3…2…1…Happy New Year! Whooo!
You pop open the champagne, share that long-awaited kiss (hopefully!) and sing Auld Lang Syne along with everyone, while your heart grows full of hope and excitement for what the new year will bring. You then close your eyes and think about the New Year’s resolution you made just a few weeks earlier, to turn your marketing strategies for your business up a whole new level so that you can generate consistent customers, watch your sales escalate, and finally enjoy that staycation you’ve been planning since forever!
Upping your marketing game is an awesome resolution for the new year and there is no reason why you can’t make the dream a reality for 2022. Of course, I am also excited to see you succeed too. So, to make good on your resolution, here are some smaller resolutions you can make towards marketing your brand, to achieve that one ultimate promise and make your business even better than it was the year before.
Be More Present
There will be no winging it for 2022! That might have been last year’s brawl. This year, however, not only are you going to make an extra effort to start showing up for your audience consistently, but you are going to show up prepared and ready to execute. Be mindful of what your audience needs and have a proper plan in place to cover the month. Prepare your monthly plan in advance by checking out calendar days to see what events may be coming up locally or internationally, and create your digital and media marketing content strategy around these events to attract both your online and offline customers. Strive for your audience to feel the presence of your brand this year, no matter their physical location.
Diversify That Content
Contrary to popular belief, marketing is not all about the sale — or at least it shouldn’t be. More often than not, if the circumstances just aren’t right, the hard sell doesn’t work to pull in customers. What does this mean for your marketing strategy? It means you want to avoid promoting what you sell in every single post. Instead, mix it up a little, and by that, I don’t mean a mix of video, imagery and quotes. Of course, this is important too, but not if you’re going to be salesy in everything you post. Instead, share valuable and useful information about your industry too. Promote the products and services of other people you admire. Tell a joke sometimes or create a fun quiz. In summary, be human. People will appreciate your brand being shown less like a business, and more like a friend they would like to do business with.
Engage with Your Customers
When you’re cooking a meal, do you put the food on the fire, walk away and forget about it until you’re ready to eat? Of course not! The very thought is nonsensical. Not only will you risk burning your house down, but you’re likely to starve to death too from having to throw away burned food every day. When cooking, you are constantly engaging with your food — turning, stirring, tasting and seasoning until you’re satisfied that it is ready. Then you take it off the fire and indulge yourself. And if you’ve done a good job, it should taste pretty damn awesome. If not, well, the results will be in the taste.
So why should engaging with your customers be any different? Posting consistently is great, but it won’t automatically bring customers to your door. I think the phrase, ‘If you build it, they will come ' has long since been proven as a lie. If your customers are not responding to your current marketing strategy, change it. Find out what your customers enjoy engaging with, and make your content interactive. Ask questions, do lives or even fun quizzes. Make them eager to want to interact with your content without feeling too much pressure to do so (I know I feel that way sometimes!). Encourage them to share, reach out to them as frequently as you can and present a meaningful response to every comment or question you get. Be there for your audience and then yes, they will come.
Deliver More Value
Photo by SHVETS production from Pexels
If by ‘deliver more value’, you’re thinking about adding more features and benefits to your product or service, or about striving to make your prices more competitive, then slow down. There is no need to stress, as that’s not the value we are talking about right here. And while features and prices are important too, there are more ways than one to deliver value to your customers — and that’s by letting customers know what you can offer them in a way they can easily relate to and understand. That means no fancy jargon and long, boring descriptions. The focus should not be on your product or service, but on addressing the problems of your customers. Talk to your audience about the stress and struggles they didn’t even know they had! Once you have caught their attention, and you can visualize them saying, ‘Omg, yes! This is exactly my situation!’, then you provide value by offering the unique solution that your business can give to them. Deliver Value! And then, by making use of the other tips above, make them believe that only your brand can effectively solve their problems.
So, there are your marketing resolutions all set!
Now go out there, and using these marketing tips, let your brand be among the winners for 2022. You know what to do. Be valuable. Be a tool! (Don’t be a tool in life, mind you.) But be a tool for your brand.