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How to Effectively Market Your Small Business

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Market your Small Business|How to Effectively Market Your Small BusinessWithout the proper marketing, most startups and small businesses will be doomed to fail. Making sure that your product or service falls on the right ears is a crucial part of any successful business plan.

However, with such an abundance of marketing techniques available, it is important that small business owners deploy the correct methods in order to maximize their return on investment.

Complete Your Market Research

Knowing your market is always the starting block for any marketing campaign. You need to identify who your customers are, where they are conducting their research and what’s influencing their decisions. A thorough market research should give you insights into customer thinking, buying patterns, location and initial sales forecasts.

This can in turn help you to monitor market trends and conduct detailed competitor analysis.

Profile Target Markets

The better you understand your target market, the better you will be able to market to them with relevant content and messaging on the right platforms. To maximize ROI and enjoy higher conversion rates, you need to avoid unnecessary exposure. Make sure you are putting out the right message to the right people by grouping or segmenting potential customers, and your existing database, based on key elements like:

  • Geography
  • Demographics: age, gender, education level, income, occupation
  • Behavior: loyalty, attitude, buying habits
  • Lifestyle: social class, personality, personal values

Isolate Your Unique Selling Proposition

A thorough competitor analysis should help you to identify what makes people buy your product or service rather than your competitors. Being known for a specific service will help you to steal a bigger chunk of the market share from larger competitors.

Decide on Your Marketing Avenues

With so many marketing strategies to choose from, it’s important for businesses to identify the best avenue for their business. From direct marketing to mobile, to social, your marketing platform should reflect your marketing goals as well as your target audiences, personality, budget, location and more.

Whether you are using business advertising to build brand awareness or social to improve lead generation, you will need a well-defined goal in order to ensure that you utilize the correct techniques for your audience. Uncovering your audience’s preferred communication channels and purchasing paths is also crucial in order to make an informed decision. Your marketing strategies should align with the when and where of your target audience.

It is also critical that you identify your marketing budget before deciding on your marketing avenue. Different avenues will have different costs associated, so it is key that you start off knowing exactly how much you have to spend in order to maximize ROI and look after the financial health of your business.

Consider your industry and look into the marketing efforts of your competitors. They may have already identified the best means for communicating with your target audience, and therefore be a useful resource.

Remember to keep testing and interpreting the results of all your marketing efforts. Only then can you know what’s working and whether it looks to stay that way.

Grabbing Attention: What Are the 4 Core Elements of a Winning Sales Letter Formula?

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article|Sales Letter|Grabbing Attention: What Are the 4 Core Elements of a Winning Sales Letter Formula?An especially effective sales letter can be worth millions of dollars despite costing very little to create. Many businesses, though, end up settling for sales letters that do a poor job of converting readers into customers.

Fortunately, there is a proven formula that can be used to make sure any sales letter has all the parts it needs to succeed. Become familiar with the following four elements of especially effective sales letters and you will be able to write your own with no trouble at all.

1. A Fascinating Headline

The largest obstacle every sales letter needs to overcome is getting recipients to read it. This is just as true of sales-focused emails as of old-fashioned letters delivered by mail carriers.

Providers of Digital Marketing Services know that consumers and B2B buyers are more jaded than ever before. People today face many marketing entreaties and pleas and have learned to tune the vast majority of them out.

As such, any sales letter that has a hope of breaking through will need to feature a headline that impresses at a glance. In the space of a couple of seconds, at most, a letter’s headline needs to make a convincing case for why the subsequent material deserves to be read.

It can take many hours and lots of experimentation to come up with the perfect headline for a letter. Some experts even devote a near-majority of their writing time to putting together the perfect sentence. In any case, overlooking the importance of a sales letter’s headline is one of the most common reasons for failure.

2. An Intriguing Introduction

Every sales letter needs to make a strong, compelling case, and much of the groundwork gets laid at the beginning. While a letter’s headline serves to pique the interest of recipients, its introduction needs to forge a deeper connection.

That most often means giving the reader a good but not exhaustive idea about what can be expected later on. Just like a conventional essay, a sales letter needs to describe its own outlines clearly and quickly.

One of the most frequently overlooked realities of writing sales letters is that readers become more committed the longer they remain engaged. If a letter’s introduction does not retain a reader’s interest, no sales will follow.

3. A Relatable Description of the Problem

Although pundits have been predicting the death of solution-based sales for decades, no other approach has proved anywhere near as effective. Selling a product or service as a solution, of course, requires first identifying the problem to be resolved.

