If customers or clients don’t know about you, how can they decide to make a purchase or place an order? The same applies to businesses looking for B2B sales. You need to ensure your business stays in the minds of people looking for the relevant products or services. This isn’t easy. Especially if your business occupies a niche which is quite saturated with competitors or other businesses offering similar services. You’re up against it. But striving for excellence is all you can do. It essentially boils down to being aware of the environment you’re trading in. Easier for some than others. The tips below can help you on the way to business awareness. However, all businesses are different and require different approaches to keep what you do in the minds of your customers. You might have already applied some of the tips below, which is great. Try the others and see if they can help too. Good luck.
Marketing Basics
You’ve likely already made the right moves towards marketing. Sometimes people forget about the most basic things regarding marketing. Take your website for example. Is it logically designed? Can potential customers move easily through the navigation and product pages to purchase the item they want. Sometimes websites aren’t logical and can confuse people. Go back to the basics and build from there. You may also want to look at help with reputation management if any of this confuses you. The bottom line is that there’s no point looking at fancy SEO or deep data mining for marketing data if the basics are skewed because it’ll confuse people. It’s like a house. There’s no point building if the foundations are not set right.
Know Your Demographic
Knowing your demographic allows you to target the right advertising or marketing streams. There’s no point going for the blanket approach. Sure, you might be able to snag a few customers, but you’d be able to get a whole lot more if you aimed for the right demographic. Look at your business in depth. What demographic are you going for? This can be male or female. It could be age orientated. Perhaps it’s designed for students or even more zoomed in, medical students or humanities students. You can get the exact right demographic and target them for enhanced success. For example if you were going for students you’d ensure your advertising was centred around university and college campuses. If you were going online, you’d ensure your advertising stuck to websites popular with your demographic.
Don’t Forget The Old School Advertising
In a world of websites and Google it’s often easy to forget how powerful sticking a few posters up can be. This is especially the case if you rely on your local community to keep your business up and running. This applies to shops, restaurants and all similar enterprises. Finding good (and legal) places for posters is a great way to spread brand or location awareness. If you live in a city, you’ll likely find digital billboards. A lot of people are put off by the price, which can be prohibitive. But you’ll be surprised by how affordable certain advertising slots are. If you don’t want to leave tacky posters around the place, think about flyers instead. This is better because it gives you or a representative time to actually talk up your business to anyone whose interest is far more attention-grabbing than a poster. Sure, some will toss them right in the bin. Furthermore, getting these designed doesn’t have to be expensive either. Learn to leverage tools like those offered by My Creative Shop to create all design collateral and print them cheaply in bulk. Actually having a physical flyer in your hand demands more attention than a more passive poster.
Sampling To Success
Sampling is a great way to stay in the minds of any prospective customers. Especially if your business is product-based and centered around repeat purchases. This is especially applicable to restaurants. Get out to areas where you think people might not know about you and your business and sample your food along with a flier. If it’s good, people will remember. People like free stuff. Give people a free sample. If you’re online only you can still do this by sending things in the post to previous customers to entice them back. The cost might be prohibitive, but think about the lasting impact you might make. You can double down here by asking them to leave a review on your website or product page. Doing this will lend more shopper confidence to those pondering whether or not to buy your product. Reviews are extremely powerful, so if you can garner some of these they’re always going to help you and your business succeed and stay in the mind of other customers.
