Simple Marketing Strategies for New Businesses to Succeed

There’s no end to the marketing strategies you can use to grow a business.

Depending on what products and services you offer, some strategies may be more effective than others. While it’s up to you to determine what works and what doesn’t, it’s important to have options available when it’s time to switch gears.

You’ll be able to test tactics, tweak them, and make them your own. In the end, your business will have an edge and the competition won’t know how to react. This is a good thing. In this quick guide, you’ll discover marketing strategies that are especially effective for new businesses.

1. Strategic Content Production

Content marketing has become one of the most popular ways to build a brand online. It allows you to find people who are already searching for what you have and guide them through making a purchase decision. The challenge many people face is creating content strategically. Just because something has a lot of search volume, that doesn’t mean it’s a good fit for your brand.

Take a moment to map out the buyer’s journey as relates to your business. After you have a clear understanding of what steps and information someone needs before buying, create those content assets.

You should have top of the funnel content to attract visitors, middle of the funnel content to educate visitors, and bottom of the funnel content to convert them to customers. It’s a fair bit of work but it’ll translate to sales without needing human interactions.

2. Video Promotion

Every year, the amount of web traffic going towards videos increases. It’s not a mistake. Video content is able to capture the attention of audiences in ways written or audio content can’t. Though video content is more effective, it’s also more difficult to create.

When you go this route, start with instructional videos directly related to your products. This can help with customer retention and attract a larger audience who’s interested in what you have to offer.

Once you’ve created a body of instructional content, branch out into more topical videos that have entertainment value. Those will attract a larger audience and push them towards your instructional videos which can convert people to customers.

It goes without saying that you should promote your videos far and wide. Upload them to platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, and embed them on your website.

3. Create Free Tools

What’s the best price tag in the world? Free. Whether you like it or not, people will go out of their way to get something for free. You can take advantage of this by offering simple tools related to your brand and give them away for free.

For example, if you help people prepare documents, you can offer a PDF converter like UsefulPDF. If you help people with email marketing, you can offer an email ROI calculator. If you offer web development services then you can create a website cost calculator.

These tools are useful to your audience, will allow you to collect contact information, and also builds brand recognition. The most important part is ensuring they’re relevant to your audience and can produce revenue for your business – even if it happens indirectly.

4. Simple Infographics

Infographics are an effective way to disseminate complex information. They’re also fun to engage with and supremely shareable. The best part is that you don’t have to hire a designer to create them.

There are many free tools like Venngage, Piktochart, etc. that come with multiple templates you can repurpose to your needs with a few button clicks. Once you’ve added your colors, data, and text, publish your infographic.

After publishing, you’ll do the natural thing like embed it on your website and share it on social media. Go a step further by submitting to the free infographic directories. If accepted, they’ll help you promote your infographic (and website) to their large audiences. It’s free publicity that you should take advantage of.

5. Local Events

There’s a strong emphasis on online marketing for new and existing businesses. In 2019, digital ad spend surpassed traditional ad spend for the first time in history. There’s a reason more money is being poured into the internet – it works.

Even though it’s effective, that doesn’t mean you should ignore offline marketing channels. Most interactions on the internet are impersonal. When you hold local events, you can communicate with your potential customers and audience one-on-one.

This is an opportunity to collect deep insights, build goodwill, and generate revenue from direct sales. The lessons you learn here can be directly applied to your marketing on other channels.

6. Customer Referral Program

Once all the things you’ve done previously start to yield fruits, you’ll get a steady stream of daily customers. As long as your product is good, a small fraction of your customers will recommend you to friends, family members, and colleagues.

The goal is to turn that small fraction of customers into a large number of customers recommending your products. Achieve this by setting up a simple referral program. For every person that current customers refer your way, they get a reward. That could be credits towards their next purchase, a cash gift, or points that can be redeemed for prizes.

Look at the kind of referral programs your competitors have, what they’re doing well, and where they’re falling short. You can also survey your customers to understand what kind of reward they’d like to receive.

7. Email Marketing

Email marketing is often touted as one of the most effective marketing strategies. For many people, it produces a better ROI than social media and paid advertising. It does take effort to get right but it’s worth it.

There are a number of things that you should focus on:

- An email marketing tool that’ll grow with you

- Multiple nurturing sequences that cater to different audience segments

- A clear offer that people can take advantage of

It sounds simple and often is but it can also get complicated. Focus on your goals and constantly test different aspects of your email marketing campaigns. What doesn’t help gets removed. A great tool to start your email marketing efforts is ActiveCampaign. It’s inexpensive to get started and has a wide range of features for you to work with.

Conclusion

There are countless marketing strategies that you can take advantage of. Some will pan out and others will be utter failures. The goal is to keep going until you hit on the one that works for you. This article has outlined a few to get started and by all means, test them out. The list presented is by no means all the marketing strategies in the world so continue researching and keep implementing what you find. You’ll get the results you’re looking for.