As a business owner, you are aware that publicity is the driving force behind a business. And although you’re probably accustomed to the old saying that no publicity is bad publicity, that’s not necessarily true. Marketing can often make or break your business. And since it is regularly the boundary setting failure success apart from failure, you want to tread carefully and make sure you only add positive practices to your business. It isn’t an easy process. There are many brands out there providing services that are similar to yours, so you’ll need to be able to set yourself apart from the rest. Before you even begin, you must first have total trust in your brand. You should know your strengths and how you can best present them. Have a look at the following tips to get a better idea of what you should do to help your brand skyrocket in the sales market.
Identify the factors that bring you leverage in the market
Before sketching the outline of your strategy, it’s best to determine the things your business excels at. While developing new skills and expanding your area of expertise is vital, you should first bet on what you already possess. Take out a piece of paper and write down some of the key aspects you believe set you apart from your competitors. Think about what your company already does well and how you can shine some of the spotlights on that. Does your company pay special attention to the materials used? Do you have a brand history that goes back a few generations and that you could employ in your marketing to drive revenue? When considering the qualities of your brand, you should also think about how you present them to make them as appealing as possible to the public. You want to keep your existing clients loyal, but you also want your customers to give your products a try. And maybe even stop buying from a competitor company and switch to your brand.
Choose a theme
After writing down your business’s strengths, you must take the next step and devise a theme for your publicity campaign. This theme should always be at the forefront of your advertising. Doing this ensures you build solid marketing and establish your name in the business. This doesn’t mean you should be repetitive, but you can find new angles to express the same thing. Choose something that is memorable and is likely to create an impact on the public. You want to keep things simple but also stand out from the rest as distinctive. If you’re thinking about it, you’ll notice that some of the world’s largest brands have evocative slogans. Sometimes you can even think about them randomly just because something reminded you of them. That’s how evocative they are.
Understand the market
In order to create a resilient strategy, you must conduct some thorough market research. Even if your marketing plans look great in theory and seem incredible to you, you must know who you’re pitching to, so you can get a good idea of the form in which to display your content. In order to get this knowledge, you should follow publications, the news and social media to stay updated on all the changes and trends. While not downright impossible, it’s unlikely to gain massive success by swimming against the current, especially if your business is on the smaller side. You must take into account the different perspectives and be sure you’re not too over the top or bordering on offensive. That won’t be a good look for you and might even damage your reputation.
Of course, you won’t be able to make everyone happy. Some, including both customers and media outlets that could communicate about your brand, may never notice the appeal of your company. So you should direct your efforts directly at the type of public you want to reach. Think about what they’d like to see and what their expectations of you are, and utilize that. This brings you to the next point:
Build a customer profile
When you put a portrait of a theoretical customer in the place, you’ll see that your marketing strategy will begin to contour easier. It’s challenging to devise a plan when you have something uncertain in mind. If you have only a vague idea of who you’re selling to, it may cause you to stall before choosing a plan of action. You can find yourself lost in extraneous details or even completely stuck in one spot because you just won’t know what to do. In the worst-case scenario, it can even cause you to completely miss your mark, alienating a portion of your clientele in the process, leaving you with plummeting sales and a desperate need to revert the damage caused. This can be rather difficult, as well as a long-term process that’ll necessitate many financial, creative and monetary resources. If you have to focus on getting back on track, you’ll have difficulty progressing and reaching your revenue milestones. So it’s better to get it right from the first try.
A customer profile won’t be 100% accurate, but it should get as close to reality as feasible. Envision your ideal client and think about the characteristics that make up their outline. Include information such as:
- Demographics: Age, education level, gender, marital status, location and general income are good markers to consider. You should also consider ethnicity and religion if you plan to deliver a more customized approach. However, it’s essential that it doesn’t come across as too forced. To be on the safe side of things, you should have people of various backgrounds in your marketing team, so you don’t put forward advertisements that are too obvious, crass or tone-deaf. That’s a surefire publicity killer.
- Lifestyle: The values, opinions, ideas, interests and political leaning of your customers are important. The principles of your business should align with their own, so your marketing campaign can reach them easier. Some may even downright reject a release that doesn’t line up with their views, so you should be very careful about this aspect.
