A successful marketing strategy is a surefire way to boost startups and old businesses alike to bring them to new heights. However, many businesses encounter different challenges when they try to implement new marketing strategies. Here are a few of the most common marketing challenges that you come across and how to overcome them.
Understanding your Target Market
This is the most basic requirement for any marketing strategy, but you would be surprised how often businesses misunderstand their target market. New businesses and startups often make the mistake of assuming that their product is for everyone living on the planet. This is wrong and is bound to set your strategy up for failure.
To ensure a successful marketing strategy, you must first know your audience. You start a business when you realize that there is a need in the market for a product you can make. Always remember to research which people have that need and why they need a solution. This helps you tailor the strategy to reach the demographic that actually wants your product and boost sales numbers.
Standing out
More often than not, your business has competition from rival companies. With so many different options to select, the chances of users selecting your product plummet, drastically. To counter this problem, you need to make sure that your company stands out and provides a unique solution that offers value to customers.
There are lots of ways to do this. You can either, focus on your product’s value for the money aspect or the durability it offers. Your company can stand out by providing the best customer service, or you can opt for making a premium product that offers a more polished experience to your customers. You can even pursue making a product for an exceptional niche market with extremely specific requirements.
Whichever route you decide to go, make sure you are playing to your strengths. Know your company well enough to understand in which areas it can provide the most value to customers and focus on those aspects. Doing so makes your company stand out from the competition and build a brand name for itself.
Knowing How to Sell the Product
Knowing the features of the product and knowing how to sell it are completely different things. You might know the exact features of your product and all that goes into the manufacturing process, but all of this information is often useless to the consumer looking to buy your product. Unless you put your knowledge into context for the customers and tell them why the features or the manufacturing steps matter to them, they won’t buy your product.
For instance, let us say that you own a smartphone manufacturing company that makes phones out of a single piece of metal. It makes more sense to claim that your phones can withstand much more wear and tear than the competition and show it with a demonstration rather than just stating outright that your phone is made using a single piece of metal.
While it may be common sense for you and other manufacturers that a single-piece design is more durable, your customers are not aware of this fact. Therefore, you must put it into perspective for them. It would also be a good idea to showcase the strength of the phone using a video where you compare your phones with the competitors’ side by side. Videos have a powerful impact on the minds of customers and are a great way to boost your company’s sales.
Getting Found by Prospective Customers
While all the above challenges involve finding potential customers, the reverse is also important for any marketing strategy. You want to make sure that if someone wants a product like yours, they can find your business easily.
The first step is to have a well-maintained and user-friendly website. The website should contain all the information about your company, its products, and the places where you can buy these products.
The second step is to get your website on the first page of popular search engines such as Google and Bing. This step involves a process called search engine optimization (SEO). You need to generate SEO-oriented content and publish it on your website’s blog to have a greater chance of the target audience finding you on search engine result pages. The search engine directs the users to your website, which, in turn, leads them to your products and the places where they can buy them.
