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Marketing Strategies for Entrepreneurs
One of the toughest challenges an entrepreneur faces is marketing. You can have a great idea and you can have a great product; but if you can’t effectively market your idea, you’ll never be as successful as you were meant to be. With so many other competing entrepreneurs and ideas, marketing can be a tough nut to crack.
Inbound marketing is focused on attracting leads through relevant and helpful content and adding value at each stage of the buyer's journey. With inbound marketing, prospective customers find your brand through channels like blogs, search engines, and social media. Inbound marketing is hands-down the most effective strategy – specifically, content marketing (on-site and off), search engine optimization and social media. There is no magic to marketing – it's all about attracting clients with helpful, relevant content that addresses their pain points and/or needs and provides value.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a strategic approach to creating valuable content that aligns with the needs of your target audiences and inspires long-term customer relationships.
Your customers are your customers because you provide solutions to their problems. That’s what inbound marketing is all about — providing the solutions that your target audiences are searching for.
Those solutions can come in the form of many different types of content across all your different platforms, designed to connect with potential buyers at different stages of the buying cycle.
These are some of the most common types of inbound marketing content — but even within these types, compelling content can come in many different shapes, sizes, and styles. Inbound marketing is about being creative to serve the needs of your audience.
These are some of the most common types of inbound marketing content — but even within these types, compelling content can come in many different shapes, sizes, and styles. Inbound marketing is about being creative to serve the needs of your audience.
Inbound marketing works because it’s entirely based on what customers want and what they’re looking for in the moment. It’s not about putting your brand in front of customers — it’s about being there, and being ready, when they’re looking for the things you offer. Successful inbound marketing happens when you’re producing high-quality content that your intended audience really engages with.
It’s important to keep in mind that inbound marketing doesn’t usually work as effectively as it could when it’s the only marketing tactic you use. The key to a great inbound marketing strategy is to create excellent content that can also be promoted through outbound tactics. Then, you’ll have a library of engaging and relevant content across all your platforms — therefore your audience finds it through search, but it’s also available for you to promote if you need to.
Inbound marketing is a great way to inspire customer engagement that leads to buyer journeys and recurring customer relationships. For example, when you create an e-book that your website visitors love, they’ll be more likely to submit their information and become leads. It’s also easy to integrate inbound marketing tactics with marketing automation to transport new leads and customers through the purchase pipeline.
What is the significance of networking? Networking gives you access to opportunities that you might not have found otherwise. Your network has the potential to provide you with insight into various sectors, information on what possible employers are looking for, and advice on how to grow professionally.
Brand Activations
Networking allows you to meet new people and give presentations at events, which boosts your confidence. This is significant because the growth of your business is dependant on your relationships and confidence.
This may seem like an easy job, but I recommend my fellow marketers to sincerely focus on this step. A lot of times, I've seen people on my team just assume the buyer persona that seems fine to them, which is the worst way to do it, because no matter how amazing is your marketing strategy, if you are not targeting the right audience, it's useless. So, create buyer persona based on real data of your customers and market research (If you're new). Once you're able to put a face and personality to your buyer, it's easier to meet their needs.
Whether it is fashion, finance, or any other industry, staying up to date with the current trend is an important role. One big benefit of this is that you will be able to forecast more accurately. Sales forecasting will help your firm grow immensely because it will aid in making the right decisions. You will be able to estimate future sales and other statistics if you are aware of what is going on in the digital realm.
Staying up to date on trends is critical for establishing credibility and value for entrepreneur marketing. That being the case, successful professionals devote time each day to staying up to date on the newest news.
Live events are definitely one of the best ways to generate leads and start to build relationships, but it's important to follow those up afterwards. Post-event email marketing campaigns and divide the leads out per region so the managers can work on them with the sales teams. Have regular calls after the event with the sales team to make sure they know where they are with the leads.
