In this busy and crowded business world, it is essential that your business stays ahead of the game and certainly stays in touch with their market sector and customers’ trends. Many businesses will already be using digital marketing to promote their business, possibly without even knowing they are doing it, but here are some useful tips for pushing your digital marketing strategy further:
Influence Marketing – or otherwise known as”word of mouth”! Influencing your target market to use your business is a key and very inexpensive way to drive new customers. This can be done in many ways, from good customer service at all times making customers much more likely to recommend your business, to running competitions/incentives for existing customers to recommend new ones. In digital terms a good way to do this is to identify some key customers or influential local people who you could invite to test a product or use a service for free and write about it through social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest). Inviting local press journalists to give exposure of this campaign would also help.
Moment Marketing – this is where you look at local/national news and events, particularly within your target market to see what is happening in the world in this area and get involved. This can be from sponsoring events, getting flyers out in delegate bags, using event/news hashtags on Twitter to tap into that feed, commenting on other tweets/posts from that news as well as finding a link between your business and that news which you can utilise. Being timely is the key…
Videos – we all know that TV adverts are extremely expensive and only really adopted by the big brands, but why not look at creating a series of videos for your business and getting these uploaded to YouTube/Vimeo and linking to them through other social media channels. These could be product related demonstrations, tours of your premises, instruction manuals, case study interview or even funny staff videos! Video marketing is becoming widely utilised and can show your business as an expert in its field.
Email Marketing – this tool should never be underestimated and a good CRM system will hold details for many new leads which you can market out to in bulk (using tools such as Dotmailer or Mailchimp to personalise the emails), or personal emails out looking at the information you hold on that individual. Make your leads feel special, offer incentives, give them information and make them remember your name!
Customer Retention – this area is quite often overlooked and for small businesses is more important than ever. If you already have a good customer base, you should not be complacent as they can choose a competitor at any time. So look after them all, regular contact through social media, emails or phone calls will ensure they know you care about them and it will give you that USP you may need against other similar businesses. Use that contact to your own advantage by:
- Getting feedback on your business from them
- Offer them upsell discounts and offers
- Incentivise them to recommend new customers and do your digital marketing for you!
- Tap into their experience of other competitors should they have any
Thank you for reading
LAB Marketing 