Marketing your business is essential in bringing in new customers as well as maintaining your current clients. Yet, it is often found that businesses fall into a routine in their marketing strategies. This non-diversification of marketing can harm the overall operations of the SMB and stifle the ROI for the marketing. Businesses that are lagging in their marketing analytics should see if they need to diversify their market strategies more. Here are a few ways to do so.
Market to the three main medias
When it comes to online marketing, there are three main ways in which people gain information. These are through social media posts, visual media such as videos and images, and direct contact with the company, such as a newsletter or email. Neglecting any of these three main sources of marketing will show lower numbers. When marketing your business, build up the social base first. Social media accounts for 145 minutes of the average person’s day. Video and Image, social imaging accounts from this number, account for about half of that time—comparatively, emails for 143 minutes a day for personal email checking.
The main distinction between images and video, social media posts, and emails is how the average person uses the media. Video and images are shared more often than emails. Posts receive more comments generally than video posts. Emails are held to be more personal and tend to do well with targeted marketing campaigns. Using all three in your marketing gains shares, customer loyalty, organic content, and a higher ROI.
Getting Offline
While online marketing has its advantages, mainly the ability to track and record the success of marketing to your targeted audience, getting offline also can show an ROI. Think untraditionally in terms of your marketing. For example, your SMB could sponsor a local sporting team or do an outreach in the community. Not only does this way of marketing increase awareness, but it also gains you free marketing from word of mouth.
In addition to thinking outside of the box, do not neglect to use the traditional offline marketing methods. These include radio, billboards, television advertisements, and direct mailing. It does help to have the community’s support when using these offline methods as it gives a point of reference for the targeted market.
Discounts and Free Stuff
Online and offline marketing has shown that discounts, promotions, and free incentives boost SMB's audience. It is important to cater to your targeted market when using discounts and free stuff to drive traffic. It is more profitable to offer a discount on services than to give away something in many instances. Why? Because although the market may be reached and you may see a spike in the SERPs during the promotion, you may not see any actual sales or traffic to your site for paid-for services or products. To be more direct, you may just be throwing money out the window to people who want free stuff and nothing more.
The workaround to building up your marketing through promotions and giveaways is to do such through a reward/loyalty program. This marketing method limits the amount of wasted capital by requiring the targeted market base to spend a certain amount on services or products before being able to cash in on the promotion or giveaway.
Expand your target audience
When an SMB starts to find that their ROI on marketing is lagging, one way to increase the yield on the investment is to survey your target audience and adjust your market as needed. Additionally, if your market is doing well but not quite performing to the desired level, you may wish to expand your demographics to include a larger market. This does not require, in most cases, that a complete revamping of the marketing be performed. Slight adjustments can be made. For instance, if your market was only catered to middle-class men between the ages of 18-21, you may want to increase the market to low to middle-class men between the ages of 18 to 21 or increase the age to 25.
Remain consistent
At first, the results from diversifying your marketing may not seem to show ROI. This is especially true with online strategies as the SERPs take time to adjust. However, SMBs that remain consistent with marketing and with the diversification of their marketing will find that they have a larger target audience, will gain useful feedback into the markets, yield a higher ROI and those that are lagging, and build a stronger branding of their SMB. Be creative, remain authentic and organic in your marketing strategies, and stay consistent if you wish to see the numbers you seek.
