By Hannah Whittenly
In the competitive world of business, you need more than just a great product or service to maximize your earnings. If you want to be truly successful, you’ll need to promote your business and make sure potential customers know about it. Here are four simple, easy to implement ways that business owners can use to think like marketers, get more customers and make more money.
Embrace Social Media
With very few exceptions, businesses today require a strong presence on social media in order to thrive in the market environment. Many customers use social media platforms to find local businesses and look for recommendations. These platforms also tend to offer advertising features at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing materials, making them a perfect solution for small businesses that are working on limited marketing budgets. Be sure to post helpful or entertaining content, as you will need to get people who see your social media posts engaged in order to increase the chances of them choosing to buy from you.
Build a Killer Website
The website for a product or service today serves much the same purpose as packaging did in the era when products were primarily bought from store shelves. Many of your customers will form their first impressions of your product based on the website you use to promote and sell it. Invest in creating a user-friendly site that is rich in multimedia, and you’ll be able to make those first impressions positive. Your site should feature a blog on which new, search engine optimized content is posted at least once per week. Good SEO will help more people find your site organically, generating long-term increases in traffic and sales. You should also make your site mobile-friendly, as more and more people are using the internet from their phones.
Gather Reviews and Testimonials
The most important part of selling something is convincing the customer that it has value to him or her. Though you can do this through your own marketing materials, an even more effective way is to gather reviews from past customers who had similar needs met by your product or service. If you can find customers willing to create video testimonials for your product, the results will be even better. Video testimonials add to the media richness of a website, increase the personal connection that a future buyer has to a reviewer and can even be used as external marketing materials when placed on video hosting sites like YouTube.
Use LinkedIn
Though it is thought of mainly as a professional networking site, LinkedIn has a surprising amount of value when it comes to promoting products as well. In fact, a remarkable 43 percent of all marketers report having acquired at least one customer through LinkedIn promotion. Because it can be used to host longer pieces of content and show vital company information, a LinkedIn profile serves many of the same functions as a website. It is also excellent for demographic targeting, since most LinkedIn users are professionals with the means to buy higher-end and luxury products. Xyngular, a company in the natural health niche, makes full use of LinkedIn’s capabilities by creating new posts frequently and populating them with engaging images that grab the reader’s attention and is, therefore, a prime example of properly using LinkedIn for business purposes.
If you are a business owner, marketing is one of the many hats you need to wear in order to maximize your own success. By following these four tips, you’ll be able to get your product or service in front of more people, generate leads and convert customers more successfully.
Hannah Whittenly is a freelance writer and mother of two from Sacramento, CA. She enjoys kayaking and reading books by the lake.
