Your company needs to get new customers to be able to grow. And to get those new customers, you need to promote your business. But what is the best method for promoting your business, your products or services, and your brand to attract the attention of potential customers?
And how can you make sure you’re using the most up-to-date marketing methods?
After all, there’s plenty of competition fighting for both consumers and their attention these days. You need to find the best ways to stand out from the crowd and create a memorable brand experience, yet without breaking the bank.
And this is why today we’ll be talking about promoting your business in 2021.
Why You Need to Promote Your Business
It’s just not enough these days to have the best product or service on the market. Customers in almost every industry are overwhelmed with choices, and making a decision can be complex.
Consumers are also bombarded with the amount of marketing they see every day. From old-school marketing tactics like radio ads and billboards, to new methods like streaming video ads and marketing tie-ins on social media, ads can seem like they’re squeezed into absolutely every corner of the day right now.
That’s why promoting your business the right way is so essential. You want to reach the right people the right way and do more than get their attention – you want to move them to take an action and become customers.
Key Tips for Promoting Your Business in 2021
Adding to the trickiness of mastering marketing strategies for your business is the fast rate of changes and advances in the marketing world right now. There’s always a new social media platform to learn, a new form of PPC ads, and important updates to search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.
That means you need to stay on top of what’s new and what’s old news in the marketing world.
Here are a few top tips for marketing in 2021:
Get focused:
Digital marketing in 2021 is ever-expanding, and it’s easy to get caught up in jumping to whatever is new right away. But you’ll get better results over the long-term if you focus on fewer tactics but do them really, really well.
Keep updating:
The world moves fast these days, and information quickly becomes outdated. Making sure your website, blog posts, and social media stay up-to-date on an ongoing basis isn’t glamorous work, but it will help you look more credible to potential customers and ensure you’re seen as being on the cutting edge of your industry.
Set the right budget:
Promoting your business in a way that gets you real results isn’t necessarily cheap. It doesn’t have to be expensive, but in most cases, you’ll get what you pay for.
Methods that used to be cheap or free, like organic social media reach, have now been monetized by many companies and so you might need to look at adjusting your budget. (See how much you should be spending on your marketing budget with our free tool.)
Best Practices for Promoting Your Business in 2021
What are the concrete steps you need to take to promote your business better this year?
By the way, here’s a helpful video on creating a marketing calendar to organize your efforts for this year!
This guide is all about making sure your business stays up to date with the latest marketing practices and leverages your existing assets for maximum effect, without costing you a fortune.
You don’t need to follow every single step – you can pick and choose which ones are right for your business if you don’t feel you can tackle everything right now. But you should use most of them to create an updated, effective plan to promote your business and get real results this year.
Optimize Your Digital Presence
Yes, we just said you could pick and choose which steps to take – but not this one. Optimizing and updating your digital presence is essential for success in 2021. Having a well-designed website with updated and compelling content is absolutely not optional for any business these days.
In fact, prospective customers expect it as the bare minimum.
We have a guide to digital presence you can review for the basics – be sure you’re following each step to create an online presence that reflects your brand in the best possible light.
At a minimum, you need to have:
- an easy-to-view and updated website that tells the story of your company and has all your contact information
- a social media strategy and presence on at least one platform
- a completed and optimized Google My Business profile
Consumers are increasingly used to searching for a company online before they take any other steps. Therefore, updating your digital presence ensures that what they find when they search for you positions your business as a trusted and current authority.
This is just as true for a small business with a local customer base as with a big international corporation.
Implement a Content Strategy
To grow your business sustainably over the next few years, you need to think long-term. That means coming up with a way to get leads coming into your business continuously and reliably, without spending a huge amount of money to get them.
This is where a content strategy comes comes into play when promoting your business. Maybe you already have one for your business – great! Just make sure to update your content and keep up the good work! But if you don’t already have one, 2021 is the perfect time to start creating a content plan.
