Half of all businesses started fail within 5 years & here’s why.

Closed for business due to poor sales

45% of all businesses opened in the US fail within the first 5 years of operation. Lots of times it comes down to lack of funding but the truth is most businesses fail due to a limited understanding of who their customers are and what they want. Marketing in today’s world can have many terms; content marketing, social media marketing, paid advertising, affiliate marketing and the list goes on. The question many new entrepreneurs have is where do I start with marketing, and how do I get people to buy my product or service?

Marketing to the masses can be difficult

Where to start with marketing?

I can’t stress this enough the best place to start with any type of marketing is to know your customer. Knowing their likes and dislikes. Know how much they make a year, do they have children?Are they married? As much as you’d think that these things don’t matter at all. They are such a vital part of creating a solid marketing strategy across various platforms. The consistent sales are in the details and many times small details such as these are overlooked.

Start with a simple list of demographics and psychographics to build your customer persona. You’ll be surprised at how much this information helps with crafting the perfect message for your marketing campaigns.

Demographics

1. Age
2. Location
3. Gender
4. Income level
5. Education level
6. Marital or family status
7. Occupation
8. Ethnic background

Psychographics

1. Personality
2. Attitudes
3. Values
4. Interests/hobbies
5. Lifestyles
6. Behavior

One of the major questions that can be easily overlooked is “can my customer afford my service or product?” Knowing the answer to this question early in the development process of your product or service will answer other questions like “is there a market for my product or service?”

Understanding how your customers think is the next step in the process.

Figuring out what your customers want can be done many ways. A few are asking for reviews, taking polls, paying attention to customers that are loyal to your brand, and using data and analytics from your website to find out why and where they fall short while in the sales funnel. Once you have these things figured out the next phase in the journey is finding the proper platform.

Which platform is best for marketing ?

Knowing which platform to interact with potential customers on comes back to the demographic and psychographics mentioned earlier. Doing your research on each social media platform is vital to your marketing strategy paying off. Simple rule of thumb to remember anything that is B2C or business to customer gets better reach and awareness of platforms like Instagram or Facebook, while anything B2B typically does better with Linkedin.

Which social media platoform works best for youtr business?

Crafting the perfect message.

Crafting the perfect message when it comes to marketing is a fine art. You won’t get it right the first few times but as with anything the more you do it the better at it you’ll soon become. Enter the world of copywriting. I could write a series of articles about the psychological aspect of copywriting. To some it up when writing copy the key is to play on the emotions of the target customer.

You’ll know just what to say based on the information that you came up with when creating your customer persona. People buy with emotion and justify it with logic. This is why finding out the pain point of your potential customer is important because you’ll know just what to say in your ad to invoke the proper emotion. Remember the goal of the ad being marketed isn’t to get the person viewing the ad to buy your product. The purpose of the ad is to build awareness, to click through to your landing page, and start at the top of the sales funnel. This is where lead nurturing begins and you turn them from a prospect into a solid lead.

Getting a customer to purchase what your selling comes down to timing. Would you purchase something from a person you knew nothing about? Probably not, your a complete stranger to anyone your selling to. Getting them to know who you are is the first important step to get them to buy from you. This is called brand awareness. Informing the prospect is the next step in the journey. All the information they need should be delivered via your website.

Once they land on your website, getting them to provide a bit of info like their name and email is the immediate goal. This can be accomplished with a low entry offer. Things such as an ebook, a discount, free or expedited shipping will inform and entice. At this stage having a sales funnel set up is vital, this allows you to know exactly where the customer is in the sales journey and where they are expected to be next. Your able to move them along the funnel using email marketing & targeted ads. The expectation is that your ads and landing pages compliment each other. You should never have a potential customer land directly on your homepage. With each ad and personalized email marketing campaign you get closer and closer to the prospect purchasing your product or service.

Things to remember

-Be ready to anticipate what the customers’ needs are before they become needs.

-All customer information is good information. Information such as commentary, reviews, opinions, information on social media about how specific brands could improve or what they do that works will allow smaller brands to use these formulas to improve their companies and improve the processes of current techniques implemented by bigger companies to increase market share.

Need help with creating a marketing campaing for your small business? Let my company RS Web Design agency help get customers to your site and buying your product or service.