Marketing Tips For Start Ups
Marketing Tips For Start Ups
Marketing done right can be an incredible boom
for your business’s net income. Done wrong, however,
it can feel like throwing money into a raging bonfire. Because small business
owners have to be whatever their small business needs all the time and it can
be difficult to master all the nuances that go into sales or marketing. If you’re
not a natural salesperson, it can be even more difficult. Fear not, the
following marketing tips for startups can help you make more sales, market
better and waste less money.
Sell The Benefit - Not A Comparison
How
you market yourself is all about highlighting what makes you different. There
are three major ways to do that. Cost (you know how to price a product better
than the competition), quality (you’re better) and combination thereof (you
offer the better value).
But
how you sell yourself is different than how you market yourself.
You can tell someone that you provide a product or service that is cheaper or
more effective than that of another business, but that doesn’t say how much
better you are going to make the customer’s life. Selling
is about the benefit. A comparison may highlight the features
you offer, but you are always selling benefit.
Market Your Product Before It’s Ready
Some businesses wait until their product is perfect before they
do any marketing or awareness campaigning. That can be a costly mistake. Many
businesses expect to sell their product as soon as it’s ready. But if no one
knows about it, then demand will start at zero until you undergo
a marketing campaign to build brand awareness for potential customers.
It’s better to do pre-emptive awareness campaigning, even if
it’s minimal, to let potential customers know your product is coming. You can
sell the benefit before the product has arrived. This way, when the product is
ready, so are customers!
Advertise On Multiple Platforms
As mentioned above, it’s good to test multiple marketing channels and ideas to see what works best. Often, it’s not any one thing but a combination of all of the above. When your customer hears you on the radio, sees you in a search engine result, and then finds you mentioned in a blog they like (content marketing), they start to accept your brand as a solid, dependable, known entity. They may not have the need for your product or service immediately, but when they do, it will be your name that comes to mind instead of a competitor’s.
Measuring Your Marketing Analytics
Marketing
that you can’t measure is failed marketing. Sure, you may spend money to do
some advertisement, and you may even see an uptick in sales around the same
time you ran the ads. But how can you be sure what you spent on ads correlates
with sales? Maybe it was something else altogether. Maybe there is a natural,
seasonal uptick for what you sell that will go away in a month.
If
you’re going to commit time and money to a marketing campaign, make sure you
can measure the results. Set up ways to track conversions that stem from
each marketing campaign. Also, run multiple types of marketing campaigns in
distinct, small batches. This will allow you to compare marketing channels and
see which perform best. Toss out the ones that don’t work and keep those that
do.
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