“Out there in some garage is an entrepreneur who’s forging a bullet with your company’s name on it.” -Gary Hamel
It’s true you know. No matter what your market it’s a very competitive business world. Your competition is going to fight you on every front for your customers. That is what makes the business world go ‘round driving us all to make better products and offer increasingly valuable services to our customer base. How are you stacking up?
If you aren’t marketing your business you are going to be left behind. Gone are the days that a business can survive on word of mouth alone. It is easier than ever to start your own business, and thanks to drop shipping anyone can quickly set up shop and offer products from around the world to their customers with a simple click of a button. Competition can spring up at any moment and challenge your position with your customers.
Marketing your business is both an offensive position to push your products and services, and also a defensive position to build your authority and protect your brand. As any good sports coach will tell you: both are important to ensure success.
So stay on top of things, and don’t let up on your marketing push. Studies have shown time and time again that CONSISTENCY is key, and is more effective than sporadic bouts of high intensity marketing pushes. You can’t afford to go “dark” in this day and age. Disappearing from the eye and earshot of your customers for long periods of time is a form of death in today’s fast paced market. Keep your business alive and well with consistent, frequent marketing from multiple sources.
Why not utilize all of your resources? Many of them only require an investment of time and effort, and the return on that investment can be immense. If you aren’t doing at least these few things to boost your business – you should implement them immediately.
Social Media
Establish your social media accounts and make frequent, content valuable posts. Engage with customers on your social media accounts putting some real human personality into it. It’s a much better feeling when you know you have a real person on the other end of the conversation and not just reading auto-post spam from web bots. Social media is a wonderful tool in this regard since it gives you that direct person to person contact with your customer base so take advantage of that and don’t squander it with spam.
Traditional print media isn’t dead. It evolved. Business cards, for one, are more eye-catching than ever. Foil prints, clear or opaque card bases, textured surfaces, custom shapes, alternative materials like wood and metal, and whatever else you can imagine has made its way to the tried and true traditional business card. This adds some more pizazz, which can make your card stand out from the rest and be more memorable. We even have a nice collection of cool ones we’ve found here at our offices. The variety of print products available today is outstanding! Signs, banners, billboards, vehicle decals, catalogs, calendars, and branded promotional products of all sorts including ink pens, magnets, coasters, portable battery packs, speakers, t-shirts, drink tumblers, and pretty much anything else you can get ink to stick to. Free product give-a-ways of branded materials are a great way to accelerate your marketing.
YouTube
Landing your business in the “Suggested Videos” is a great benefit of having a Channel with promotional video material. Tag your videos to correctly represent the content contained in them, add good descriptions and titles, keep it clean, don’t use someone else’s copyrighted music or video clips to ensure they aren’t filtered out and get included in YouTube’s Suggested Video and search results. Interact with other YouTubers as well in other videos and comments as a frequent commenter to further your reach. Just don’t spam links to your videos on other people’s content – no one likes that and it will likely get you reported or banned.
Summary
Whether or you trying to catch up, or stay ahead, it’s time to add those tools to your game plan if you haven’t yet. Simply setup your social media and YouTube accounts for free, and print marketing can be very affordable (you should at least have business cards). So stop slacking.
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