shares, this information.

One great way to do just this while also gathering more followers for the company is to follow individuals who share and repost the company’s content. As content crafter Belle Beth Cooper explains, taking the time to show appreciation to marketing audience members is a great way to entice them to follow the company even closer in the future. It will also help boost a company’s reputation amongst audience members as a business that pays attention to them and takes an interest in what they have to say.

Double Check Consistency

With any type of marketing endeavor, online or offline, consistency is an important consideration. A lack of consistency is also one of the easiest marketing mistakes to make without noticing, which is why all businesses should take extra care to make sure that they are presenting a steady marketing image.

To help companies with their marketing consistency, Bozeman Daily Chronicle marketing writer Doug Weber advises companies to double check that they are using the same tagline throughout all of their promotions and a color scheme that is consistent across their brand. It is also important that companies use the same logo, or family of logos, in each of their marketing efforts. The more consistent the marketing, the better idea customers and other audience members will have of who the company is and what it does.

Stop Marketing to Unprofitable Customers

At first glance this can sound like counterproductive advice. After all, ignoring customers to chase profits is an easy way to paint a company as cold and uncaring, a reputation that will definitely not help their marketing efforts.

But on closer inspection, this advice proves sound. After all, if a company stops spending time and money marketing toward customers who do not respond well to their advertising, then they will have more resources to direct toward those customers who do.

As Atlanta marketing consultant Michael King told Microsoft’s Business Hub, “More than likely, 20 percent of your customer base is contributing 150 percent to 200 percent of total annualized profit (TAP).”

A remaining 70 percent of customers are “breaking even,” while the final 10 percent most likely cost a company between 50 and 100 percent of their TAP, according to King.

What this means is that companies should take a closer look at how their customer profitability stacks up. Premium marketing services should only be directed at those customers who are most likely to return with a boost in profits, not those on whom this marketing will most likely be wasted.

Naturally, there are many more ways that a company can improve its marketing endeavors and draw in more and more interested customers.

Bottom-line, marketing can be daunting, but the important thing is to focus on the audience and the most important marketing tasks while trimming away inefficiencies and unnecessary costs.

Weighing Up the Pros and Cons of Starting an Online Business.

There are many advantages to turning to an online business. Whether providing your customers with online purchasing options, or building a business that exist solely online, there are several advantages that exist over traditional brick-and-mortar stores.

1. Advantages

Online Stores Have Fewer Limits

When it comes to the obvious practical benefits of an online business versus a traditional one, online stores do not suffer from the same time constraints as brick-and-mortar ones.

With any traditional business, there will come a regular point in time during the day that business simply cannot happen. Employees go home and customers must wait until they come back again to make purchases. With online stores, this isn’t a problem, as retail websites are open all day, every day, all year long. This is more convenient to the customers, which translates into more sales.

Compounding this advantage is the fact that there are also no geographical constraints to an online business. With a physical store, you limit your customer base to those people who are already close enough to frequent your shop. When you go online, you make the whole world your potential customer audience. There are effectively no limits to where or when online businesses can draw their customers.

Online Stores Are More Cost-Effective

One major and tangible advantage that any business owner can see with an online store is the lower costs involved with opening, running, and maintaining it. This reduction of business comes from:

 Real Estate – Since online stores do not need a physical building in which to exist, there are no real estate costs involved. Website hosting and registration fees will almost certainly be less expensive than paying rent.

Staff – With an online store, many processes are automated for both customer and business alike. These include operational processes such as inventory management, billing, payments, and checkout. This in turn lowers the number of employees that the business needs to function.

-        Marketing and Advertising – Many channels of advertising for online businesses can prove much more cost effective than with traditional businesses. Traffic from sources such as social media sites, pay-per-click advertisements, and search engines are all either free or very cheap.

These cost savings can be passed on to the business’s customers in the forms of better deals or lower prices. In this way, online businesses can turn their own lowered expenses into even more customer traffic.

Online Stores Offer Better Convenience

For many customers in many ways, online businesses are vastly more convenient than traditional businesses with physical limitations. For this reason, simply being online is often enough for a business to draw in customers that it might not otherwise have had.

With a well put together online retail business, customers can find your products almost instantly with just a few clicks. There are no lines, no crowds, no waiting times, and no need to travel out of their way. They can also more easily compare products and find relevant information on them as necessary. All in all, for those who embrace it, online shopping is much less of a hassle in many respects than traditional shopping.

2. Disadvantages

Like any business model, though, online retail is not perfect. While it has many advantages over traditional, physical alternatives, online business does come with a few disadvantages that business owners need to consider. These include the following examples.

Customers Cannot Try Before They Buy

Unless your product is purely visual, there is no way for your customers to experience it fully for themselves before buying it. They cannot try on clothes, test out electronics, or flip through books that they buy over the internet. For some customers, this can be a turnoff to online business, especially when it comes to major purchases.

Online Purchases Take Time

The tradeoff that online retail makes to gain many of its time saving conveniences is a bigger delay on customers actually receiving the product. They can shop, compare, and buy relatively quickly, but for any tangible product, they must then wait for their purchase to ship to them. For this reason, customers may prefer to simply go into a physical store and buy it so that they can walk right out with it in their hands.

Security Concerns Are Greater

It’s probably a safe bet that most customers worry less about being robbed in a store than they do about having their information stolen online. With online businesses, customers have to write out their personal information to complete many transactions. This can naturally make many customers uneasy, as this information may possibly then be stolen by a third party and used to commit identity theft.

Fortunately, businesses can take steps to emphasize the advantages of their online stores while lessening the drawbacks. With careful planning and consideration, almost any business can utilize online commerce to their developmental benefit.