Once you build up the relationships you can go back to the events and people come over and say, Oh hi, I met you guys last year.. This is the massive advantage of events over email marketing; it's more personal and you're not just a faceless recruitment agency.
One of the most valuable tools that a marketer can have is a clear and concise view of the demographics and habits of their customers. Up until a certain point, much of the knowledge of any company in regards to the demographics and background of their customers is based on guesswork. By creating a comprehensive survey and incentivizing its completion for customers, you can gain invaluable insights that will help you to craft the most effective marketing strategies possible.
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Social media platforms assist businesses in marketing their products and services. While also assisting entrepreneurs in communicating with the rest of the globe. When their own committed customers share their social media postings with other users, this makes the process of marketing for entrepreneurs easy and effective.
In terms of brand awareness, consumer engagement, income, and customer service, social media has numerous positive effects on business. It’s also a terrific tool for evaluating your competition and how they’re using social media to grow.
Social media networks are open to everybody, allowing businesses to track the activity of their customers or potential purchasers. This allows marketers to learn more about their target demographic and their interests, allowing them to develop a stronger marketing strategy to acquire such customers.
Use all your online and offline sources and resources to get the market data as much as possible and analyse those in different metrics to find the current trends and upcoming future trends related to your trade. Once you know the actual present needs of your target audience, immediately find the shortest route to reach them and get to action.
Analysing market data will also help you the guess the next set of requirements of near future in advance and you will have certain time to set your action plan to harvest the best crops from the future market. Therefore, the best marketing tip is to touch the pulse of your market to know the present and estimate the future well ahead.
Digital marketing boosts entrepreneur marketing to increase brand exposure. Because you know that brand awareness is critical for both new and existing firms. Marketing is an essential practice for entrepreneurs because no business can create and thrive without a customer market.
Entrepreneurs must differentiate their company’s product or service so that the customer understands its uniqueness and worth. This is the responsibility of marketing strategies to make it clear to the consumers.
My best marketing tip is to get marketing involved before the development of the product. From my experience as a business owner, you need to conduct extensive research so every business decision you make is backed by data. You can easily make assumptions of which features your target audience will want, but if you're not conducting market, competitor, and user research, you are going in completely blind.
The chances of your product succeeding if you don't have clear cut reasoning behind every move, are very slim. Many people use marketing only for promoting your product after launch. This is a big mistake because marketing needs to be involved throughout every phase of the product/service lifecycle.
Marketing isn't just an afterthought. You need to start marketing your product or service before you begin development. Validating your product, the reasoning behind why you built the product, the messaging, etc. are all things you should be considering early on. Many business owners will spend an enormous amount of time and money building something that fails in the market simply because they did not validate their idea and only leveraged marketing when it was time to promote their product.
SEO increases traffic and conversions. Every business needs a website, and search engine optimization (SEO) is critical to assisting consumers in finding it online. SEO is not only a low-cost and evergreen approach to attract new consumers and build brand awareness, but following a few fundamental strategies from the start can have a significant influence on your bottom line.
SEO assists organizations in providing the material that their visitors desire. Instead of having traffic drop as soon as an advertisement expires, SEO will gradually grow an audience.
You can create credibility by getting in touch with your customers and keeping them up to date on your business by email marketing. The more they learn about your company and the more they hear about it, the more they will trust it.
Email marketing is essential for developing relationships with prospects, leads, existing customers. And even past customers since it allows you to talk directly to them in their inbox at a time that is convenient for them. Email marketing is one of those marketing strategies for entrepreneurs that makes your brand approachable and engaging.
Affiliate marketing enables businesses to efficiently sell a product on a little budget, with less work and time, and with a low-risk level, while ensuring a high return on investment, increased brand awareness, and business growth.
A fashion affiliate program, for example, is a platform set up by a corporation, manufacturer, or merchant that sells the fashion products you want to discuss. They offer you special links known as “affiliate links,” which you will use to advertise their items on your blog (and other marketing materials).
