Marketing for small to medium businesses by using an integrated marketing approach
Capture your audience by using the below tips for your marketing strategy:
1. Make sure that your objectives are very clearly defined:
List your objectives. eg. increase sales of a specific printer cartridge or a range of cartridges and define the specific time-frame for your marketing promotion. If your time frame is over a quarter, you might want to define more than one promotion but perhaps include a link between all your promotions over this period. Click here to discover more about marketing strategy.
2. Identify your target audience:
Are you wanting to target existing customers or new prospects or both?
If you have decided that it makes much more sense to target existing customers as these are your repeat purchasers and they are more likely to buy again from you, then this makes the decision around the media of the marketing campaign that much easier.
If you are not sure who your target audience is, here are some questions to answer so that you can drill down to a a particular segment:
– What demographics are you hoping to reach?– What are their attitudes, social beliefs, or behaviours?
– What are their interests?
3. Outline the specific media you would like to use:
If you are targeting your existing customers, it is probably more effective to roll out a direct email marketing promotion if you have a consolidated database of all of your contacts. The promotion would link to a page on your website, displaying the specific promotion. This could be tied into a more tangible version of the promotion and perhaps target another audience. Print media is an excellent way to attract new prospective customers – newspaper / magazine / poster / billboard advertising.
4. Measure your promotion:
Make sure that your promotion is measurable. If you are marketing one specific product over a specific time, you will be able to measure your sales against a previous time-frame. The beauty of online media is instant tracking and measurability.
5. The marketing mix:
In today’s marketing landscape, it can be quite overwhelming selecting the correct platform to market your business / product. Here are some options to choose from.
- Website:
This can be an online display of your business / products which can be very simple to a more sophisticated e-commerce platform. Make sure your website is consistently updated and your content is fresh. - Blog:
The current landscape of online marketing has set the tone! Content is gold, not only in informing your audience about what it is that you do but for Search Engine Optimization reasons too. The more content you create online which drives traffic to your website, the better. - Print/Direct Mail:
Printed flyers to a post-box or being handed out in a public arena is still an effective way of marketing. If you are strategic about your print / direct marketing campaigns your audience will still appreciate this medium. This should be done from time to time, and not on a regular basis. - Email Newsletters/Direct Email Marketing:
According to an infographic from EveryCloud, 55 percent of organizations say that email accounts for more than 10 percent of their sales. Make sure that the content you are including is relevant to your target audience. If you are implementing a Direct Email Marketing campaign for a promotion, keep it simple and personalised. - Facebook: Your presence on this platform is about brand awareness. Make sure you are posting regularly but not too often. Your posts should be relevant to your followers.
- Instagram: This can be an excellent platform for your business if you generate a lot of photos and/or short video clips on a regular basis. Posting images from your latest events or from around the office can be an engaging way to promote your brand and display the “personality” of your brand and in so doing attract more followers.
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