You’ve worked hard to get your business off the ground. You’ve dedicated countless hours and sleepless nights to create a business that you can be proud to call your own. You’ve once called yourself a start-up, but you’ve grown into something more than that now. So, since you’re business is growing, it’s time to upgrade your marketing strategy for sustainable growth too. The marketing plan you had while you were a start-up got you this far, yes. But if you want to continue to reach new goals with your business, you need to keep updating your marketing and advertising techniques.
These are a few things you’ll want to make sure you include when creating a marketing plan that will take your business to the next level.
Invest in a good website
Perhaps in the rush of getting your business started, you managed to piece together a working website quickly. But for a business to run successfully and grow, you need a strong digital presence. A website nowadays is one of the first impressions a potential customer may get of your business. Therefore, you want to make sure that your website is the best representation of your business that it can be. It should display well and work quickly on a mobile device, offer digital customer service, and be easy to use. It might even make sense to have an online store or shop to make your selling process seamless too.
Set a marketing budget
It seemed like before, whatever extra money you had lying around went towards your advertising. Now, as a more well-established business, it’s time for you to properly budget your marketing plan. A successful marketing plan doesn’t always mean throwing as much money at your advertisements as possible. It’s quite the opposite. Think quality over quantity. We recommend for a successful marketing plan to set aside between 5-7% of your annual revenue to invest in advertising or promoting your business. Once you have that number set in stone, you can work it backward along an annual calendar to decide how best to invest that amount. When you have no marketing budget in place, you don’t have a starting point, you just have a few ideas that likely won’t happen. – Yes, that’s a little tough love but, it’s true. How many times have you set a goal without a plan and it didn’t unfold the way you wanted it to?
Have a steady social media presence
Just as a website is important for first impressions, a strong social media presence is important for customer communication and engagement. The best part about social media for business is that it isn’t costly. Think of your social media as a direct line between you and your customers. There are so many opportunities for your business to grow just by talking to those around you on “social” platforms. If you’re just sending information out and not communicating personally by answering questions or posing questions you might be missing the whole “social” side of this concept. Maybe you’ve been able to post a couple of times a week, but now it’s time to start posting more frequently and start to focus on what type of posts get the best response from your customers.
Create an email list of customers
Social media is an excellent tool to gain trust and increase engagement with your customers, but sometimes your posts will miss different customers – that’s just the reality of it. Not every single one of your followers is going to see your posts – but there is a way you can change that. By having a customer e-mail list you can send your message directly into your customer’s inbox where they are less likely to miss it. If you haven’t already started taking advantage of e-mail as a marketing tool, now is the time.
Have an annual plan
Perhaps you’ve been running your business for a few years now and you’ve started to notice patterns where sales take a dive throughout the year. Now that you’ve experienced the ups and downs seasonally, you can start to brace yourself for these slower periods by creating an annual marketing plan that will help your sales throughout the year. Think of seasonal sales and promotional techniques that will help draw in more traffic throughout the slower parts of the year. With this plan in place, you’ll also know how much of your marketing budget you need to allocate and where. If you have a lull in the year, plan to spend a little extra there and on your really busy months maybe you spend a little less there so you can reallocate it to other areas, or maybe on your high months, that’s where you plan to have new business cards printed, flyers, have website revisions done, etc. Marketing isn’t just advertising, it’s any visual representation of your business or brand.
Consider an integrated advertising approach
What is integrated advertising? It’s when you combine different marketing channels such as content, email, advertising, and social media to make the most of your marketing budget and increase your outreach. Having a unified, actionable plan that includes all areas of your marketing will reduce stress on you, and it will also make your marketing plan more consistent. When marketing becomes consistent you’ll generate more leads, in a more measurable way and it will set you apart from the competition.
When it comes to running a business, sometimes your marketing plan gets put on the backburner. However, it’s important to keep your marketing plan near the top of your priority list to see your business succeed. But how can you run a business and manage your marketing strategy? Well, you can always call the professionals to handle your marketing needs for you. At 3SIXTY Marketing Solutions, we can do it all from website overhauls to running your social media to creating an integrated marketing plan that actually helps grow your business. Whatever your marketing and advertising needs may be, we’ve got you covered – 3SIXTY. Perhaps it’s time we took a look at your marketing strategy together. If that’s the case give us a call today at (705) 252-4180. We’re the marketing partner you’ve been hunting for, and we look forward to helping you take your business to the next level.
