It is one thing to market your business online. It is another thing to do so effectively. Effective marketing should help your business establish a circle that goes from prospect acquisition to building a strong army of happy clients who bring referrals to your business.
The degree to which any business achieves this determines how effective their marketing is. Let’s take a look at the different bits that must be in place for that to happen:
1. Getting Prospects Without traffic, you simply have NO business. Like many would tell you, it is the lifeblood of your business. Every business must pick the strategy that suits them most. While it is important for every business to ensure they have taken the right steps to optimize their websites for the search engines, there are other details that must be spot on if they are to get the right people to their businesses.
Among the top of things to consider are niche research, keyword profitability, communication models and media that work best and so on.
2. Nurturing Prospects It is one thing to get prospects and it’s another thing to get them to buy from you. A good marketing plan should have an effective way of nurturing those prospects. The most cost effective method for most is email marketing. Social media also comes in handy in nurturing prospects.
The focus here is to bring them from the point where they are just interested to a point where your business becomes the brand of choice for them.
3. Making The Sale Nothing matters in marketing if it does NOT eventually lead to the sale. No business can thrive or survive if this component is NOT in place. Good marketing has to take into account everything that poses a hindrance to a sale and addressing them via the messages sent out both in advertisements and follow-ups.
For businesses that offer more than one service, a good marketing plan should include how to introduce them to other products and services they may find useful. By so doing, they increase the lifetime value of each customer.
4. Fulfilling The Promise No matter how good a company’s adverts are they will eventually convert poorly if they don’t have a good mechanism in place to ensure the fulfilment of the promise made to their clients. This includes everything from shipping to customer support.
People want to get their orders delivered without hitches. They want to enjoy the products or services paid for without any problems. And when there are problems, they want quick resolution. A good marketing plan takes a look at the challenges that have been faced in the past by businesses within the particular niche and ensures that they are eliminated or reduced.
5. Getting Referrals Many businesses take the pains to ensure that their clients are happy. However, many don’t take the pains to ensure that they reap the maximum benefits of such clientele. Yes, happy customers will tell others how good your products or services are. However, they will do it more readily and more consistently if you give them incentives to do so.
Referral commissions, special discounts are simple examples of how smart businesses help push that all important word-of-mouth marketing.
