Regardless of which industry your business operates in, marketing and advertising will be essential to ensure that you continue to be successful. You may have managed until now by paying for marketing to be done in a hurry, when you have had a new product to promote, for example. However, the downside to this is that in between these sporadic marketing campaigns, your more occasional clients may forget about the excellent service you provide and go elsewhere, for the simple reason that your company is less visible than your competitors.
So, how can you prevent this from happening again in the future? The best way to retain all of your existing customers, and to bring in new clients regularly, is by having a well-planned marketing strategy in place, and by thinking as far in advance as you can – this may be up to twelve months ahead.
Don’t worry, though, as the majority of your marketing strategy can be extremely simple, and will not take much in terms of either time or money. On your website, you may have a page for a blog, and if you don’t, it would be a very good idea to get this added to the site. However, having a blog page is not sufficient by itself. You will also need to make regular updates, which will show your customers that the business is active and thriving. You don’t need to be advertising your products or services in every blog post – think about including “how to” articles, or random fun facts that you find interesting. The purpose of a blog is to encourage people to visit the website on a regular basis.
If you are not the creative type, or simply can’t find the time to write your blog once a week, then this does not have to be a problem. Blog writing is one of the cheapest and easiest tasks to outsource, and finding someone to write blog updates that are relevant to your field of work can be easily done online.
In addition to a blog, think about having a regular newsletter that you can send out to your clients by email. This is probably best if you can send it once a week, and again the writing on this can be outsourced if you don’t have the time or writing is not your forte.
Having your marketing plan in place throughout the year means that you don’t need to panic when it comes to the busy periods. Everything will already be prepared, which means that you will be able to focus purely on what you do best – running your business and providing an excellent service to all of your customers.
This months guest article was received from Liz Fox of Funky Fresh. Funky Fresh are a marketing agency provided services to small businesses, including email marketing.