- Buying habits: Each customer has a different purchasing pattern. Some only buy when they need and only as much as they need. Others follow deals and sales and are always ready to bring home something they find at a discount price, even if they don’t require it. Some clients are loyal and return to the same brand year after year. They are also more likely to recommend the products they use to relatives and friends, which is an immensely effective form of marketing. Pretty much everyone would trust someone close to them sooner than a commercial on TV, right? However, impulsive customers also exist. They don’t base their decisions on opinions or reviews but rather on their spur-of-the-moment feelings to just purchase something that caught their eye. Think about which one or two of these your ideal customer is more likely to be. Or, think about a way to successfully integrate aspects of each in order to reach a wider clientele.
Discuss with the customers
What better way to find out what the customers want than to ask them directly. Arrange surveys in which you ask them to share their opinions about your business and let you know what you could do to improve. They should share their expectations of you, what they hope to see in the future, as well as ways in which you could expand your current product line. The opinions will likely be very variable, but you should try to look for the similarities present in each of them and synthesize them into your products and branding. Looking for the common denominator guarantees that you’ll be able to satisfy as many people as possible. You should also keep the more unique ideas in mind, don’t disregard them, as they have the potential to make for incredible future projects.
Social media is another medium you should not miss out on. Everybody’s on social media, at least on one platform, so it’s easy to reach a large public through it. If you want to drive good publicity to your company, social media is a necessity. You can reach pretty much everyone through the sites. Look into which platform your target clientele is more likely to be on and focus your efforts there. Keep in mind that social media moves quite fast, and people have a habit of simply scrolling down for hours on end. In order to catch their attention and make sure they stay on your page, you need to come up with interesting, attention-grabbing titles, visuals and slogans. After all, you don’t want your brand just to be seen. You want customers to engage.
Work with an agency
When you start working side by side with a public relations agency, you send the message that you’re a committed professional. When you’re aiming for the long haul in your marketing strategy, you’ll want to get branding that is calibrated and customized for your enterprise. When you choose the services of experts, you’ll be your own publicist as well, since you’ll become an integral part of the process. You don’t have to worry that an agency will just take over and completely exclude you from the marketing ventures of your own business. After all, your image is at stake, so you should be in control of all the proceedings.
With the help of a publicity firm, you’ll guarantee your placement in the magazines of your choice, so your business can enjoy the benefits of this type of coverage. Press releases are a great way to gain recognition fast and extend your reach to the public. You’ll also become more adept at mastering your business social media pages. You’ll gain new insight into what you need to do to build convincing advertisement strategies online so your accounts can bring revenue to your company.
If you’re intent on achieving success as soon as possible, an agency can help. They won’t only help fix what you haven’t been doing well so far, but they’ll also encourage you to develop your own skills, help you recognize and establish good marketing practices and make the differences between good and bad publicity clearer to notice.
Stay relevant
One of the easiest ways to sink into obscurity is to bring forth content that is no longer relevant. You want your marketing to be up to date with the realities surrounding you. Your clients will be particularly perceptive of this, and if something feels too far removed from their lives, it’s not likely to get their attention. Some may even find it to be in poor taste. If you want to ensure that your advertisement won’t come across as insensitive toward social nuances, you should encourage your marketing crew to share any concerns they might have. Do your research and look at how similar campaigns were received.
Take a look at social media in order to get a good idea of what’s hot and what’s not. Just a few minutes of browsing through a page should give you a solid idea about the topics currently trending. You can try to incorporate them in your marketing to ensure a higher likelihood of success, or if you feel like you’re more adept at social media, you can try and guess the next trend and use that. This can be tricky as the internet is volatile and continuously changing, so predicting what’s going to be viral can be quite challenging. However, if you’ve been paying attention, you have probably been able to notice a pattern in what becomes popular.
Make sure not to wait too long to adapt to a trend if you plan to incorporate it into your publicity. Something that’s a craze today runs the risk of becoming unknown tomorrow, and you don’t want to waste resources on manufacturing products everybody will think are already obsolete.
It’s not easy building a solid marketing strategy. It takes time and effort, and you won’t see the results immediately. But as one of the main features of successful companies, you’ll want to pay attention to it.
