Steps to Creating Powerful Marketing Strategies to Grow your Business Faster

Marketing is the most formidable tool for facilitating growth in your business. Executing carefully formulated marketing strategies is likely to welcome various benefits for your organization. Below are the steps you take to creating powerful marketing strategies any business can implement as part of their marketing plan. 

1. Conduct Market Research

No marketing strategy is complete without conducting market research prior. Market research provides a clear indication of where your business currently stands amongst its competitors. It also provides insights into trends, opportunities and potential threats. The more well-informed you are about your operating environment, the more likely your marketing plan is to succeed.

One of the ways to conduct market research, particularly about your customer, is through an online survey. To have the most effective survey, ensure you:

• Define an objective for your research
• Segment your audience to determine who receives which survey
• Use tested tools to analyze & collect data

Otherwise, the internet is home to various secondary resources to provide you with a plethora of information about the current climate of your relevant industry.

2. Build a Strong and Genuine Relationship with your Customers

There is nothing that will aid your business more than building a genuine relationship with your customers. Building a connection with your customers ensures that they come to your business not just for the product/service you offer, but for the personal bond you’ve created. Aside from the fact that it’ll boost customer loyalty, it also means that customers are less likely to look for flaws in your business, as well as defend you in moments of strife.

Here are some ways you can strengthen your relationship with your customers:

• Storytelling can drive conversion rate by 400%. Be authentic, consistent and allow your target audience to become a part of the story
• Stand for a social cause that relates to your business
• Conduct webinars, lives and podcasts to interact with your consumers
• Have a key figure (like the founder) be the personal embodiment of the business 

3. Use Key Performance Indicators to Stay on Track

If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are necessary to ensure that your marketing strategy is actually achieving what was designed to. Setting new KPIs may reveal new strengths and weaknesses you never identified before.

KPIs you should consider measuring as a part of your marketing strategy:

• Marketing effect on sales growth
• Marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads
• The lifetime value of a customer
• Cost of customer acquisition
• Sales team response time
• Website traffic to website lead ratio
• Social media reach and engagement
• Email marketing performance
• Landing page conversion

4. Improve your Social Media Marketing

Social media is an invaluable touchpoint for your business. Customers use companies’ social media pages to stay informed, be alerted of new products and services, and for entertainment purposes, amongst many other reasons. By regularly updating your socials, your customers remain interested in your brand, while also keeping the brand top-of-mind. It helps to strengthen the branding of your company while also providing an avenue for direct interaction.

If you cannot update all of your social media, focus on your most relevant channel and then address your other channels as a part of a future marketing strategy.

Here are some ways you can improve your social media marketing:

• Have a strategic and integrated social media calendar in place
• Engage with those you post on your social media pages
• Include video content
• See what content/type your consumers like best
• Present a call-to-action on posts
• Consider a Facebook/LinkedIn group

5. Improve your Email Marketing 

There are a number of benefits to email marketing, including greater revenue, more sales and increased customer retention. Welcome emails are extraordinarily effective; 320% more revenue is attributed to them on a per email basis than other promotional emails. Customers who purchase products through email spend 138% more than those that don’t receive email offers.

Here are some recommendations to action as a part of a new email marketing strategy;

• Create a long-term content strategy
• Create multiple opt-in offers on your site
• Generate email list popup form
• Add a banner with a subscription invitation to the top of your site

6. Renovate your Landing Pages

A landing page is a webpage designed for a specific purpose. Usually, landing pages become the destination sites for ads, but they can also be found through organic search. A good landing page will present a particular call to action for a lead.

Here are some tips to improve your conversion rates on your landing pages:

• Offer something that solves a problem (and keep it specific to that point)
• Keep it as simple as possible (and get to the point early on)
• Have an opt-in at several points on the page
• Provide some social proof: reviews greatly impact purchasing decisions
• Utilize video: videos have a positive impact on purchase decisions
• Write a great headline
• Split test every aspect of your landing page by testing one variable at a time 

7. Work on your Search Engine Optimisation

Knowing that 70-80% of customers ignore ads stresses the need for a focus on search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the process of organically increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic through search engine results. By knowing what your customers are seeking, what problems they’re needing to be solved, and the type of content they’re wishing to consume, you can craft your website to target exactly what they need.

Here are some ways to improve your SEO:

• Focus on low-competition keywords
• Include keywords in FAQ pages and product descriptions
• Start a blog
• Improve load time on your website
• Use tools like SEMRush and KWFinder to make it easy to find high-ROI keywords to drive leads to your website
• Perform an SEO audit on your website

8. Improve your Local Search Engine Optimisation

Local SEO is vital to the success of a small business. By updating your local SEO, you have the ability to bring in more leads, double up your local visibility and increase your site’s authority.

Here are some ways to improve your local SEO:

• Have an accurate Google My Business profile
• Engage with your local community on social media
• Have a local blog approach – talk about things your community cares about
• Ensure your Google Maps is optimized (problem-free and appealing to customers)
• List on sites and local directories
• Ensure any profiles are not missing and have correct business info
• Establish review quantity and diversity

9. Strengthen your Customer Retention

While the probability of selling to a new customer is about approximately 10-15%, selling to an existing customer is approximately 65%. It costs 16 times more to bring up a new customer to the same level as a current one. A 2% increase in customer retention can lower costs by 10%. These statistics demonstrate the worth of pleasing your existing customers as opposed to simply looking for new ones.

82% of customers said they’d stopped doing business with a company due to poor customer service. One of the greatest ways to keep your current customers engaged with your business is to continue to deliver a high-quality, unmatched service. Customers don’t like to change businesses too often, so keeping them satisfied will help keep them out of reach of competitors.

Here are other ways to improve customer retention:

• Encourage (and review) customer feedback
• Remain top-of-mind with weekly newsletters, social media content, or high-value content (like videos and podcasts)
• Creating a loyalty program
• Educating and motivating staff to deliver high-quality, knowledgeable service.