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Marketing is a fundamental pillar of any successful business and is responsible not only for attracting a keen customer base but establishing a unique position within your industry.
Despite the clear importance of marketing, however, many businesses neglect their marketing efforts and suffer the negative results that it brings.
Although it is vital to concentrate your time and resources on key parts of your business – such as production, distribution, and sales – these will all be for nothing if you fail to cultivate an eager audience to sell your products and services to.
Naturally, trying to market your own business can be tricky, especially if you are at the coalface and struggle to see your brand for what it is. After all, when you are close to a project, it often takes someone else to provide perspective on it.
What’s more, marketing requires the implementation of different strategies that require skill and hard work to implement successfully. Learning these skills is possible, but it takes time and effort.
To help you to improve your marketing, here are some top tips:
Use SEO as the basis for your marketing
You may already have heard about search engine optimization. Still, it brings with it a reputation for being complicated and difficult, so it is easy to write off before you’ve learned more about it.
SEO is the process by which you gain the trust of search engine algorithms, thereby being rewarded with a higher place on results pages.
These algorithms control which websites rank where on search engine results in pages (SERPs) and measure the relative merits of these sites based on a number of key metrics.
For example, these algorithms crawl your website to see how well its content matches the intent of a particular search. If the query was ‘how to bake a loaf of bread’ and you posted a bread baking recipe to your site, then you would have closely matched the search intent.
If you are struggling with your SEO output, then enlist an SEO consultant to help.
Don’t be afraid to stand out against your competitors
A key tenet of marketing that few brands remember is that standing out is the aim – not a byproduct.
You actively want to position yourself in a place all of your own in the market, to catch the eye of customers and demonstrate that you have few real competitors.
Unfortunately, many companies fail to do this because they are nervous about getting their positioning wrong or courting controversy. In fact, the opposite should be true. You need to find a way of appearing completely different from other businesses in your market – whether it is thanks to your unique ethos, tone of voice, or branding. Customers need to love you or hate you but not ignore you.
Create a customer avatar
If you want to connect with your audience, then you need to understand them. The best way to do this is to create a customer avatar.
A customer avatar is the summary of your ‘average’ customer – including their demographic, occupation, location, how much they typically spend, and the problems they have that you could potentially solve.
By creating these avatars, you will find it far easier to create content with your audience in mind.
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