Make Marketing Your Company’s No 1 Priority

Make Marketing Your Company’s No 1 Priority

If you own your own business, you need to market your products and/or services to be able to continually get customers, make sales and grow your revenue. You will get the best results if you have a marketing strategy that combines a number of elements, including traditional and new channels and both paid and free media. Here are some of the elements you need to have at a minimum.

A good website will help you draw in potential customers. Unless you or a staffer have experience in web design, it’s best to hire someone to design your website for you. You want to make sure that you not only have a strong home page but also good landing pages as well. Each different page should have have strong search engine focused content that will get you a high ranking in search, particularly on Google. Google owns about 70% of the search market share in the U.S., and three-fourths of users never make it past the first page of results, so it is important to make sure you show up in the first few results. You also need to make sure that your website is mobile optimized so it will load quickly and display correctly on mobile devices such as smartphones.

Your marketing strategy also should include a strong social media campaign. Top social media outlets for businesses include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Social media is a free and easy way to promote your business to a wide audience. Use social media promotion and social media campaigns to cultivate as many followers as you can, because at some point some of them will likely become customers.

Your own website and social media pages allow you to promote your business without spending much, but they also have limited reach. To reach a wider audience, you need to include paid media. This can include buying ads in traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, TV and radio, and newer paid techniques such as pay per click ads on websites. You also can do email marketing, although it has a very low success rate.

Marketing can be a lot of work, but it is key to your firm’s success. If you don’t feel comfortable doing it or don’t think you have the right expertise, it’s best to spend the money to hire someone to help you.