Startup Strategies for Standing Out from the Competition

Standing out from the competition is a key component to success as a startup. However, in order to understand how to build the point of difference that is going to pull consumer interest, a little research will become necessary. Key questions to ask while doing this research include:

• What kinds of products does the competition sell? Do they have a diverse line, or do they only offer one model?
• What is their pricing structure?
• How customizable is the product? Can purchasers make it their own, or is there just one standard issue item?
• What kind of customer service do customers receive?
• Who is a typical customer?
• What kinds of sales and marketing strategies are being implemented?

Customers are not attracted to new businesses that are exactly like more established, trustworthy companies. In order to turn a startup into a success, that business must provide a unique approach from other options. There are several ways to put this into place:

• Offer different options: This will vary on the product, but could include a range of colors, a smaller sized product, or different flavors.
• A different pricing structure: If a competitor is charging $100 for a product, consider charging $50 or $75. The slight discount might be enough to convince a person to switch brands or trying something new.
• A different marketing approach: Consumers hear so many marketing messages each day that they often turn into white noise. However, if all of the competitors in the industry are saying message X and a new company is offering message Y, that is often enough to get attention and encourage people to tune in.
• Approach a different target demographic: When the rest of the industry is going after women 25-54, consider approaching teens, older women, or men. There is probably not enough business in that small demographic to support three different companies, but other demographics can turn into valuable clients.
• Have a clear marketing message: If an entrepreneur does not know what they are hoping to achieve with their company, then it is likely that they will not convey a strong marketing message to potential customers. Prior to doing any advertising for the business, it is important to figure out exactly what the company stands for, together with long-term and immediate goals.

When an entrepreneur takes the time to research the competitive environment in which they will be vying for business, the chances of building a position and share in that market is significantly increased.

Why Entrepreneurs Need to Get With the (Marketing) Program.

Marketing plays a much more important role in business success than a lot of entrepreneurial leaders realize. In fact, when asked to explain what exactly marketing is and how it affects their businesses specifically, many of these leaders would probably find it hard to pin down a definition or explanation.

This is not unexpected or even unusual. Marketing is oftentimes a hazy area of operation despite the vital role that it plays in the way a company performs. And while it can be taught, many of the most successful names in the marketing business learn everything that they know about the subject on the job without any formal training beforehand.

The unique characteristics of marketing that make it both easy to pick up and hard to pin down, in addition to its importance with all business operations, means that it pays for every level of a business to have some knowledge and experience with the subject.

Here are some of the most important truths and aspects of marketing that can help entrepreneurs lead more effective marketing initiatives as well as more effective companies all around.

Successful Marketing Does Not Require Huge Budgets

While budgeting affects nearly every aspect and department of a business, marketing is one of the few places where smaller budgets do not necessarily have to equal less success. The best marketing comes as a result of excellent communication strategies and the creation of self-sustaining visibility. Through effective use of information for strong targeting and messaging, entrepreneurs can create effective business-driving campaigns on small-scale budgets.

Marketing Affects Every Aspect and Level of a Company

The marketing department of any company impacts the operational outcomes of other departments. Sales, communications, product development, administration, and other departments all have a cause-effect on how a company shapes their marketing strategies. If you plan to be a leader in the industry, the role of marketing has to be a business priority.

Effective Marketing Means Effective Reuse of Ideas

While inventive skill can be wildly useful from a product development standpoint, the best marketers are always innovators rather than inventors. The difference is that invention focuses on the creation of wholly new ideas, whereas innovation finds ways to adapt and transform existing ideas to be more engaging to a wider audience.

From a marketing standpoint, this applies to both the products and services as well as to how they are presented to their audiences. Marketers do not need to come up with brand new campaign ideas. Instead, they can tweak existing strategies and refresh them to bring new life and relevance to consumers.

Despite Appearances, Marketing Means Brutal Competition

The more effective marketing campaigns are those that display how the product or service involved stands on its own strengths rather than reveal the weaknesses of competitors. However, while effective marketing does not feel overly competitive, marketing itself is often a highly competitive game.

The end goal of any marketing campaign is to result in more sales and transactions. Each of these individual transactions requires a single buying party and a single selling party. And when a customer buys something from one provider, they are not buying it from another. Therefore, even when there is no obvious antagonism between two businesses offering the same product or service in the same field, competition is still alive and strong.

First and Foremost, Marketing is About People

All marketing is meant to determine what it is that customers want or need and how best to deliver it to them. This means that the heart and soul of any marketing campaign is its ability to effectively communicate with the target audience. Even when a business sells to another business, it is people within the business making the choice. Because of this, good marketing always means good communication skills before anything else.

How to Delegate for Business Growth: 3 Focus Factors.

The ability to delegate effectively can make all the difference between reaching the next level of business growth and burning out before getting there.

Most entrepreneurs are used to, and prefer, doing things themselves whenever possible. It’s one of the reasons why they become entrepreneurs in the first place. However, a business owner that does every job that they can is a business owner who is stretching him- or herself too thin. It is likely that they won’t have the energy left to see to vital business matters if they expend it all on tasks that somebody else could have been doing. This can effect operations and productivity, which, in turn, can challenge the successful flow of business.

The following focus factors can help achieve successful hand-off of specific and relevant tasks.

Analyze Everything on the Plate – To delegate effectively, you need to know what needs to be done first. Keep track of where your time goes every workday, and when you see a task that can be done by someone else, make note of it.

Explore Delegation Options – There are many ways to delegate a given task. You can hire employees to deal with them, outsource them to independent help, or find a way to cover them with technology, among others.

Learn to Trust and Be Trusted – When it comes to effective delegation, the key is trust. You have to be able to trust those to whom you are delegating the work in question. These individuals in turn have to be able to trust you and know that you’re not giving them anything that they can’t handle and are available to answer questions and provide other assistance if necessary.