Every single business needs to have a marketing strategy. That goes without saying. And, there are evidently a whole host of different and diverse advertising methods that a company can employ in order to attract more customers and make a bigger profit.
Nevertheless, there is a lot that needs to be contemplated when it comes to deciding which strategy to go for. After all, what works for one company may be an absolute disaster for another one. All in all, the truth is that what strategy is chosen lies within the makings of the business in question; how big or small it is and what industry it is placed in, and so on and so forth. For example, the likes of Allvision Billboards offer a service for businesses to reach a large number of people – ideal for big companies especially!
There are one or two methods that have been adopted by a whole host of companies that are placed in a whole host of different industries and have entirely different budgets. Billboards are one. Another one of these is the utilization of promotional gifts.
Using promotional gifts is something which has been used by a lot of companies for many, many years now. This may lead one to think that it is outdated. But that is certainly not the case. It is a method that boasts just as high of a success rate as it did ten years ago, if not better. The main reason behind its popularity is that it creates a bond with people and so they feel inclined to use the company in question whenever they require the products it sells or the service that it is offering.
Nevertheless, when picking promotional gifts to go for one has to be very careful. This is where a lot of planning and forefront has to go in. After all, the products chosen are the main component and so they will dictate whether or not the marketing strategy is a success or not.
One of the most popular options lately is the utilization of promotional bags. Reusable bags are great at present because more and more people are caring about the environment and shops and supermarkets have put a charge on plastic bags. Therefore, this is something that will certainly come in handy. Moreover, the scope for advertising is huge because whoever uses the bag in question will advertise the company to every single person that they pass by.
Perhaps the most common product to start with for a business that is just starting off with this strategy is pens. At the end of the day, a pen is something that will always be needed and always be used. Moreover, it is something that is relatively easy and cheap to employ, and it is a product that is also easy to distribute.
To conclude, the utilization of promotional gifts is one which has an evident success and popularity base. But it is important to regard just how crucial it is to ensure that one picks the right item or items for the job.
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So, you have a small business and it is doing ok, but you cannot seem to take it to the “next step”, what do you do?
If you are serious about moving your small business from tabletop tinkering to garage empire, there is one thing you should be focusing on: Branding!
Branding For The Future
So many small businesses miss out on great opportunities because they do not think that branding is important, and even fail to see how putting a clear focus on their brand and brand experience can be important to their business.
British marketing agency, Eleven Marketing, know all about branding and help all kinds of clients to solve their marketing challenges, and one of the first ways they do this is by helping them to create a strong and recognizable brand that will catapult them forward.
Here are four reasons your small business should be focusing on branding right now to build a better future for you tomorrow.
Branding Helps You Get Noticed
When you think of McDonald’s you immediately see the golden arches on a red background, Coca-Cola has that specific red and white look, and if it is Apple you can bet that it is white, sleek, and has a premium feel.
Branding helps your small business to be recognizable, even if you are only advertising to your town right now, plenty of big businesses started as small-time enterprises.
Branding Builds Authority
Having a strong and consistent brand is key if you want to build authority and trust in your business.
If people can recognize who you are from a mile off, they are more likely to be trusting of you and want to buy from you.
Branding Boosts SEO
It is not just people who need to recognize you, sooner or later your brand will need to be online, on social media, and on Google My Business.
Having a strong and consistent brand across all of your digital properties – that matches your in-print properties – will help you to stay on top of your search engine optimization (SEO) and improve your search result rankings.
The bottom line with SEO is that the more Google and other search engines can see you are the same company across all of your properties online, the more its algorithms are likely to boost your rankings and get you closer to the top of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
Branding Helps Your Business Expand
The final reason for exploring branding in your small business is so that you can expand your offering and get more customers who want to be shopping with you.
No matter what it is you do, getting more customers (or more clients) who are higher paying is like the holy grail, and there are not many businesses who want to have less custom!
Improving your brand means brand loyalty, but it also means brand advocacy, letting your current customers do the hard work of your marketing for you by word-of-mouth, reviews, and brand advocacy through their own channels.
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For every business owner, the challenge post-pandemic will be to reinvent themselves. Their brand must take on a new image as well as display the charms of the previous generation. It’s quite amazing when you think about it, that a pandemic has changed the way we see business and products as customers and clients. To this end, we must rediscover our passion for marketing, as business owners. The key to this is to realize that the world supply chains that we got used to, may need to change. That in turn, must incorporate green technology and sustainable design. Thankfully, there is no shortage of options for you to select a new design, theme, color scheme and narrative for your products.
