8 Marketing Strategies To Increase Your Reach (Part 2)

On Tuesday, we posted Part 1 of this article. Here are the last four marketing tips to help you increase your company’s visibility.

5. Use Social media to market your business – You need to be where your customers and potential customers are. They are on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and many other social media sites. Research which one(s) your customers use most often and participate in the conversations. Post about what’s happening at your business, post your blogs and let your followers in on what new products you have coming out. If you don't have the time to manage a robust social media campaign for your business, hire a marketing firm to handle that for you.

6. Build a great website – You know your business because you are the expert in what you do. Unless you are an expert in web design, you should not attempt to build your company website. You don’t want to direct your potential customers to a website that looks homemade. You want and need a website that reflects your professionalism and expertise. If you do not have the necessary skills to build a website that represents your brand, hire a marketing firm to design and build it for you.

7. Create the right copy for your website - Your website should not be all about you. Your website is a tool that should talk about your target market’s pain points and how you can solve their problems. Your content must to speak to your ideal client in a way that connects with them emotionally and convinces them in a matter of seconds that they have found the exact solution they are looking for. 

8. Launch your product, program or service – You are ready to let the world know about your awesome products or services. How do you share this information? Some great suggestions are to write an e-book and offer it for free on your website. You can offer free webinars to introduce people to your services and give them some introductory level information for free. If they want more, they can hire you. A business coach can help you decide upon the best way for you to launch your particular business.

Did you notice a common theme through many of these marketing tips? Hire help to get your marketing done for you while you do what you are good at. You can try to do all these things on your own and missing out on opportunities or you can hire a skilled and experienced marketing team, like Blue Dog Marketing, to do the work for you.

8 Marketing Strategies To Increase Your Reach (Part 1)

You started your small business because you are good at what you do and you have great solutions or products to offer. You may be struggling with how to reach your target market. The answer is to consistently get your message out.

How can you do that? Here are 8 smart marketing ideas that will help you spread the word about your company and increase your sales. You may have tried one or more of these already but haven't stuck with them the way you should for them to work. Follow the suggestions Blue Dog Marketing is sharing in this post today and Thursday to drive traffic to your website, create visibility with your ideal clients and solve problems for your target market.

1. Blog about the problems your ideal client is facing – If you are not blogging you should be. Blogging is one marketing strategy every business owner can and should use. You position yourself as an expert in your field when you blog. You don't have to be a writer to have a great blog. Your posts can be short or long. They can be short video snippets of a webinar that you deliver. Your blog can be whatever you would like it to be. Just remember to have your content relate to the problems your target market is experiencing. Pick a schedule to blog and stick to it. If you don't have time to maintain a blog yourself, hire a marketing firm to do it for you.

2. Promote your blog – Once you have a blog up and running, you need to let people know about it. Attach the blog to your website, include a link to your blog in your email signature and put your blog link on all your marketing materials, including your business cards. If you don't let people know your blog is there, no one will read it.

3. Send your clients an email newsletter – You want to stay top of mind with your customers and prospects. An email newsletter is one of the easiest, least expensive and most effective ways to do this. Regularly publish an email newsletter, once a month or once a quarter, whatever works best for you and your company. When you choose a publishing schedule, be consistent. If you do not have time to create, write and send out an email newsletter yourself, outsource it to a marketing firm.

4. Following up from networking events – Networking is a wonderful way to increase your visibility in the community. You can make some great business connections at networking events. Don’t just collect a bunch of business cards. Follow up with the people you met to turn those conversations into opportunities. Call or email them to set up a time to meet for coffee so you can each learn more about the other’s business.

Check back on Thursday for tips 5 through 8!

Do You Have a Marketing Strategy?

Is your marketing working for you? Do you have a lot of marketing tactics but not marketing strategy?  It’s probably because you haven't really grasped the difference between a marketing strategy and marketing tactics.

There is a huge difference between your marketing strategy and your marketing tactics. Marketing tactics are the social media (Facebook, blogging, Twitter) that you are doing. But, they are NOT marketing strategies. They are the things that you do to support your overall marketing strategy.

To better understand the difference, let's define what your marketing strategy is and what your marketing tactics are and the difference between the two of them.

Marketing Strategy

Your strategy is what you plan to do and the goal that you’ve set to achieve by a specific time frame. It's what you want to happen.

Marketing Tactics

Your tactics are the things you will do in order to make sure you’re your marketing strategy or "goal" is achieved.

This is the time of year when you should be working on your budget and your marketing strategy for next year. So, you need to get clear on what your strategy is so that you know where you're going. Then, you can set plans to use the appropriate tactics to achieve your set goal.

Do not be too broad with your strategy and especially with your tactics. Your strategy should be as specific as possible so that you know if and when you've actually achieved it and can move on to the next marketing strategy you want to implement.

When it comes to your tactics you want to be very specific on how they will support the strategy. You don't want to just say that Facebook will be one of your marketing tactics. But, what specifically will you do on Facebook to make it a tactic that supports your marketing strategy. The more specific you can get then the easier it will be for you to implement everything.