Even though business objectives, strategies and aspirations may differ, every entrepreneur seems to set out to achieve a common goal: get customers to pay for their products or services. Building a sustainable business requires patience; but while waiting, you want to make sure that you remain focused on activities that help your business gain traction fast.
One of the important things that drives business growth that you cannot ignore is marketing. What are your current marketing strategies, and how effective are they? In this post, you will learn 10 creative marketing ideas that you can adopt to attract more customers and grow your business.
What Is Marketing?
Marketing refers to a collection of activities that businesses undertake to promote their products and services whether online, offline or a combination of both. It typically involves advertising, selling and delivering products to customers or other businesses.
More importantly, marketing is about getting the right attention from your target audience using the right channels. No one is going to buy from you if they are not aware that your business exists. You must be able to not only make your business visible to your target market, but also communicate the benefits of your offering.
10 Creative Marketing Ideas To Scale Your Business Fast
1. Identify Your Target Market
The reason why this point is coming first is obvious. For your marketing campaign or efforts to be successful, you have to ensure that your message is targeted at the right people. Your target market refers to a group of consumers for which your product or service is designed. You have to understand who they are, where they are located, and the best channel or medium to reach them. Having some important demographic and cultural information about your prospective customers enables you to craft and position an irresistible offer before them.
2. Have A Website
Internet usage over time has gained tremendous traction. According to a report on internet usage in the United of States by Statista, the U.S. ranks third among the largest online markets in the world with over 313 million active internet users nationwide.
Today, people have normalized going online to get information on search engines like Google. Having a website and ensuring it’s effectively optimized for search engines can help you gain organic traffic which can create more awareness for your business and produce sales.
3. Use Customer Testimonials And Product Reviews
When you have a new visitor on your website who knows literally little or nothing about your business, one of the ways to make them trust you is through product reviews and customer testimonials. You do that by simply showing them how you’ve helped people in similar situations in the past. This helps you build trust with them.
When prospects see genuine customer feedback on your website, it instantly gives them an impression that your product has some level of credibility. Testimonials can help prospects make a buying decision quicker than they would if there weren’t any. You can gather testimonials by simply reaching out to your existing customers to share their experience using your product or service.
4. Create High-Quality Content
Running a successful business is more about what you can do to help your customers solve their problems. You can leverage reliable market insight to understand the challenges your customers are having and then create helpful resources to help them solve those problems.
People engage with high-quality, well-researched and valuable content that honestly addresses their worries or concerns. For example, you can publish detailed infographics, blog articles, or videos on your website that helps your target audience solve a particular problem they are dealing with. Relevant and impactful content helps you build authority within your niche, and makes you a preferred option for your target audience when they are looking to buy. Your content has simply pre-sold them!
5. Maximize Your Social Media Handles
A Pew Research Center report of social media usage among Americans revealed that around 7 in 10 Americans use social media to connect with one another, engage with brands, share information and entertain themselves. The most popular social media platforms in the U.S are YouTube and Facebook.
Social media enables you to reach your target audience where they’re spending their time and engage them with valuable content. You can create a Facebook page, for example, where people can learn more about your business, product, or industry and reply with comments about your posts.
6. Promote Fun Activities On Your Social Media
Even if your business is serious by nature, there are ways you can lighten up your followers’ mood on social media. One of the ways to create fun activities is through contests. Known as a contest marketing idea, you can organize an online video contest where people make videos about a particular product or service you offer. This type of contests promote engagements from social media users and you can build on this for future marketing purposes.
7. Create Landing Pages and Run Targeted Ads
If you want to have a consistent inflow of leads and customers then you simply have to create a funnel and invest in paid advertising. A sales funnel helps you attract your ideal customers on autopilot.
You simply have to build landing pages to collect emails and introduce people to your offers, then run targeted PPC ads via Google or/and social media platforms like Facebook, Snapchat Instagram, TikTok and Youtube. Let things run for a while so you can gather enough data then start doing A/B testing to figure out what works best and increase your conversions over time. Now, that’s how to ensure your business never runs out of leads!
8. Invest In Email Marketing
Email marketing in the form of email outreach or newsletter is one of the ways you can connect with your current and prospective customers and expose them to your business. A study conducted by McKinsey & Company showed that email marketing is 40 times more effective than social media. Your newsletter can serve multiple purposes, but it’s mainly used to provide relevant information to your subscribers and keep them connected to your website.
9. Consider Traditional Marketing
While it is normal to write off traditional methods of marketing such as printing of fliers or advertising on local newspapers, studies reveal that they still work. Does that mean you should solely base your marketing strategy on traditional approaches? No, but you can complement your online marketing efforts with relevant traditional marketing methods. You can share branded materials such as T-shirts and advertise on local radio.
10. Ask For Referrals
Nothing grows a business faster than a constant influx of customers. One of the ways to build your customer base is through referrals. Let’s face it; it takes time to earn a stranger’s trust, but it’s much easier when you’re recommended by someone they already know and trust. Use your happy customers as the channel to draw in new customers. After you finish a service project or sell them a product, as for a referral to someone they know who might benefit from a similar offering. By doing this, you can build a strong base of loyal customers.
Wrapping Up
The success or failure of a business lies in its marketing strategy. As a business owner, you need to do a critical survey of your industry to understand the nature of your would-be customers and then create your marketing strategy around your discovery. Now is the time to reach your ideal customers with the right marketing messages that will resonate with them. This is the best way for your business to build trust and authority.
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