Successful sales letters inevitably do so in ways that readers relate to personally. It will always be easier to frame a problem in relatable fashion when the situation and background of a letter’s recipient have been determined to some degree.

4. An Irresistible Offer

Once a particular problem has been defined and a company’s product or service positioned as the best solution, it will finally be time to close the deal. Too many sales letters let up overly early and end up leaving money on the table.

The best way to ensure that a sale will be concluded will always be to extend a particularly appealing offer. With a product’s desirability having already been established, a special offer will make action a lot more likely.

Anyone Can Write a Winning Sales Letter

Some otherwise-capable, confident people see the writing of sales letters as an art so arcane that it is unapproachable. In reality, winning sales letters always include the four elements above, with little else really being needed.

How to Grow Your Ecommerce Startup in Year One

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StrategyDriven Starting Your Business Article |Ecommerce startup|How to Grow Your Ecommerce Startup in Year OneAs many proud business owners can attest, the growth cycle for ecommerce businesses doesn’t necessarily adhere to older principles related to the growth of physical stores. Indeed, when you’re setting up online, you’re bypassing many of the difficult aspects to scaling that you’d have had to work through with brick-and-mortar stores.

In this article, you’ll learn about your priorities in year one in order to make a sustainable and profitable business that scales effectively into your second year of operations.

Marketing

To scale, you need more people to visit your website, and more people to make purchases to boost your ecommerce business’ profits. It’s really that simple. While there are some other underlying elements to scaling mentioned later in this article, you’re going to need to build out a marketing campaign as a priority in order to draw in traffic, clicks, shares and sales to your site.

You can do this in a number of different ways, depending on your budget and the personnel you have on-side. If you’re a small company, you may prefer to outsource marketing to an experienced digital marketing firm, which will help you build a long-term strategy to increase engagement. Otherwise, look online to uncover some of the fundamentals of digital marketing, enabling you to slowly bend your strategy to fit with the wants and needs of your audience and your target customer.

Operational Efficiency

Many ecommerce startups begin with manual processes, and slowly move into the automated software world as they scale. That’s exactly what you should be looking to do in your first year, so you spend less time managing orders, responding to emails, and doing all those little repetitive jobs that end up consuming most of your waking day.

As a starting point, you should automate orders on your website, and automate emails through to confirm orders, confirm subscriptions, and add individuals to mailing lists. Mailing lists are incredibly important for your data collection, and to offer deals and discounts seasonally, so they’re also best set up in your first year in business. Once you’ve taken a good look at your operations, and made as many of them automated as possible, you’ll be able to deal with scaling far easier.

Deliveries

The only physical part of your ecommerce business is delivering parcels to customers. You want this to be as effective and efficient as you can possibly make it. You’ll know only too well that one of the main market differentiators in the ecommerce world is customer service, and that’s primarily driven through cheap yet swift delivery services. You need to get your parcel to its destination within the shortest-possible timescale.

The problem with distribution is that you can ship your products easily to local distribution centers – but it’s the final mile that’s the kicker, adding costs to your overall logistics operation.

Indeed, last mile delivery costs are one of your greatest overheads, and something you’re going to want to keep low in order for you to succeed in your first year in ecommerce. Be careful when signing contracts that you’re getting what you want to get from your delivery deal, and that you can hold delivery companies responsible for late packages, too.

Funding and Cash Flow

Finally, you need to be cognizant of your funding situation, and how much cash you’ll have in the kitty to support a growing business, before you enact your scaling plan. If you’re unable to meet soaring costs related to providing more for your customers, you’ll miss out on delivery times, you’ll miss payments to clients and subsidiaries, and you’ll endanger the soul of your business just as it shows promising signs of sustained growth. You need capital – some saved for worst-case scenarios – before you scale.

This capital will help you bring in new personnel if you’re swamped with orders to process. It’ll enable you to buy in bulk, reducing your order costs in anticipation of larger order volumes and it’ll enable you to invest in made-to-scale, cloud-based software – the kind that’ll help you to build your audience through automation, and meet the extra demands placed upon the entirety of your operations. With financial security in place, you won’t need to worry about your labor and your investments going to waste as you’ll be prepared for your next great step into ecommerce profits for 2021.

These tips are all designed for ecommerce startups in their first year – those which are ambitious to scale, but a little concerned about how to achieve sustained and sustainable growth into 2021 and beyond.

