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In business, you need to sell products, which means you need customers who know about your products.

You cannot expect that every customer will find you themselves. You have to go out there and find your customers, and this is called marketing. Every successful business has a great marketing strategy. It is how they communicate with their customer and attract new ones. If you want to be a real contender, then you need to plough a lot of time and resources into your marketing plan. Marketing is a lot more in-depth than paying for a few advertisements. It is an entire strategy. So, to help you develop your marketing plan, here are a few things to consider:

Who Are Your Customers?

This is problem number one. You need to create a key customer profile. The better you know your ideal customer, the more you can create target marketing material that actually taps into these people. So, you need to do a lot of research in this area. Exhaust every avenue, such as your current customer base, your competitor’s website and social media platforms and their activities. Talk to people who come into your store. Create your own social media platforms and engage with your customers there. Have a list of questions that you want answered. The more rounded your ideal customer profile is, the better for you. Marketing is most affective when it is focused and to the point. Knowing who your customers are can help you focus your material.

Your Brand

This is pretty much the second big thing you need to do, create a brand. Not just a pretty logo and a colour scheme, a fully rounded brand with a depth and philosophy. This is how you really connect with your key customers. Use your knowledge of your key customers to direct your brand creation method. Make sure that the things that you are saying and the messages you give are in line with their thoughts in the political, cultural, and socio spheres. You cannot be saying things that seem alien to your customer base. Create an entire brand narrative that competes with a vision of the future and strategies on how to get there. Your brand is absolutely key to connecting with your customer base. You want it to be so powerful that an emotional response is created in the mind of your customers when they see your logo.

What is Your USP – Unique Selling Point

To better understand your USP, you need to research your competitors. You need to work out how you are different, what you do differently and better. Think about their strengths and weakness; what is it that you think they do well? What do they think they do well? What are their USPs? What do they do badly? Try and get into their mindset. You need to find things that you do better and that you can exploit. You need to know as much about your competitors as possible. You should discover what hole in the market you are plugging. It would be best if you found something that gives you that competitive edge. It cos be to do with your products themselves, it could be to do with your green product macking facility, it could be your brand itself. It could be anything. But you need to find something that is unique and that you can focus on and sell. So do a lot of research and discover as much as you possibly can about our competitors and the way they sell themselves and their products.

Your Website

You need a great website. A website is literally your main piece of digital marketing. It has to have everything on it. Your brand narrative, your products, your history, your blog, images, videos, everything that your brand is has to be on your site. It also has to be fully functional with all the key attributes that your customer would expect. Consider things like a chatbot and an e-commerce store as a bare minimum. It needs to be speedy; slow websites will result in a high bounce rate – a bounce rate is when a visitor goes to your site and immediately click out. It needs to be attractive with great images. You can find some great images here at Dreamstime stock photos, for example. A website needs some short, snappy and relevant written content too. Don’t waffle with your text. Less is more. No one wants to read Shakespeare when they are trying to find something online.

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