New entrepreneurs and startups boot strapping their business often find marketing a challenge. While most will hire a pro when they reach a certain revenue point or land investment funding, beginning their business marketing remains challenging. The do-it-yourself method works. It just takes a little learning and practice. Here are five ways you can kickstart your marketing.
Establish Direct Contact
Establish a direct, real time conversation with your potential customers and/or existing customers. This achieves three key goals:
1. It establishes a positive, honest relationship.
2. It lets you get to know their needs.
3. It ensures you both recieve clear, transparent information.
Customers buy from individuals and brands they trust who fill their needs. You can make the best broom on earth, but if users need a mop, they won’t buy your broom. Direct communication also ensures clear messages. Remember the grade school game when the teacher began a sentence at the first desk and each person whispered it to the next? By the time the message reached the last desk in the room, even the first row, it had changed. Middle men and go-betweens hurt business by deteriorating communication transparency.
Use social media.
While not every client can or wants to visit your office or speak on the phone, most want to see social media accounts that remain active and engaged. These accounts provide you with a free, key mechanism to communicate directly with your customers. Take full advantage of it and get to know what your customers want. Then you can give it to them and they will buy. Don’t live online. Jump on for 15 to 20 minutes a day (per business account if you run more than one business). Less is more and you have lot of other work to do to run a business.
Provide quality content only.
Providing quality really is simple. Social media lets you see what your target audience wants before you even make a post. Just look at the competition. Which posts get the most consistent positive reaction? Which engage users the most? If you do already have an established account, your users tell you what they want to see. To succeed, give customers what they want. Craft quality posts that fill their needs and desires. You might only post two photos to Instagram per week, but in the interim, liking the type of posts they enjoy can benefit you, too. Twitter works the same. You might tweet an original post twice per week, but you can re-tweet your employees’ business related tweets and colleagues’ topical posts.
Design for mobile.
Choose a website look that wows, but also ensure it loads equally well on mobile devices as on a computer. About two-thirds of Americans own smartphones and most use them to conduct online research and shopping, says the Pew Research Center. Undertake your web designs with both screens in mind and include scripts that recognize the visitor’s device type.
Advertise on Facebook
Facebook starts its ads so cheap that you can run campaigns for less than $5. It provides an ideal method for small business to target locally or an online business to market nation- or world-wide. Boosted or promoted posts don’t do as well as giveaways. You don’t have to create a tangible promotional item to do this. You can create a digital document, such as an e-book, screensaver or wallpaper. Include an amazing image, so you’ll capture user attention.
Marketing may seem daunting at first, but if you know how to type, talk to people and be honest, you’ll do fine. People buy from brands they trust. Build honest relationships with your customers to succeed as an entrepreneur. Y
