Old Businesses Really Need These New Marketing Tricks
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How long has your business been on the market? If the answer to that question is a couple of years, then you are probably at least open to the possibility of shifting your business model around to ensure that you are getting the most interest from customers and clients. Or, perhaps that you are reaching your maximum potential online. But what about if you have been on the market for ten years or more. Suddenly, you might find yourself a little more set in your ways, unwilling to let your business evolve and adapt to the changes on the market. You may be in the position where old tricks of marketing have worked before so they’ll still work today. Particularly, if you know, you can rely on a niche target customer base.
There are lots of reasons why older companies refuse to evolve. Usually, it’s the cost involved. Rather than looking specifically at marketing, for now, let’s broaden the scope a little. Any time you introduce a change into a business, it is going to mean cost and risk. These three are undeniably linked together. So, every time a change is possible in a business the owner needs to decide whether it’s worth the cost and whether it’s worth the risk. In many cases, the answer will be no but sometimes it’s worth making the change.
Marketing is an example of this. It’s always worth exploring fresh ideas of innovation and injecting a little more excitement into your marketing campaign. It could be the difference between reaching one hundred new customers and reaching one thousand.
So, what new methods of marketing should you consider to improve your business performance both online and offline.
Taking Local Marketing To The Next Level
Perhaps you are running a small business that caters to a specific customer base. In particular, we’re talking about people living in a local town and perhaps the odd, occasional tourist. Does that sound familiar? If it does, then you might be using a range of local marketing techniques like flyers. If the town is small enough, you probably won’t even be using billboard’s because there will be no need. In fact, you might mainly base the marketing for your business on the outer appearance of your company. You’ll make sure that you have a great sign to attract new customers.
But you also need to put up signs online, and this is true for local businesses. Even if you are selling with a reach of just thirty miles, it’s worth looking into local online marketing. With local online marketing or local SEO, you’ll be able to pinpoint the customers in the area. Now, you might think that this is a waste of time and more importantly money. After all, customers in the area are always going to buy from your business. But don’t be so sure. For cheaper, better products or products they can buy in bulk customers might just be willing to travel further than before. Alternatively, you may find that a new bigger business opens nearby that can afford to sell your products or offer your service at a lower price.
It is a mistake to think that offline companies shouldn’t invest in online marketing, even when appealing to local customers.
Checks And Queries
Is your business as effective as it could be? Or rather, is marketing delivering the results that you would hope for. If the answer is no, you might want to consider investing in a service that will allow you to discover what’s going wrong and why it’s happening. There are various possibilities to explore here, so let’s look at a few and see how they could benefit your company.
Let’s say that you have a great marketing campaign and that’s proven by the fact that hundreds or even thousands of customers and potential customers are visiting your site every day. But unfortunately, they’re not buying. Usually, this is going to be an issue with reviews. Somewhere online, someone is bad mouthing your product pushing customers away from committing to a purchase. That’s an issue because if it continues you’re never going to see the level of profit you need. The good news is that you can invest in the services of a company that will scour the web for you, checking the buzz around your business. That way, you can target problematic areas, getting things back on track.
Alternatively, you might find that the issue is to do with the design of your business site. Something about it is turning customers off, ensuring that they don’t buy from your company. In cases like this, it’s quite possible that the issue could be as small as a single image on your business site. To rectify the situation, you’ll need to invest in some A-B testing. A-B testing runs two versions of the same site showing it to different groups of customers with minor details changed. By doing this, it’s easy to see whether a small detail really could be impacting your sales.
Or, maybe the issue is that no one is seeing your site in the first place. If that’s the case, then it’s definitely a problem with your SEO. Thankfully, this can be corrected with an SEO audit. Using an SEO audit, you can find out exactly what the problem is with this part of your campaign and correct it immediately.
If you want to save money, you can also DIY the issue with google analytics and other tools that you can download for yourself. However, it’s debatable whether you will get such clear results using this method.
Tech Innovation
We mentioned briefly that business owners need to continuously be on the lookout for ways to innovate their marketing campaign. There are lots of ways to make your marketing stand out online. For instance, you could be creating an online ad for a website. If that’s the case, you can use a design such as a carousel ad, that is exactly how it sounds. It turns, showing different pictures and text to create a story that the consumer can follow. This is a great way to gain attention of browsing customers, but there are other fantastic possibilities. For instance, you can think about using the tech that is being pushed to the forefront of personal entertainment.
VR is a very popular gadget right now, and the best part is that it’s now accessible to a wide range of the buying public. So, you no longer need to worry about isolating part of your target audience. It’s easy and potentially profitable to set up your own VR app for any business. Obviously, though, this tech does work best when used in relation to certain industries over others. For instance, holiday marketers can actually show people what their vacation is going to be like. Real estate agents can theoretically allow buyers to walk around a home they might be considering purchasing without ever visiting it in person. The possibilities are potentially endless, and VR is certainly not the only tech that you should be exploring. You might also want to look into the possibility of AR.
If you want to jump ahead of the curve and reach the next craze before any other business, you need to explore what the biggest tech companies are interested in. This year, that’s AR, and this has been highlighted by the fact that Apple’s new IOS software is based around the concept of making AR as easy as possible for app developers. Particularly, when using apps on the Iphone X. What does this tell us? It suggests that AR marketing could be about to blow up. Over the next few years, it’s possible that AR is going to be a given when creating promotional campaigns. But right now, you can jump ahead and make sure you’re one of the first businesses to effectively utilize it.
Using The Platforms Available
You might worry about the problems and money involved in setting up a brand new platform for marketing your company or business. But the fact is that there’s no need to do that. There are countless platforms that you can use and that are already set up for your company. Let’s explore the possibility of Google Shopping. These days, you can use an AdWords campaign in conjunction with Google Shopping and you should. Google shopping will allow you to expose a huge audience to your product without them even realizing that you are marketing towards them. Instead, it can be a natural part of the process of searching online.
Or how about social media. By now, you should have a solid grasp of how to market through social media, from hashtags to content to follows. But what about buy buttons. With buy buttons you can allow customers to buy straight from your social media feed, cutting out the issues that can crop up when they navigate to your site.
As you can see, it’s always beneficial to learn new tricks in marketing because they can provide a huge advantage. They can ensure that your business is always ahead of the curve and that your company is constantly at the top of the game.
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