Older customers
Older customers will be much more health-conscious than ever before. The majority of the casualties that were taken by covid-19 were indeed the elderly generation. The changes are very interesting. For one thing, it’s not just about more positive colors, but actually, ‘enjoyment’. This has been taken from the fashion industry, which often depicts the models in the adverts, as enjoying life. Since the aging population will live to 90 or more in the near future, we need to think about how we as business owners can display a joyful life at this age. It requires us to do a few things.
If our product is targeted to older people, such as older people using our product and smiling. Big white pearly teeth are a good sign of health and happiness, something that will be attractive to people who don’t live by the norms that older generations of elderly people conformed to.
Make sure that the colors are bright but not too bright. The reason they should be bright is to compensate for poor eyesight. The brightest product on the shelves will always garner more attention. However, if it’s too bright it can also signify danger, i.e. red mushrooms in the wild. So, color choice is just as important as color scheme.
Grandchildren should also be used in the video ads that you produce. This is something that is normal in our everyday lives, but something that doesn’t get taken advantage of in our marketing campaigns.
Packaging has to be simple
Green businesses are going to leap forward in the eyes of the customer this decade. Nobody has any patience anymore, to buy products from companies that do not make an effort to be sustainable. The cultural shift is so strong, that many CEOs feel like they are playing catch-up. One way you can market your food better, is to show how your packaging has shifted dramatically. If you sell snack food, then consider ditching the box and the plastic wrap, and just for good food grade tube packaging. The tube can be sealed and the inside can be covered in a protective paper that has been sterilized. This means that your food is going to be protected, you can get a lot of your product into the internal space, and it will be safe. Tubes are also very strong so there is less likely chance for external penetration and thus, contamination.
The good things
The best things about any food product is the lasting benefits it will give you. So you should be targeting the vitamins and minerals that are present in your product when it comes to this line of marketing. Customers want to know, what kinds of vitamins they will be eating and thus, what kinds of things will happen to them personally. For example, vitamin D is well known to help with our immune system growing stronger. Vitamin E is known to make our skin smoother and stronger as well. Vitamin C helps our bones to be tougher, etc. All of this is something that must be repeated over and over and over! Take a look at Yakult, the Japanese yogurt drink company. They have never ever stopped talking about the digestive rebalance their product gives and thus, they have stayed at the forefront of our minds when we consider a healthy drink option.
The food marketing industry is going to revamp its course of action. Rather than trying to be too viral, they will want to brand products in a healthy, long-life and sustainable prism. Customers will be impressed that a food company is doing it’s share to make the world a better place. So invest in green production strategies so you can boast about your decreasing carbon footprint in your ads.
https://www.strategydriven.com/wp-content/uploads/aisle-3105629_1280.jpg8531280StrategyDrivenhttps://www.strategydriven.com/wp-content/uploads/SDELogo5-300x70-300x70.pngStrategyDriven2021-04-15 07:00:202021-04-15 01:11:35How Food Marketing Will Change Post-Pandemic
When it comes to marketing, you’ve got to move fast to make sure you aren’t left behind the times. This is true in every area of business, which is why it’s so difficult to launch a successful company that stands the test of time.
However, too many businesses have been burned by jumping on a bandwagon and following a trend blindly. Once the losses start rolling in, that’s when you take notice. This begs a very important question – should entrepreneurs wait and see or go all in?
To find out more, please continue reading the following points outlined below.
The Competition
The first thing to look at is the competition. Whether you feel it’s necessary or not, your rival’s approach to marketing can sway your decision. This is because you can’t afford to let them steal a march on you. By failing to invest in the latest trend or piece of technology, you could fall further behind, allowing them to soak up your market share. Sure, you shouldn’t do everything they do, but if enough of your rivals believe a marketing tactic is helpful, and they have a similar business plan, it’s worth considering the consequences of failing to act.
Your Budget
Of course, you must weigh the above against your budget. Lots of SMEs don’t have bottomless pits of money that they can throw at marketing, unlike massive brands and major corporations. Therefore, you need to tread carefully before going all in. If the marketing trend is going to be expensive, it might not be in your remit. Losing out to the competition is something you have to accept. However, anything that’s relatively cheap could be worth a gamble. Look at search engine optimization. It’s unthinkable to create an advertising plan without SEO, particularly as it hardly costs a penny.
The Effectiveness
Some trends are effective from the moment they arrive. SEO is a prime example because it has all the relevant features. Not only was it affordable, but it positively affected almost every part of the industry, making it an essential part of any company’s strategy. Content marketing is along the same lines. As the ultimate guide to content marketing strategy highlights, the effectiveness of your marketing boils down to content. That means to ignore it, or not to pay it the attention it deserves, is an error. The trick is to spot the fads and avoid them like the plague while embracing the tried and tested methods.
