If I could go back in time and give myself a single piece of business advice, it would be to put more work into marketing. Everyone knows that a business needs marketing to survive, and yet countless new entrepreneurs slack off on it. This is a mistake that will kill your business! If you’re close to launching your venture, here are some marketing tactics you can’t afford to ignore.
I’ll get the nagging out of the way first; please, please, please don’t ignore responsive web design. Mobile compatibility has been a huge topic for a while now, and yet there are still businesses that are completely ignoring it. You may not know it, but a massive proportion of your target market are using mobile devices to find businesses like yours before going anywhere near a desktop. Unless you’re fine with cheating yourself out of this much business, you need to see to it that your website has responsive design. If one of your target customers clicks a link to your site, and they’re met with a dysfunctional, pixelated site that they can’t understand, they’re not going to stick around for long.
Platform-specific social media marketing is another prevalent method which you need to be using. If you were to take an article, video or any other piece of content and share it across all your social networks, you’ll receive a very different response from each one. These days, brands have to study the type of engagement they’re getting from every different social platform, and spend more time customizing the content for each one. Pure Facebook ads are a hugely effective way to get your message seen by more users on that network. However, that kind of direct, salesy language will get you into trouble on Twitter. There are all kinds of rules and conventions for different networks, but the important thing to remember is that one size does not fit all. Evaluate how you’re using different networks before you go any further with your campaign.
In modern digital marketing, having a human brand is now much more important than having a prestigious one. If you go directly for a hard sale in all of your marketing efforts, more and more people are going to start ignoring you. Your content and social strategies, and even your B2B website material needs to have a nice touch of humanity to it. Make your materials more about engaging and educating your supporters, and less about a hard sales pitch. At one time, a good old paragraph of classic advertising language was all you needed to convince someone to go out and buy your product. Now, on the other hand, social media has changed the standards. Customers have become more used to engaging directly with a brand, and for this reason you have to act like one of the little guys. On the upside, this is easier for your business than it is for Coca-Cola!
When drafting your marketing strategy, make sure you don’t neglect these three tactics. Miss them out, and you’ll certainly feel the consequences!
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