My marketing is just not working, I will cut the budget this month, or I will stop the marketing all together, let’s just run our business based on referrals and so on and so fourth. How many times have you felt this towards your business? Wether you are a dentist, or a restaurant owner, or a barber, regardless of the industry that your business runs in, there are many times we get super excited in investing in a marketing process and it just does “Not” seem to work.
Why Isn't My Marketing Helping My Business?
There are many reasons as to why “your marketing process” just isn't working. First let’s start off by mentioning that a marketing plan should never start off as a process. It will always start off with a strategy, a well planned out, strategy that fits with your business model and competes against competition. When this is completed and assess and throughly thought through, the “Marketing Process” or execution will begin. Followed by continued assessment, tweaking and analysis on a regular basis.
We mention tweaking because your marketing process is not carved in stone, and it will never be until you have a rhythm and a momentum going. You will always need to consult and keep up to date with trends in your market, see what works and invest more into it see what isn't working and park it aside for the right time.
Now that we have calmed you down a little and gave you hope to get back up on your feet once again and bloom in your industry, let’s discuss the technicality of a successful marketing strategy.
The Basic Steps To A Successful Marketing Strategy
- Educational
The point of this is to build trust. You want to educate your audience about your products and services in your marketing plan to help them believe in what you do. You want to stand out as the best with the most value and nurture your audience to understand why you should be leading in your industry.
- Personalized
Everything you do, from posts to your website to your packaging or advertising needs to be personalized. What does this mean? it means in sync. You need to establish a brand that flows across all platforms. This will be your reputation.
- Data & Analytics Driven
Never run a marketing plan or a business blindly. Meaning based on what you feel or think or believe. This is intuition and you may be lucky that your intuition works but for the vast majority of the time it may be the leading cause of your marketing failure. Research, mine and analyze data. This is why the use of technology is crucial you can access in time live data of your sales, your customer preferences, your audience demographics and all this is data that will help you make certain aspects of your business stronger.
- Current Content
You never want to recycle your content. Especially when you have established an audience for your business that is always checking in with you for new offers, new promotions or just new news. Think new, think fresh and imagine you are your own customer, what would you like to see.
- Invest In Different Creative Options
This is one of the most importance aspects to retaining, attracting and growing an audience base. You want the audience time spent with your brand to increase. The way to do this is to invest in creating branded videos for your brand, live interactive streams, more blogging, branded photography. Different visuals represent your brand on a greater scale.
- Believe In The Power Of SEO
This is a straight forward one. But we kept it to the end because it ties everything we mentioned above together. When you can act upon everything mentioned above, your SEO will start to flourish online. Your SEO is pot, metaphorically speaking, that will take and mix each of your marketing plans into a recipe that will gradually rise time over time.
- Set Up An Automation System
And the last thing, why not set it and forget it. Set up automated email marketing, set up referral programs, set up follow up programs. It’e like having a personal assistant working for you around the clock to keep your brand live.
Just to sum up, always plan, strategize and then execute a marketing plan. Never stop the analyzing of your plan and always stay current. And most importantly, never stop what is working, the moment you press the break your momentum will be lost and you will have to invest in the time and money all over again.
