Here are the best marketing ideas and tips for growing any business, right here, right now.
1. Identify Your Target Audience and Buyer Persona
It’s not exaggerating to say that if you don’t know who your target audience and buyer persona is, your marketing attempts will fall flat. Especially in an age where new niches are created and targeted constantly.
You can’t engage and entice the right audience if you don’t know who they are, and you can’t know who they are until you know who you are. This is exactly why your business needs to explore the benefits of process mapping even before you begin identifying audience and personas.
Buyer personas and target audiences are intrinsically linked. Whereas a target audience defines a group of customers, a buyer persona looks at specific members of that group—and identifying both is the first step in successful marketing. They’re both incredibly important because they allow you to segment your customers into different groups.
When you know the motivations and purchasing habits of your existing customers, you can target different groups in the best way to generate leads. So ask yourself: What’s pushing customers to make a purchasing decision? What does it look like if they succeed? Knowing these things will help you create marketing messages that resonate with your audience specifically.
2. Optimize Your Website for Web and Mobile
As we move into 2022, there’s an even stronger need for businesses to optimize their websites for an omnichannel and mobile-heavy ecommerce experience. Any patience your customers may have had for putting up with a less than perfect mobile experience has truly evaporated. Our customers don’t just want an omnichannel experience, they expect it.
Everything from your web design to your content should be created to be mobile-friendly. While many businesses have adopted a responsive web design, there are ways to take your optimization efforts to the next level.
For one, you can try prioritizing elements for mobile devices that are absolutely crucial for users to see—like CTA buttons on landing pages, for example—to avoid the problem of limited display space. It’s also important to remember that mobile design is more limited than desktop, so focus on content that is easy to read and easily accessible. And, make your mobile navigation a top priority.
3. Leverage Email Marketing Strategy
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that email in today’s flashy ecommerce universe is irrelevant. In fact, leveraging your email list and employing a smart email marketing strategy can be hugely beneficial. Email acts as a direct link between you and your customers, and if you utilize it correctly, you’ll achieve the direct and targeted online marketing your customers want.
Although designing attention-grabbing messages with top-quality, unique content is crucial, you can go one step further and harness the power of automated email marketing tools to provide hyper-relevant material to every inbox. How? By setting up an email preference center that segments your contacts according to their own self-selected desires, is how.
When a customer provides a preference to your automated preference center, it can trigger an email delivery to that subscriber based on their likes. Adopting an automated behavioral email marketing strategy based on the customer’s interactions with your company is a hands-free way of delivering marketing suggestions based on specific needs, rather than generalizations.
4. Build Customer Loyalty Programs
Like email, small businesses may overlook customer loyalty programs and focus their efforts on more expensive and trendy marketing strategies, such as using influencers. But the simple fact remains that customer loyalty programs are proven methods for growing and sustaining market share. That is, if they’re given the right kind of attention.
So how can the small businesses of 2022 revive their loyalty programs? Well, firstly, businesses need to remember that dusty, rigid, and old loyalty program structures can’t simply be pasted into your current strategy. They need to be simple, relevant, and appealing to today’s digital consumer.
The loyalty programs of today need to be flexible and malleable, with attention-grabbing surprises rather than outdated explanations of why customers can benefit from certain products. And they need to be driven by an accurate measurement of customer experiences and a business model that uses this data effectively.
5. Start Partnerships
Ecommerce in 2022 is more fluid than it has ever been, and current marketing strategies can’t afford to stand alone. Utilizing partnerships with other small businesses can boost the revenue potential of your business exponentially, and these partnerships are mutually beneficial.
Your products and brand reach more potential customers, and your partners get the chance to grow their brand authority by recommending your excellent products. Partnerships and partner programs are a way to form bonds with other companies that share the same vision and goals, as well as solidify your own brand and company to boost profits.
Today, there are many ways to connect with the right potential partners, and platforms like Affise Reach make it simple and easy. There are also many ways to take advantage of partnerships in 2022. Partners can:
- Build do follow links on relevant blog posts
- Perform social media blasts (on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) to share new content
- Email swap to promote your respective services or content marketing
- Co-produce and co-promote webinars
- Organize live events targeting the same prospects
- Conduct a new piece of research together
6. Social Media Marketing