Speaking to you as a small business marketing consultant, I speak with a lot of small business owners about what makes a successful marketing campaign. In my experience, it seems that very few business owners have a complete understanding of everything that's involved in getting more customers (especially online).
In order to generate more customers for your small business on the internet, you have to take some time to evaluate what I like to call The Four Pillars of Marketing Success. Here they are for your education and enlightenment:
1. Market
Your market is a HUGE part of your overall marketing success. You need to know who your customers are (and what they want), who you competition is (and how you stack up), what the average prices are in the marketplace for your product or service and what keywords your customers are searching on the internet to find your business.
2. Creating a compelling marketing message
Once you know about your customers, competition, pricing and keywords the next step is to create a compelling marketing message. A compelling marketing message is a message that get's the attention of your customer and leads them to take a specific action. There are a few pieces to the overall marketing message that should be there to make it most effective.
First, to get the most customers, you should include an overt benefit. This is what your product or service does for your customer. The benefit should be stated in a direct and obvious manner. You should not be subtle about what your product or service does for your customer because they will not take the time to figure this out.
Second, you want to include forms of proof. Forms of proof could be case studies, before and after photos, testimonials, third party endorsements etc. Something that PROVES that your claims are true.
Third, your offering should have a dramatic difference. In essense, you should share something about your product that makes it truly unique and better then the competition.
Fourth, a call to action. Once you have utilized the other elements above to create a powerful marketing message, you have to leverage that information into a specific call to action like filling out a form or contacting you. Offering an incentive to take this specific action now is even better.
3. Getting your message seen by your customers
This is another important step. You can have the most amazing marketing letter in the world, but if your customers don't know that you exist, it doesn't matter. Getting your message to the masses is very important. There are several options for doing this. You can use search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click (PPC), affiliate marketing networks, banner advertising, social media marketing, classified postings, social bookmarking or contextual advertising. The best campaigns use a combination of these tools in order to get a lot of traffic and relevent traffic to your site.
4. Tracking your results
The last step is one that most people simply don't consider. This step is highly important because your marketing efforts rarely work as you plan them the first time out. IN order to know what's working and what's not, you need to take the time to track your results. The best way I have found to track one's results is to incorporate a tracking software into your site itself. You can use something as simple as google Analytics.
This type of software will tell you how many visitors you are getting, where they are coming from and you can actually use this software to follow your visitors around your site and see what pages they are looking at.
Capturing & analyzing this data can give you tremendous insights into the effectiveness of your marketing campaign and you can utilize this information to make adjustments to your marketing in order to maximize your results and get the most customers possible.
We call this process the four pillars of marketing because like a table has four legs, your marketing needs all of these elements in order to truly be successful. If you are not incorporating every element mentioned above, you are going to miss out on opportunities to make your marketing efforts as successful as possible and get as many customers as possible.
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All this four pillars are very much necessary for small business. Social networking is best and effective for small business. It is much important to focus on some important sections so message can be send.
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