Listen to this articleMarketing is the lifeblood of any business. The better a business can market itself, the higher its volume of sales will be and the faster it will build its brand. Even if your business is already deploying many successful marketing strategies, it’s always possible to go from good to great or from great to fantastic. Marketing is a complex, ever-evolving process. Here are a few simple and straightforward strategies to enhance your marketing efforts.
Research More
Customer research is a dynamic, not a static, process. You can’t simply flesh out a customer avatar and then move on to focus on other things. Because information changes so rapidly, research has to be a consistent business practice. “Our jobs as marketers,” Bryan Eisenberg, an internationally recognized marketer and co-founder of BuyerLegends, once said, “are to understand how the customer wants to buy and help them to do so.”
Even if you have a good grasp of who buys your product and where the market is moving, keep accumulating fresh insights. Surf the Internet and use web capture software to collect anything relevant.
You don’t always have to incorporate your latest discoveries into your current series of marketing campaigns, but the information will be readily available when you plan the next big push to promote your business.
View Marketing Through Your Customer’s Eyes
Although you are well-aware of all the salient features of your product or service and can elucidate how your product transforms your customers’ lives, your customers may see things differently.
Let’s suppose you start a YouTube channel for your content marketing strategy.
Your videos are superb because you hired a top-notch copywriter to craft your script, because your excellent camera work in a perfectly lit studio made your presenter look good, and because you used a collection of crisp, high-resolution graphics to illustrate the main talking points.
Since you are aware of all the money, time, and effort it took to produce a 10-minute video, you can probably imagine that the quality of your production will impress viewers. But most will not appreciate the perfect storm of technical detail. Instead, many may have been bored by the dumbed-down information.
The point is that your marketing should go beyond the mechanics of production and delivery and focus on understanding how well your message resonated with your audience. Remember, the message is primary; the medium, secondary. Good marketing is all about responding to positive or negative feedback loops and adjusting a marketing campaign accordingly.
Robyn MacKeller, who manages senior living and luxury apartment communities, calls this resonance factor “creating uncommonly positive experiences.” She knows her marketing strategies work when residents stay longer and invite other people to join the community. She views her marketing through her customer’s eyes.
You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
Sam Walton perfected the art of learning how to spy on the competition to improve his business. In his book, Sam Walton: Made in America, he explained how he shamelessly spied on other retail stores and then unapologetically adopted their best practices. He went so far as to measure the distance between aisles using a tape measure. It’s now a commonplace practice in the retail industry for executives to spy on each other’s signage and merchandise displays (and it’s also routine for store detectives to throw them out for taking pictures).
In conclusion, the best way to improve your marketing is the same way you improve anything—by staying humble enough to learn more. It doesn’t matter how successful your marketing is right now…it’s just one tweak away from being even better.
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