The Number One Marketing Issue for Businesses
Small business owners should be spending more on marketing and PR according to ... small business owners. The Alternative Board's Small Business Pulse survey reveals that 20% of entrepreneurs would invest more money in marketing, advertising and PR, if they had a chance to start their businesses again.
Every business should be concerned about growing, and that means one thing: acquiring new clients and leads. Unfortunately, many businesses go about this the wrong way. For example, Luxury Daily reports over half of small businesses in America spend over $1,000 every year on local advertising without having a solid customer acquisition strategy. Fortunately, there are three easy steps to help you learn more about your customers, nurture mutually satisfying relationships, and acquire new customers to maintain continuous growth for your business.
Building Relationships Both In Person and Online
Whatever your business, it’s important to know every aspect of it. While this obviously applies to your own company, it’s also vitally important to understand your competition and fellow business leaders in similar fields. This is partly to help you network – to develop the cordial relationships that may eventually become professional relationships. However, it also lets you develop ideas for how to stand out from the competition by developing products and services that other businesses do not have, encouraging them to turn to your company as a pioneer within the field.
You also want to be available everywhere your potential client is searching for you, especially online. Setting up social media accounts and a basic website can be done yourself — but unless you're a web designer, programmer, content creator, search engine optimizer, and a social media expert, that's not money well-saved. According to a 2014 Neustar Localeze and 15miles study, four out of five local searches on mobile devices end in a purchase. And, if you want to be found on the Internet these days, you should invest in all aspects of your web presence — from being mobile-friendly to producing high-quality content.
Use Customer Relationship Management Software to Analyze Sales
Considering the sheer amount of software and hardware for small businesses that is available, the task of picking the best one for customer acquisition may be daunting. However, the answer is simpler than you may think. Customer relationship management software is absolutely vital for your company. If building relationships is one of the first major steps in acquiring new business, then relationship management software is the next step because it helps you to keep that business.
Such small business CRM helps you to collect data and view it in an easy-to-process visual form. This is particularly useful for companies accustomed to the frustrating task of juggling multiple applications for things like sales leads and customer records. Being able to view all of this in one location allows you to assess the data necessary to strengthen relationships with existing businesses. This information can be used to create future marketing campaigns designed to entice similar businesses to become your clients.
Collect Data for Everything
Speaking of data, both small business CRM and tools, such as Google Analytics, allow you to examine data like never before. For instance, you can link marketing efforts – even basic ones like sending out a newsletter - an analytic reporting system to determine what clients do with the information you provide them. Of course, knowing how current clients process and react to information you send can help you tailor your marketing to bring in more businesses. The more data you have, the more effective this process becomes, making data collection and analysis the most powerful tool for growing your business by growing your client base.
21st Century Marketing
One of the lessons of the 21st century has been business is always changing and it runs in a neck-and-neck race with revolutionary technology. Fortunately though, the core principles of building relationships with other businesses and optimizing your usefulness to them has not changed. Technology need not be a rival. It can simply be a way to help you successfully grow your business like never before.