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You can have a fantastic product and excellent customer service and still fail as a business. In most cases, this is a result of the failure of marketing. If you do not have the ability to attract a constant flow of consumers to your products, you will never achieve long term success. Instead, you need to develop strategies for attracting more customers to your business. Below are a few rather simple and cost effective ones to consider.
Create Positive Word of Mouth
While the quality of your products and services aren’t a replacement for marketing, in certain cases, they can certainly help create good will for your company that spreads much like marketing would. This of course is positive word of mouth. Overall, you should always be striving for excellence as a company. View it from the standpoint that you only deserve as much success as you have actually worked for. Even huge marketing campaigns can’t turn a poor product into a good one. However, if customers are extremely satisfied with your business, they may end up telling others about it in person or online.
Utilize SMS
Something else that should certainly be in your marketing mix is SMS. SMS is an acronym that stands for short message service. In most contexts, this refers to text messaging. Text messaging is an excellent platform to use to help spread your marketing messages. In certain cases, it can be even more successful than email marketing campaigns. While many people may ignore the bulk of marketing emails as spam, people still tend to check each individual text message they receive. Make the process of sending SMS marketing messages much easier by utilizing an SMS blast service that allows you to send text messages to groups of any size.
Focus on SEO
In the past, businesses were rather limited in regards to the avenues they could use to get messages out about their products. This typically included things like print ads, billboards, TV ads and radio commercials. Today, the internet is king in regards to internet advertising. While you could pay to get your business advertised on the internet, one of the best strategies for doing so is actually completely free. Simply get your business listed on Google and then work on tweaking your SEO until you obtain preferable search rankings for keywords related to your industry. Keep in mind that Google is constantly upgrading its algorithms. SEO needs to evolve in response.
Localize Your Marketing
In regards to internet marketing efforts like SEO, localization is key to achieving success as a small business. These days, most consumers research where to buy products on their phones even if they will do so in a physical brick and mortar store. If you have no digital footprint, you will probably be overlooked in favor of more internet savvy competitors. Instead, make sure to ingrain localization into all facets of your digital marketing efforts. Include the name of your city or county in your SEO and digital advertisements. Make sure your business is listed on all digital map services including the ones that are used by car GPS navigation systems.
Leverage Social Media
Something that works very much like word of mouth is social media. On platforms like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, individual users repost and share content that inform other users of products and businesses. If your content goes viral, you can reach a large swath of people indeed. According to the Pew Research Center, 70 percent of Americans use social media. This can give you access to more consumers than pretty much any advertising platform in existence. Better yet, access to these social media networks is completely free for businesses. The only entrance fee to success through social media is just how much effort you put into using your accounts to spread the word.
Conclusion
Overall, you don’t necessarily need huge marketing budgets and gigantic television ad-buys to get the word out about your products and services. Instead, you have simpler and far cheaper avenues available to you such as SMS text messaging, search engine optimization, localized internet marketing, social media accounts and even just positive word of mouth available to you. Make the most of these simple tools to further boost knowledge of your business with the public.