Your Data
Jeff Bezos isn’t the richest man in the world because he got lucky. He’s smart and knows when to make decisions based on the data and when to hold back. Famously, Amazon’s founder pulls the trigger when he has 70% of the information as he believes waiting any longer leads to missed opportunities. Concerning waiting or jumping on the bandwagon, you should use the same technique. Wait until you have the majority of the data before shooting your shot. It might go wrong, but at least you took a calculated and informed gamble.
The answer to the title question is – it depends. The circumstances will dictate your approach, and the pointers above will help.
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Do you want to generate more sales? It’s a silly question to ask, admittedly – every business wants to send out more orders to customers. Yet actually making it a reality is a whole different story. If it were easy, you wouldn’t see so many companies fall by the wayside each year.
The good news is there are numerous ways in which you can boost the chances of selling more to consumers. This is particularly the case if your business operates with a sales team. Whether they are out in the field, within your office, or working from home remotely, there are ways to optimize their performance.
How? That’s where this guide will help. Below are five tips to improve how your sales team operates.
1. Accurate sales forecasting
Did you know that most organizations don’t feature a scalable, repeatable method for forecasting sales? If your business falls into the same situation, it’s time to change this process. The reason for this is simple: a lot of critical decisions – from investments to hiring employees – are down to sales forecasts.
As a result, sales forecasting accuracy – where you measure how close you come to hitting your forecast – is necessary. Generally, an accurate sales forecast can be essential in improving your sales team performance. For instance, it allows your business to spend adequate resources more effectively to facilitate a successful sales strategy. It also helps your sales department to attain specific business goals by determining issues with their sales and looking for ways to correct them. Lastly, having an accurate sales forecast can help you make sound business decisions in terms of budgeting, risk management, and planning.
With all these things being said, sales forecasting indeed plays an integral role in the success of your marketing and sales efforts. But if you’re a beginner, how can you create an accurate sales forecast? Well, One way of doing this is by working out the percent difference, also known as the percentage error. Simply put, this is the difference between forecast volume and the actual volume expressed in percentage form. You can learn more online about how to calculate forecast accuracy.
In the sales world, there are plenty of repetitive, unproductive tasks that each employee has to handle. This is why it is recommended to automate as many of these tasks as possible with the implementation of sales tools. When tools like these are used, it helps to save a significant amount of time on redundant assignments like data entry. This means your sales team can then dedicate more time towards tasks that matter most.
Aside from innovative sales tools, there are also other things that can help make the sales team’s work much easier and faster. One of them is the so-called sales playbook. It refers to a document containing your business’s best sales tactics, strategies, and even templates which are based on your sales successes and failures. In other words, it’s a cohesive manual that can guide your company in obtaining an increase in sales over a certain period of time.
Like the other sales tools, a sales playbook can serve as an effective tool to ensure your sales team utilize the best sales strategies. It also helps get your team on the same page in terms of your marketing and sales efforts, thereby making them much easier and more efficient. With a sales playbook, you can ensure that the sales department will properly implement your proven sales tactics. So, if you want to include a sales playbook in your list of sales tools, then you should start creating one as early as now.
3. Establish a schedule
Yes, sales reps are not known for sticking to the most stringent schedules – particularly if they’re working in the field where travel also has to be factored into the equation. However, putting together some form of schedule for your sales team is highly recommended.
When you have structure, where sales reps also know how long each client session should last, it’s easier for them to organize their daily schedule. They will know how much time needs to be dedicated for each meeting, along with other points that may apply, such as travel and preparation.
4. Decide on daily goals
Accountability leads to results. It is a driving force that gives your sales team that extra push to, well, sell your products. To add accountability, one of the easiest methods is to set goals that serve as a form of motivation. They supply salespeople with a plan of action, a sense of direction so they can hit their set targets.
For instance, say an employee is set with the target of reaching $500 in sales for the day. To do this, they need to make five sales. On average, it takes 20 attempts for them to land a single sale. As a result, it is known they need to make approximately 100 attempts to reach their goal of $500.
With this type of information and motivation, they can plan out how to make their goals a reality.
5. Communication is key
Being in constant communication with your sales team is imperative. This point shouldn’t be overlooked. The more you stay in touch with your employees, the more you’ll be aware of their performance and any feedback they might have.
When communicating with your employees, you can start with a quick meeting each morning. Yet, it is also wise to schedule a daily one-on-one check-in with each salesperson. This doesn’t necessarily have to happen each day, of course, but it is a great way to gain insight from employees.
By going with an in-depth interaction like this, it is perfect for getting valuable feedback. You can learn about not just ways to improve your business, but also the morale of your employees and if any steps need to be taken to improve their mood.
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Every single business needs to have a marketing strategy. That goes without saying. And, there are evidently a whole host of different and diverse advertising methods that a company can employ in order to attract more customers and make a bigger profit.
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