Have you ever wondered why nearly 90% of startups and small businesses fail within the first year? In most cases, going out of business has nothing to do with the quality of your product or service. Instead, it is due to the lack of interest or investment in any business’s most critical function – marketing. Not only does it help attract and retain customers, but also builds brand awareness through more exposure.

In this article, I’ll share how to market a business in 4 smart ways so you too can take advantage of the innovative approaches and strategies.

The Importance of Business Marketing in the Digital Age

Marketing is a strategy that businesses in every industry sector use to promote their value offerings. Every business must be capable of devising a marketing strategy and employee it effectively to ensure they can extend their reach and grow their business. Let’s take a look at the 5 top reasons why marketing is so important for any modern business:

1. Marketing Helps Boost Sales

Marketing is a direct line to your customers. With regular customer engagement, you can furnish your target audiences with relevant information regarding your products or services. When people are well-informed about your value offerings, your sales will increase.

2. Marketing Helps Create Different Revenue Streams

Marketing is an excellent way to help your brand create multiple revenue streams. By employing different marketing strategies and approaches, you can target different sets of audiences and maximize profit. Another way to increase profit is by running social media ads and promotional content so more people can know about your products.

3. Marketing Helps Build and Maintain Your Brand Reputation

Your business growth and lifespan are correlated to your brand reputation and equity. Marketing offers a way to help businesses effectively meet their customer expectations using communication, branding, PR, and CSR strategies. By establishing a solid reputation, you’re essentially telling your customers that your brand is the place to get outstanding quality products and services.

4. Marketing Offers Valuable Insight and Feedback for Improvement

One of the most important laws of marketing is that you can’t sell to everyone. Every market understands this and therefore needs to target the right audiences with the right content. With customer segmentation and personas creation, you can test different campaigns and generate valuable insight regarding their failure or success. Feedback is an important business metric and provides modern marketers to avoid guesswork.

5. Marketing Can Serve as a Great Equalizer in Your Respective industry

With the emergence of digital marketing, marketing has become a significantly less expensive game in the last decade or so. Social media platforms, text marketing, digital ads, and email campaigns have leveled the playing field for businesses of all sizes and budgets. With the emergence of AI and machine learning, data analytics has become incredibly powerful, allowing marketers to pay attention to all their segments with just a click of a button.

How to market a Business in 4 Smart Ways

While there are hundreds of ways to promote your value offerings in the digital age, many startups and small businesses don’t have the luxury of multiple trials and errors. Therefore, it’s now a game of minimum effort (time, money, and/or resources) to seek maximum results (revenue, reputation, and traffic, etc.). Here are 4 smart ways to market a business in the digital age:

1. Create a Website

In the digital age and new normal, having a website to showcase your products and services is a must for a business of any scale or niche. With the pandemic accelerating online retail and digital transformation, your website is now your digital front and the top-most layer of your sales funnel. The good news is that you don’t need tens of thousands of dollars to create one. By investing in three essential things – a domain, hosting, and a renowned web design service – you can get a few landing pages to get started.

If you already have a website, you must regularly update it in terms of design, content, and performance. To optimize performance, you need to invest in search engine optimization and keep your content unique/fresh so your site can rank higher on search engine results, allowing more people to find you and potentially shop from you.

2. Network Using Virtual Platforms

While there’s no denying that emails, calls, and text messages have been serving businesses for decades and remain relevant in the modern age, it’s safe to say that they lack the context, meaning marketers can’t convey tone, emotions, facial expressions, body language, and gestures, etc. With the emergence of virtual networking during the pandemic, many businesses have expanded their channels from chats and calls to include virtual one-on-one sessions using Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Google Meet, and Slack, etc.

3. Improve Your Social Media Presence

Just like websites, having a social media page on some or all of the most popular platforms in the market is crucial for consistent engagement with your clients. With billions of users on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, these platforms have become hunting grounds for businesses to promote their products and services. Therefore, you need to invest in the latest management tools like Zoho, Hootsuite, Loomly, Sprout Social, Sendible, and others to optimize your presence.

4. Continuous Market Research

You can consistently market your business successfully if you don’t keep pace with your target audiences and their changing behavior. Therefore, you need continuous research to help uncover what makes them tick and how you can get them to splash their cash on your business. Using data analytics tools and social media, you can gather valuable insight into the mind of your customers

Conclusion

And there you have it – our 4 smart ways to market a business in the digital age. However, don’t stop there. For more information related to technology and trending business practices, visit Percento Technologies today. We specialize in working with small businesses to help develop IT and web solutions that can support your marketing initiatives.