New entrepreneurs tend to receive a lot of business advice from people around them. They have everything to comment on what you should do or avoid when starting up. While listening to some of them can feel a waste of time, you still cannot afford to block them from sharing their experiences. Some, like Eric J Dalius, can suggest something genuinely invaluable for your business. Anyway, one of the common things that you hear from people is that you need to work on your business and not in it. Although it is critical, you may find it challenging to keep at it, mainly when your business is still in its nascent phase.
A majority of entrepreneurs have to wear different hats when they start, and this makes them proud also. From implementing marketing strategies to emailing to building products to updating websites and shipping materials, the list is endless. They also have to take charge of admin activities, including paying bills, filing taxes, handling payroll, and others.
These can be normal expectations from a guy who has just started up. But do you know this can prevent you from having a broader look at your business and taking strategic steps for its organic growth? If you analyze, you would realize that these activities put you in reactive rather than proactive mode. Some businesses can find it impossible to hire workers or outsource tasks. If it is the same case with you, don’t worry. You can control the situation by focusing on the right marketing strategy. Here is a quick view of what you can do.
Eric J Dalius – Know your buyer
For a new business, revenue is the most important thing. Hence, anyone can feel tempted to welcome anyone who offers money in return for your product or service. But this is not a good practice. You end up overextending yourself by entertaining all the potential customers that contact you or come to your store. At the same time, this may not let you know who your real customer is. To avoid such a situation, you need to ask yourself a few pertinent questions. For example, you may want to know who paid you most, who gave you the maximum profit, who you found easy to deal with, and who enjoyed your services.
Prepare a list and see who belongs to which and how many categories. You can focus on common features, such as the number of satisfied customers and their income, where they live, and so on. The exercise will lead you to some common insights about the ideal customers and what you need to focus on when searching for new users. You can continue applying this process and start examining who gave the least money and who gave you a hard time, and so on with some more research. It can reveal who is not useful for your business.
Find out marketing channels
Your happy customers may use social media a lot. But you don’t know where to target them because of the sheer number of platforms. For this, you need to figure out the demographics of the social media users and map that with the age group of your end-user. It can help you zero down on specific platforms, for instance, Instagram, where the relevant age group is dominating. Based on this, you can direct your time and resources here.
The marketing and entrepreneurship expert, EJ Dalius, recommends that you don’t just have to think of social media in this context. You can apply this to other marketing channels also to bring down the number. If you find that other resources prove better than social media, you can give them a priority. It can include an ad in a local paper, for example.
Research on businesses from the same field
By now, you will have an idea about what you need to do with your marketing strategy. Going ahead, you would, however, want to learn about businesses from the same line of product or service. You can try to dig out their marketing endeavors and the impact of the same. Focus on strategies that you are also planning to implement. It can validate whether what you are thinking is right or not. You can also feel motivated to search for more options that yielded results for others in a similar field.
Plan a marketing strategy by Eric Dalius
As you progress with your research, you will gain clarity about your marketing campaigns. For instance, you may now know that your customers choose their service providers through online searches. If that is the case, you can spend your energy and resources on getting better rankings in search engines. Similarly, if you discover that your customers are dedicated social media people and make informed decisions before committing a purchase, you may want to direct your attention there. For social media platforms, you can consider investing in targeted ads.
In essence, it shows that you have to strategize as per your customers, industry, and offerings.
Study your marketing approach
After you have designed a strategy, you would need to let it run your marketing efforts, services/ products, pricing, and so on. Watch out how these work out over a specific period. Usually, people wait for one quarter before assessing the impact. However, the ideal time is six months to one year before any activity starts showing effect from the point of strategy. Hence, it is essential to give your strategy a decent time. After this, you can examine the response of your strategy. Does it meet your intended goal? If it doesn’t, you may have to build a new strategy.
In the end, you will come across the right marketing strategy for your company and its products/ services. You will know where you need to spend and how much. Your energy and attention can stay there. If everything pans out the way you desired, you can double down your efforts and expect a further rise in the trajectory.
Many successful entrepreneurs have done this, and you, too, can trust this method to work for you. Just make sure you are thorough with your research data and observations.