What type of loan is best for starting a business with no money?
Do you need a loan to start a business? Looking at the best type of loan options for your start-up? […]
Read More »What Are The Top 5 Marketing Activities? (For big results)
Great marketing can make or break a business. Without proper marketing, you have no way to reach new customers, keep current customers up to date on new products and promotions, and will struggle to convert cold and warm leads into paying customers or clients.
The top 5 marketing activities are: 1. Build a database of customers, 2. Become an expert in database marketing, 3. Use email marketing, 4. Use direct mail, and 5. Apply the Law of 80/20.
That said, in this article, we have listed the top five marketing activities to help you bring in new customers, keep more customers coming back, increase brand awareness, and boost sales.
You will notice that this is not a list of mind-numbing marketing tactics. That is because we don’t know exactly who your ideal customer is, so it is impossible to make a list of how to communicate to your customers. That’s your job (See the second point under item #1).
But, by stepping back, we can build a proper framework of activities that will make it very easy for you to develop your main marketing activities.
1. Build A Database Of Your Customers
Absolutely nothing is more important than your customer database. This is because having this database allows you to use and leverage direct marketing tactics that are all but guaranteed to keep customers coming back. We will get more in to these tactics later in the article.
A couple of tips to help you start or grow your costume database are:
A) Learn How To Use FREE In Your Marketing
No matter who your target market or demographic is, every consumer has one thing in common: they want to feel like they are getting a deal. Nothing is a better deal than free. This is especially true when your customer feels like they are getting something of value for free.
Some examples include:
- “Sign up for our newsletter and get a FREE e-book on how to grow your business, normally a hot seller at $59”
- “Fill out our discovery form and get a FREE social media audit to make sure you are properly leveraging your online presence, a $199 free value”
- “Get your first personal training session for FREE, a $59 value for first time customers”
In each of these examples you are providing something of value to the customer in exchange for their personal information (name, email, address, etc) to help you build your database. The customer gets a valuable item and you get data for marketing, everyone wins.
CAUTION: Remember, if you can’t sell it, no one will want it for free, either. Don’t make the common mistake of believing you can give away something for free if it isn’t sell-able.
Go here for an example of how McDonald’s is using FREE in their marketing.
B) Marketing Where Your Customers Are
This is a simple measure of how well you know your target customer base. You want your marketing efforts to reach the largest amount of potential customers as possible, so you need to look at where they hang out the most. Basically, what platform do your customers use the most? Think about:
- Youtube
- TikTok
- Online E-commerce sites such as Amazon
- Brick and Mortar Retailers like Walmart or Target
Wherever your customers are, this is where you need to focus your marketing efforts.
2. Become An Expert At Database Marketing
Now that you have your customer database built up, it is time to leverage it with database marketing. Database marketing is a type of direct marketing that connects you directly with the potential customer through email, text message, or physical mail.
To get the full utility from your database, you will need to divide it into segments. This means that you will divide your customers into classes, such as: repeat customers, one-time customers, high spenders, low spenders, demographic data, etc. Once you have all of this information together, you can begin tailoring marketing specific communications to each segment. This will significantly increase conversions over just sending mass communications to everyone in your database
3. Learn To Integrate Email Marketing Into Day-to-Day Operations
Once you have grown your database to a significant amount and mastered segmentation, your email list will become the lifeblood of your business. Statistically speaking, email marketing is up to forty times more effective than social media advertising (1).
By coupling your email marketing with daily operations, you are increasing the efficiency of both. Email marketing is, by far, the most efficient way to communicate news and alerts to your customer base quickly and easily. Providing this extra information so customers know what to expect makes all processes run easier.
4. Learn How To Use Direct Mail Marketing
The next form of marketing to master is direct mail marketing. In this form of marketing, you physically mail advertisements, coupons, postcards, etc directly to your customers at their home address. Direct mail marketing is your secret weapon that your competition is not properly executing due to not knowing how or just laziness.
Direct mail marketing is often overlooked in today’s world, especially as we become increasingly digital. Most fast-moving entrepreneurs don’t need them to confirm this, but the United States Small Business Association reported in a 2019 study that direct mail marketing is still a fantastic salesmaker -- again, something we already know because we do it every day. Despite this, the competition is still low. So there is space for you to increase your customer base with memorable, creative, and interactive mailing campaigns.
5. Understand the 80/20 Rule of Marketing
As a fact, not all activities and not all customers are equal and nothing explains that better than the 80/20 rule of marketing (also sometimes referred to as the Pareto Principle). The rule states simply that 80% of results come from 20% of causes and actions.
A very common example of this rule is statements such as,
“80% of products come from 20% of companies”
So, how does this apply to marketing? Simply put, this means that 80% of your company’s sales come from only 20% of your customers.
This means that you need to find these 20% of customers (see item #2 above), focus a significant portion of your marketing efforts on them, and keep them ecstatic about buying from you.
Their brand loyalty is what drives the majority of your top line sales revenue.
Conclusion
These are our top five marketing activities for any business.
Good marketing and promotions can be the difference between your business barely staying afloat and soaring to heights you never thought possible. So, it is essential to create a marketing plan that includes database creation, digital and print marketing, and factors in the 80/20 rule.
