The trickiest thing about managing a growing business is keeping it in balance as parts of it expand at different speeds. When it comes to marketing, you run the risk of generating a level of demand that you can’t keep up with and leaving potential customers disappointed, or generating products that have nowhere to go because not enough people know that you’re selling them.
What you need is a flexible approach to marketing that lets you keep control of your campaigns so that you can adjust them as needed. These five methods can help you to achieve that.
Develop your website
Work on your website is a long-term investment. Adding useful resources to it, such as a blog or video content, helps you build a valuable connection with loyal customers. You can refine your landing page and streamline your sales funnel to maximise gains from traffic arriving there, and it’s then up to you how hard you chase that traffic at any given time. Improving your search engine ranking through positive link building and good SEO will also give you a lasting advantage.
Use social media
Social media marketing gets a bad rap largely because popular platforms are saturated with people doing it badly. If you concentrate on just one or two platforms and refine your approach, however, then it can be very effective. The biggest platform today is not Facebook, as many people assume, but YouTube. With the right software, marketing videos can be easy to make, and you can embed them on your website and use them across multiple platforms.
Build targeted campaigns
When you’re still growing and you want to develop strong customer appeal but not get overwhelmed, it can be a good idea to focus on select groups of potential customers. Find a niche market, research it thoroughly and target your advertising accordingly. If you can build up a good reputation in one area like this, then that reputation will give you an excellent base on which to build as you go on to expand into other markets.
Run competitions
An easy way to boost your visibility in the short term is to run a competition. Local newspapers, websites specialising in contests, and magazines (online or offline) with an interest in matters relevant to your business all make great partners for this. It’s a good way to connect with them so that they can help you generate publicity in future, and if you require entrants to visit your website to have a chance at winning, then you have a chance to pitch other products or services to them.
Build your brand
Long-term marketing success is about far more than direct sales – it’s about building up people’s awareness of who you are and what you do, developing your reputation, and getting people to think of you as an established player. You can build your brand in two ways: by working on technical points such as your logo and the style of your materials, or by actively advertising your organisation. This strengthens your position over the long term.
Marketing techniques like this put you in control and give you the solid base that you need to develop your visibility in line with your production capacity.