Marketing Research
No business can succeed without marketing research. It is a key step for any business that expects to create customers for their business or win customers from competitors. There are various ways and models to do marketing research. Some of the basic research tactics should answer at least following questions for your business.
- Who are your customers - What gender? What age? Where do they live? etc
- What do they do - Profession? Income level? Hobbies? etc
- Do they like your product - Do the see value in your products/services? etc
- Who are your competitors - Number? What do they offer? How do they offer? etc
These are some basic questions you should be able to answer if you have done marketing research. But there more sophisticated questions such as whether do you have strength in catering this segment? How much and what time these customers spend on Facebook? etc. Don't worry if you haven't figured it out yet. We are there to help you with the same.
Marketing Strategy
Once the identified and understood market, customers and competition it is important to formulate different strategies. There are number of ways to determine what is a right marketing strategy for your business. Some of these strategies will go hand-in-hand with your business strategies. To make more clarity, see if you can answer the following questions by yourself.
- Product strategy - How is your product/service different from your competition?
- Pricing strategy - Do customer see value in the way you priced your product?
- Positioning strategy - Do customers recall your brand when they come across the need for your product/service?
- Promotion strategy - Do you have the right message in the right place at the right time?
When the above and fem more other elements in strategies will define your business and offering very clearly. A well defined strategy will make your life easier in getting new customers and retaining the existing customers. So spend some extra time and effort in making the right strategy. Because business is like war. You need the right strategy to win customers and block competition from taking your customers.
Brand Management
Do Small Businesses need Brand Management? Yes indeed they do. People usually likes to associate themselves with the brand more than the people in the business. The reason for this is because people may stay or leave, but the brand will remain forever. It is that assurance that people will look for when associating a brand. A strong brand inspires people customer loyalty, creates word-of-mouth and defend customers when in need. Following are some key aspects people look for when associating with your brand.
- Brand Personality - What is your brand personality? Independent/Adventurous/Simple etc
- Brand Promise - What does your brand promise to the customers? Transparency/Luxury etc
- Brand Benefit - What benefits does your brand offer over others? Emotional/Rational etc
- Brand Story - What is your brand story? Historic/Exotic/ Modern etc
So these are some of the key brand elements that you may need to look for when managing your brand. Have you thought of them so far? Does your brand offers these to these customers? Talk to us we can help you define your brand.
Content Creation
'Content is King'. In this digital era there are billions and billions of content are created for business and brands around the world. These contents are creating clutter in the communication mediums. How to create a content that would stand out in these clutter? How to attract the targeted customers? How to keep them engaged? How to convert that engagement in to purchase? These are some of the important questions we need to answer when creating contents. So what are the key contents that we can look for.
- Advertisements - this had been there for donkeys ages and one of the still most effective content
- PR Content - Public relation news articles are some of the most effective content in reaching customers
- Digital content - with the social media usage increasing it is important to create digital content
Each of the above category has a vast number of different content types. The key is to make content consistent across different platforms ranging from traditional mediums and digital mediums. This where 360 degree marketing will take place.
Analysis & Evaluation
'If you can't measure it, you can't manage it' Peter Drucker said. Marketing is no magic, it is just calculative effort to win and retain customers. Any marketing effort will become useless if we can't measure it. Having said not everything can be measured with revenue and profits. There are number of ways some of these efforts can be measured. Following some of key metrics
- Return on Investment (ROI) - ROI is used to measure the return gained from the marketing activity
- Customer awareness - increase in customer awareness is a key metric that business can consider
- New customer leads - Generating new leads is a way to understand the effectiveness of the activity
- Customer loyalty - Improving customer loyalty by making repeat purchases is another method
Measurements like these and beyond will help you understand whether the campaign or activity carried out effective or not. Having said that, sometimes it would be not easy to measure some aspects. For more information on how these metrics work read our article.
Social Media Marketing
Social media is one of the largest communication medium in the world right. 2.5 billion people have accessed to social media sites in the year 2017 alone. It has seen an exponential growth in recent years. Having been the largest it still remains one of the most effective mediums for small businesses around the world. Micro targeting, Geo tagging and Smaller budgets are some of the key benefits of social media for small businesses. Following are some of the key social media sites.
and the list goes on. As a small business it is now very important to be active on social media sites, at least the most important ones. Mere presence in social media will not benefit, but the continuous engagement with customer will. We include social media management as part of the package.