By Anica Oaks
If you intend to take your business to the masses to begin getting clients and making sales, then it is essential that you have a sound marketing strategy. For many companies, marketing ends up being more difficult than the type of business these companies are engaged in doing. It is common for businesses to be good at what they do, but a lot of these businesses have no real idea how to get their consumer base to recognize it. The following is a marketing crash course that will discuss four marketing tips to use to overcome this problem.
Profile Your Ideal Customer
Before you run out spending a lot of money on advertising to just anyone, it helps to have a realistic idea of who your ideal customer is. The better you are at visualizing the type of person using your products and services, the easier it is to market to that ideal client in your ad copy. Developing a profile of the ideal consumer for your business helps you to get in touch with the right message you need for reaching out to the right people. The alternative is never really knowing the people you are marketing to or how they think.
Incentive Marketing
They say it is easier to attract bees with honey than vinegar. Interestingly enough, the same is true with customers. If a customer believes they are going to obtain something of value by answering your ad, then chances are you have an ad that will attract many potential customers. This may seem like an expensive way to advertise initially; however, it is often a very solid way of developing strong relationships with customers that will give you repeat business for many years to come.
Using incentives to obtain customers that give you repeat business is also a great way to save money long-term. Repeat customers are a lot cheaper to market to than shelling out the funds to obtain new customers tends to be on average. Even running a contest is a great way to utilize the power of incentive marketing.
Post Card Marketing
Let us say you are trying to drum up business for an orthodontist’s office. You may have run a couple of ad campaigns in a local paper, but gotten a very limited response. For the money, post card marketing through the experts at Orthodonticmarketing.net will generally bring a business more leads than other kinds of marketing.
Using the right message on the right color of card stock is important to catching a potential customer’s eye. For example, yellow post cards stick out nicely against other forms of mail; consequently, when people get yellow post cards in the mail, it is generally going to be something they will take a closer look at to determine what it is.
Leveraging Social Media Marketing Strategies
According to Wordstream.com, it is a smart idea to become familiar with the marketing potential of social media outlets. From websites that provide you with traffic to articles you have written to your latest tweets on Twitter, the Internet is filled with a variety of free social media avenues for generating leads and making sales.
There are all sorts of marketing strategies that will work to bring in new customers to your business. Sometimes a combination of strategies will prove to be a great way to reach a broader market. Today, with the Internet providing new marketing avenues for the small business owner, there are more ways to generate new customers than has ever existed in the history of mankind. It would be a shame if your business did not take advantage of the many varied marketing approaches that exist. Since many of these marketing avenues are free, this makes marketing a lot cheaper than ever before as well.
Anica Oaks is a professional content and copywriter who graduated from the University of San Francisco. She loves dogs, the ocean, and anything outdoor-related. She was raised in a big family, so she’s used to putting things to a vote. Also, cartwheels are her specialty. You can connect with Anica on Google+.