When it comes to marketing your business, ensuring that your strategy is relevant to you and the industry in which you operate in is key to achieving a return on investment. There are however, a number of things that every business can carry out when planning their forthcoming activity, that will go a long way in transforming their marketing.
Establish brand guidelines
When you think of some of the biggest brands such as McDonald’s, Virgin Media or Easy Jet, you are immediately able to remember specific aspects of their branding, such as colour and font.
Ultimately, you want your business’ branding to be easily recognisable as the brands mentioned above are, and therefore sticking to certain guidelines when it comes to your marketing activity is essential. These guidelines will include font, colour palette, filters when posting social images and much more; used in all marketing imagery, and you will gradually build a recognisable brand for audiences.
Content plan
One of the main things that business owners and managers struggle to do is to regularly write engaging content that will attract visitors to their site, blog or social media page. A significant roadblock when it comes to content marketing, is the initial brainstorm of ideas. However, from experience, setting aside time to plan out your content ideas and a timeline to be written is an effective way to ensure that you are regularly writing quality content, that both audiences and search engines like to see.
If you are struggling to find ideas, keep abreast of industry news that you could comment on in your own articles, write tips or guides for clients and customers or even relevant company news.
Embrace video
I can’t stress enough how powerful the use of video is in your marketing strategy. Statistics show that viewers will retain 95% of a message conveyed by video as opposed to only 10% reading the same message in text.
There are a wide variety of video marketing techniques that you can incorporate into your strategy, including testimonial videos, promotional and guidance, all of which should follow those all-important brand guidelines, and provide true value for your audience.
Ensure your website is user friendly
For the majority of the time, your website is the first impression of your business for prospective customers, and therefore it must display your business in the best possible light.
This means it should load quickly, be simple to navigate, provide the right information and make it easy for a visitor to contact you. Not only will this reflect positively on your business from an audience perspective, but search engines actively seek out user friendly sites to rank, and penalise those that aren’t.
Whilst there are many different marketing techniques that will work for businesses across all industries, by establishing your strategy using the above four techniques your business will be off to a great start.