There are many aspects to the art of marketing, as it requires an intuitive understanding of the customer’s needs and preferences, as well as the ability to present your products and services in a clear, understandable and persuasive manner.
Award-winning Chief Creative Officer Ajab Samrai understands the importance of marketing for companies of all sizes, having worked with a wide range of brands and businesses. This article will explore marketing tips and tricks for small businesses.
Marketing: The Basics
There are many ways to market a small business, such as paid advertising, online traffic, email promotions and social media ads, as well as contests and giveaways, media coverage and guerrilla tactics. Each marketing tool will reach a certain type of customer, and the individual marketing techniques will vary greatly in cost, reach and results. In an effort to reach the biggest audience – and make the biggest possible impact – businesses use a mixture of marketing methods to create a personalised and effective strategy.
With regard to their marketing, businesses should look for growth in a number of areas: increased volume of sales; selling more expensive products and/or upselling more often; selling more profitable products; and acquiring more customers. By acquiring more customers, the other three options become a possibility, as a business needs a large pool of customers before it can go about persuading them to make bigger or more profitable purchases.
The Target Audience
It is important for a business to understand that only a particular portion of the entire buying population have the potential to become customers. Marketing, therefore, should be designed to speak directly to the portion that has an underlying interest in the business: the ‘target market’. If businesses do not understand and connect with their target market, it is possible they will waste a lot of time, money and resources attempting to attract people that will never become customers.
Understanding the target market will inform every element of a business’s marketing, helping it to decide the style and type of language used in messaging; which social media platforms to use; which keywords to target; and potential sponsorship and partnership opportunities.
If there is uncertainty or doubt concerning the preferences and needs of the target market, a business should conduct market research to better understand its customers and make better marketing choices. For further information about performing market research, please refer to the embedded PDF.