Marketing your business during difficult times

Today’s economic conditions are tough. There are new businesses emerging onto the market regularly, resulting in a heavy reduction in client leads.

This article will act as a step by step guide to boost your sales and business into a higher gear, and to tackle the challenge of finding new way to market your business and not spend a fortune will doing so.

One of the most important ways to assist you in growing your business is to create a unique selling proposition (USP) and guarantee. A USP is something that sets you aside and separates your business from your competitors. It is something that makes your clients come back to you every time to do business. A successful USP should be incorporated into the company slogan and be a part of all marketing material. As an example, at Baggetta & Co we always ensure we promote the fact that Baggetta & Co is a small specialist practice, and that the Founder & Principal Paul Baggetta is a both a qualified accountant for over 35 years and also a financial planner for over 17 years. Paul Baggetta is also a qualified Real Estate Licensee since 1989, and operated his own Real Estate Business for his property investment clients for over 5 years. This combined skill set is unique in Australia, with not many Advisors have this level of expertise and experience and in this combination. This is Baggetta & co.’s unique selling proposition (USP) and what attracts our clients, and all our marketing focuses on this.

If you are unsure on how to determine your USP, follow the steps below as a guide.

Step one: Describe your target audience.

You need to know who you are targeting your services at before you can start to market them. Be specific!

Step two: Explain the problem you solve.

What challenges or problems can you solve for your potential clients? Here you should tell these potential clients what you can do for them.

Step three: List the biggest distinctive benefits of your business.

List the top three benefits your clients would get from using your service than another competitors.

Step four: Define your promise.

Making a pledge or guarantee to your clients that holds you accountable for your services and gives the client or prospective client reason to place their trust in you.

Step five: Combine.

Take all the information from steps 1 – 4, and condense into a single paragraph. You should see ideas and thoughts repeating throughout. From this paragraph, condense even further to bring the reoccurring ideas down to just one sentence. This should be your final USP.

Tactical Marketing Plan

It is important to have a tactical marketing plan to improve your sales ratio, increase the amount of leads you attain and increase your overall net earnings. Below are the components of a tactical marketing plan:

1. Ensure your plan has many approaches of generating leads. Some of these approaches could be email marketing, direct mailing, advertising or door knocking, etc.
2. Ensure your marketing material is up to standard. Your marketing material should reflect your business and USP, and be consistent throughout.
3. Have a clear USP as it separates your from your competitors.
4. Be able to measure the outcomes of each different marketing activity. By asking your clients and then recording how they heard about your company and why they decided to choose your company can be a way of measuring the success of the activity.
5. Embrace social networking. Things like Facebook and Twitter are a platform that can reach millions of people for free and should be taken advantage of.
6. Email-marketing. Be able to send email updates to all your clients.
7. Create the time for marketing. Set aside a regular time to develop marketing activities for your business and don’t ignore this aspect of growing your business. Creating calendar dates as a reminder can help with this. Your marketing plan should be set a year in advance to ensure you are constantly attaining new leads.
8. Estimate your return rate for marketing tactics and compare them with the expected number of new leads. Ensure the benefits outweigh the cost.

Tailoring your website to your business

Most customers today are researching goods or services from a business on the internet before going into the store or even talking to the employees. That’s why it is incredibly important to have a visually pleasing and informative website that aligns with your businesses brand and USP.

Information on your website is ‘the front door’ to your business that is open 24/7. You need to make sure it captures the prospective customer in 3 seconds or less to avoid them seeking the help of your competitor.

If all this seems like too much you can hire a professional to set up the site creatively and professionally. A professional can ensure your site looks exactly how you vision it to be without the stress of trying to navigate through all the technical aspects yourself. These professionals can also help your business stay relevant when clients are searching for your service. This is called Search Optimization and it is a process where the professionals ensure your business comes up at the top of the list when people search for your service.

All of the marketing tools mentioned above are common criteria that most businesses today need to cover in order to boost their business sales and net profit. Strategies for marketing your business need to be put in place in order to stay competitive in this ever-changing market.

IMPORTANT:

The material and contents provided in this publication are informative in nature only. It is not intended to be advice and you should not act specifically on the basis of this information alone. If expert assistance is required, professional advice should be obtained.