Trade Show Setup: 5 Best Tips for Preparing for a Trade Show

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |trade show setup|Trade Show Setup: 5 Best Tips for Preparing for a Trade ShowIf you’ve been to trade shows then you know just how valuable they can be. This is even truer if you’re a small startup or a growing business.

These shows provide an avenue for you to promote your brand, meet and network with prospective clients as well as to gain some sales. That’s the upside, but it’s also easy to not have as much success as you’d like.

This can either be due to a poor exhibition in comparison to competitors or simply a lack of overall planning and execution.

Are you trying to figure out how to have a great trade show? Read this article to learn the best tips for trade show setup and how to prepare for the show.

1. Preparing for Your Trade Show Setup

There is an old adage that says, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”Never has it been truer than when it comes to trade shows.

Sit down and make plans with your team so they will be ready for everything well in advance.

Book your flights early and reserve your hotel rooms well ahead of time. Make plans for any news release and be sure to get giveaways ready for the show.

2. Strong Social Media Presence

Inform your customers of your participation in the trade show via social media platforms. Do teasers, announce the latest news, and offer to let them meet the team.

On the day of the show promote your booth using social media and invite customers to stop by, visit, and shop.

3. Be the Talk of the Show

Use a vast array of colors and decorations to make your booth stand out. Be sure to include company colors and your logo.

Use a presentation board to display your company’s name and logo. You can even include pictures of products on your display board.

As an added bonus, have a slide show or show images of products and clients’ reviews. Distribute pamphlets, brochures and print outs of products, achievements, and other important information.

4. Prizes and Surprises

Giveaways, especially company-branded ones are vital. Pens, buttons, and business cards are a few of the best items you can give away.

Having a hospitality suite where you serve light refreshments is a plus. Gift certificates are always a good idea for your customers as well.

Get your visitors to sign in a guestbook, get them to add their email addresses or phone number in the book too.

5. Warm Welcome

First impressions last!

Put on your best customer service game and focus on what you can do to help the customer. Avoid being too pushy about your product.

Simply welcome each visitor, make conversation, and be sure to introduce yourself and your brand briefly but make it fun.

Ready to Shine!

Knowing what to do for a trade show setup is key. Use these tips to be the highlight of the show. Remember advanced preparation is vital.

Social media is your best friend too. A great display and prizes will also add some much-needed flair and make great Instagram pics.

If you would like more tips to help you succeed in business, please contact us.

Marketing Advice for Your Business

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Marketing Advice for Your Business

You may have the best product or service in the world, but if you do not know how you market it, you will not be able to sell it. What this means is that your competitor with an inferior product can potentially make far more sales than you if they have the marketing wherewithal you lack. It may seem easy, post a few adverts on social media, the product will sell itself. You need to understand now that this is not going to work. You need a fully thought out marketing strategy and the ability to maintain it into the future. So here are some ideas to get you started.

Your website

You need to invest in your website. It has to be fully functioning, quick loading, and work in all browsers and devices, as a prerequisite. There is no point in having a beautiful marketing campaign that points to a rundown old website that doesn’t even work properly. There will be a huge disconnect, and people will think they are in the wrong place. Your website needs to be discoverable, so you need to invest time in working out keywords from your target market, and what they are likely to input into a search engine. Once you have done this, you can fully SEO (search engine optimization) every page of your website. Content on the site needs to be updated regularly, so having a blog is essential these days.

Brand awareness

You need a good brand for the business. So think logos and taglines. These must be used on all your content. The idea is to get the brand into people’s minds. In addition, think about your personal brand. You should create your own site where you can authentically promote your business. As a person, you can connect with people more easily, so developing your personal brand is essential. This means that if you have any accolades which make you the perfect person to listen to, such as having gone through a master of occupational therapy program for your clinic, tell your story on a vlog.

Social media

Any business that wants to succeed in the modern world has to have a presence on social media. It is a free way to advertise, and it gives you an unprecedented way to learn about your target audience and connect with them. You need to create a separate method of marketing for each social media platform. However, the onus is on quality posts over quantity. You need to have some glossy images, a good story to tell, think about social responsibility, and what you are doing to help the plant, for example. Have a look at your competitors and members of your target audience to get an idea about what they share. This will give you some ideas about how best to proceed. In terms of frequency of posts, about two to three times a day, every day. You need to be there, but not whitewash people’s feeds as this will have the opposite effect to the one you want, they will switch off.