7 Marketing Ideas to Expand Your Small Business Client Base
What marketing ideas do you have to grab people’s attention, arouse their interest, trigger their desire, and motivate them to take action?
Answer that four-part question correctly and you’ve identified the secret to achieving tremendous sales and marketing success in your chosen business or field.
To complicate matters, the potential answers are numerous and multi-faceted due to the growing number of niche markets, products and services, and marketing trends in our culture. While not all-inclusive, the following list of priorities and small business marketing ideas can help put your small business on a faster track to growth.
Marketing Idea 1: Gain Customer Confidence
Customer indecisiveness,
Marketing Idea 2: Market Penetration
Penetrate awareness of your target audience by using some form of integrated marketing. In other words, the more ways the public hears about you and your business, the better your chances are for achieving brand recognition, credibility, and greater market share. Effective marketing is partly the result of exposing your target group to your name and your selling points (unique selling proposition) as often as possible, in as many ways as possible, and as cost-effectively as possible.
Marketing Idea 3: Enthusiasm
If you deeply believe in your products, services, your company, and yourself, then your prospects will pick up on that passionate attitude and feel confident and optimistic about doing business with you.
Marketing Idea 4: Purchasing is an Emotional Decision
Instil in your prospects good feelings about your company, your business relationship with them, and how you can improve their lives or solve their problems. Accomplishing that is at least as important in the sales process as focusing attention on product features and benefits. Enhancing Social Media is a great way of keeping ‘your ear to the ground’ and answering questions and solving problems in your field of expertise.
Marketing Idea 5: Dispel Distrust
Gain customer confidence and overcome potential feelings of distrust by offering written guarantees of satisfaction, customer testimonials, references, and by joining respected and well-known professional organisations, such as the Chambers of Commerce, and specific industry associations and boards.
Marketing Idea 6: Impose a Deadline.
Counteract one of the biggest obstacles to closing a sale known to mankind: procrastination. To overcome the natural human tendency to deliberate, postpone, and delay, it’s often necessary to inject a sense of urgency into your ads, sales presentations, and marketing messages. Whether supplies are limited or prices are going up at the end of the month, some prospects need to have a deadline or an incentive to motivate them to take action now.
Marketing Idea 7: Create a business marketing plan to identify and capitalise on your strengths and opportunities.
Your strategic plan should also take into account factors such as your weaknesses (and possible remedies), external threats (competition, economic factors, etc.), your marketing mix strategy (products/services, promotional goals, pricing strategy, and distribution decisions), media strategy, sales and expense budgets, and target market analysis (know your customers). Review this ‘bible’ periodically and adjust your efforts accordingly.
The list above is by no way exhaustive and we would love to hear your marketing ideas, thoughts and comments. Feel free to enter your thoughts in to the comments area below.