Don't try to do everything and don't try to be everything! Pick a few key tactics and do them consistently. You don't have to be on every social media platform and you don't have to do every single marketing method you come across. Find what works best for you and concentrate on becoming the best in that particular method.
Since you never know when or where your potential customers or investors may cross your path in life, you need to have an engaging elevator pitch ready to share at any time. The average adult attention span is under eight seconds, so you should have something compelling to offer about your brand that shows value, and does so quickly.
Content marketing, more than any other kind of advertising, successfully interprets these visual idiosyncrasies by charging brands with intimate, moving, and inspiring stories – through words, photographs, and personal presence. This is something that traditional advertising or any other marketing strategies don’t do.
What is the significance of content marketing? Content marketing is vital because it helps you build trust, develop relationships, enhance conversions, and generate leads by answering your audience’s questions. Customers nowadays expect high-quality, consistent content from their favorite brands.
One of the best tools you can use to track specific marketing campaigns and return on investment (ROI) is by implementing a call tracking platform. A call tracking platform allows you to assign unique phone numbers and tracking sources providing you with valuable information on what marketing campaigns are producing leads and which are not.
These metrics provide information on where to spend marketing dollars and where to cut costs.Many clients over the years who were throwing their marketing dollars in the wind, with no real tracking in place. Imagine how much money it saves once this is implemented allowing companies to be able to make informed marketing decisions!
Pairing your Google Adwords or Facebook Ad campaigns with Dedicated Landing Pages. I can't tell you how often online retailers simply point their Facebook ad campaigns to a home page. A dedicated landing page is crucial to get decent conversions and to make a better user experience. You just worked so hard to get that customer to click on your ad, why wouldn't you lead them to a targetted product offering?
Any marketing that you cannot analyze and measure is a failed marketing. Definitely, you may spend money to do some advertisement, and you see an uprise in sales around the time your ads run. But, tell me how can you be so sure what you spent on the adverts correlates with the sales? Maybe it was something completely different altogether. It may be a seasonal uptick for what you sell that will fade away in a month.
If you are ready to commit time and money to a marketing campaign, you should make sure that you can measure the results. Setting up conversions that track each marketing campaign and running multiple marketing campaigns indistinct and small batches will boost your ROI. Compare the marketing channels and see which perform best. Toss out the ones that don't work and keep those which do.
Do anything that shocks a reaction out of the audience be it unexpected tears or surprise or jaw-dropping. Once that's achieved then open conversation while they are still digesting what they saw/ heard/ experienced. Those few precious seconds when your tactic or storyline left the audience speechless are your marketing gold. Use them to engage and start a conversation about your brand and product.
Continuously hone and test your unique selling proposition. Why should customers choose you over the competition? Is your product particularly suited to a niche market? Do you have a unique background? By perfecting your unique selling proposition you will stake out a position in that market that you can expand as you grow.
To begin building strong relationships, you need to give people a reason to be interested in you. The easiest way to do that is to create a clear and compelling social media profile. This is your digital first impression, just like a first impression offline.
I hesitate following people who don’t have a description in their bio or no profile picture. A good bio is a strong signal. With little effort, it’s an invitation for the curios to connect. If you want to build relationships on Facebook, Markethive, Webtalk or Twitter, put effort into this first impression.
It’s important to understand your customers and what they want. This is where effective marketing strategies come in whether in the fashion, financial, or any other industry. And this way, you can tailor your marketing strategy to cater to their needs and wants as well as increase sales for your business.
When deciding on marketing strategies for entrepreneurs or small business owners, it is vital that the entrepreneur understands the tactics available in order to make smart choices about how best to reach potential clients. With this knowledge at hand, there are many different avenues of marketing that may be used by entrepreneurs who do not have much funds or means with which to advertise their products or services.
To your success!
Andries van Tonder
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Serial Entrepreneur/investor since 2013.
South Africa.
Follow me on FaceBook, Twitter, WebTalk, Instagram & Markethive
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