Congratulations! You’ve successfully launched your ecommerce or web-based business and are anxiously awaiting the orders, inquiries and most important, money, to start rolling in. If you want to ensure that your business receives the traffic and interest level to keep a profit turning, marketing must be on your mind every day. In fact, 14% of startups that have failed cite poor marketing as the reason why their business went downhill fast. Having an effective marketing strategy in place before you launch on the web is a crucial tool in growing and being able to maintain your profitability.
Solving a Market Problem
The best way to devise your marketing plan is to start with offering a product or service that solves a problem in your market. After you have done your market-based research and determined a product or service that is in demand, marketing your solution to the masses effectively is the most important component of your plan.
Being able to appeal to the client or customer’s needs in a variety of ways will help you to determine the most effective way of getting your solution in front of them. A veterinarian who wants to increase his client base is not going to buy into the idea of upgrading the computers to your new software simply by listening to you tell him that is the solution; however, if you show him that the new efficiency in his office procedures will lead to being able to process clients quickly allowing for two more appointments per day and thus increasing his revenue, he will be more likely to give your solution a shot over your competitors.
Knowing Your Competition
Before releasing a product or offering a service, you should know the marketing strategies of your competition and how saturated they already are in your market. Being able to offer a new or unique perspective on something that is already offered will often times generate more interest in your product or service, rather than the competitor’s. Even if your solution to a market demand is similar to your competition, if you can appeal to your customers or clients in a way that they haven’t already seen, they will also help to generate traffic for you through that magnificent share or retweet button on social media. This will be the single most cost effective marketing strategy you can use. The power of social media has propelled many startups farther than they could imagine in their first months of business.
Using The Tools Available to You
In the beginning, the amount of time you should spend researching the competition, what content is trending online, and how you are performing can be overwhelming. Using the tools that are available to you will become a lifesaver when you have a million other tasks on your plate every day.
Some of the most useful marketing and analysis tools include Google analytics, which allows you to create your own dashboard to monitor your website’s performance. SEMRush is a great tool for understanding how your SEO content is working and allows you to compare your keywords to your competitors. Buffer will save you considerable time in managing your social media accounts through scheduling the times that posts will regenerate or be shared throughout your various channels. There are also great sites such as stock up, where you can find stock images to use in your blogs, and Statista to find data to back up your points.
If you can master these three basic marketing strategies, you will be on your way to being a leader in your market and growing your business in no time at all!