Start writing blog posts a few times a month so search engines can find you and potential customers will find you too. You can read all about how to optimize your content for search engine traffic here. This is a low-effort, low-cost way to start bringing in those sustainable leads.
For maximum effect, you can combine a paid search ad strategy with your organic content efforts to find what keywords bring in the best leads for your business.
And if you’re looking to grow the audience of your site, writing guest posts for blogs for others in the industry can help you get your name and your business out there without spending money. This is great for getting more readers to your site and raising your brand awareness in your industry.
Understand Your Audience
When was the last time you did a deep dive into understanding exactly who your ideal customer is, and exactly how your business fills their needs or solves their pain points? After all, promoting your business really means promoting it to the people who need you the most.
If it’s been a while, it’s time to go through those exercises again.
This is because markets change, so you should stay up to date on what your competitors are doing. And your business has probably changed over the last few years as you introduce new products or services and grow your brand.
Furthermore, the needs of your audience may have changed as well. Perhaps their former pain points aren’t so painful anymore, and there’s something new you can help them solve.
Having a deep understanding of your ideal customer will help make all your business promotion efforts more effective, because you’ll understand exactly how to talk to them and get them to take action. If you’re just trying to appeal to the broadest number of people possible, you won’t be doing a good job addressing the specific concerns and desires of the people who are perfect prospective customers for your company.
Fine-Tune Your Brand Image
How does your business present your brand right now?
Do you just talk a lot on your website and social media about how great your products are or how extensive the features on your product are? This is not what we mean by promoting your business.
Focusing and fine-tuning your brand image and brand equity can help you stand out from the competition so your prospects know immediately why they should make a purchase from you.
What does that mean in practice?
You want to narrow down exactly how your company makes life better in some way for your customers – your brand image and offering should be totally focused on them.
Most people don’t buy Apple products just for the features, of which they probably use only a handful. Instead, they often purchase everything in the Apple universe because each product works seamlessly together, and there’s dedicated help available just by stepping into an Apple store. It’s about ease of use as well as product sophistication.
What’s your similar selling point that helps your brand stand out? And does every piece of your marketing and branding reflect that selling point in terms that grab prospects right away? If not, you’ve got work to do.
Get Strategic with Social Media
If you’re not using social media for your business, or you haven’t refreshed your social media strategy in a few years, it’s time to start. You should begin by looking at the platforms you want to use or are currently using – are you picking them because they’re the hot new thing, or because they truly connect and resonate with your target market?
Social media platforms change all the time, so what worked for you two years ago might not be a good fit anymore.
For example, Facebook started as a site for college students, but now its audience has lots of boomers and seniors. Instagram used to have lots of potential for getting organic reach, but now they’re increasingly making businesses pay for ads to get their content seen. And TikTok is a hot new platform – if your targeted audience skews quite young.
Assessing where your social media strategy is now, and where you think it should go for 2021, is a great way to start the year.
Are you getting the results you hoped for, or do you need to switch things up a bit? Trying a new platform or a more engaging social media content strategy can pay big yields.
Master Email Marketing
This may seem like an old-school step, but rather, it’s just tried-and-true. Email marketing is an incredibly effective yet inexpensive way for businesses of any size to promote their products and services.
That’s true for several reasons:
- It’s a way to cut through the marketing noise and talk directly to your customers and prospects.
- It allows you to fully own your content delivery, unlike social media platforms which can decrease your reach at any time.
- It can be quite low-cost with high ROI for small businesses with limited marketing budgets. Yet it’s just as effective for medium and larger businesses too.
If you’re not using email marketing yet, or you’re not using it as frequently or effectively as you could be, now is a great time to start.
You can read through our previous guides to email marketing basics and types of email marketing to get informed, and then start creating your own strategy that works for your business.
Email marketing isn’t just effective for promoting your business to new customers – it can help keep your brand identity and products top of mind for your existing customers too.
If you have lots of delighted customers, you can think about implementing an email referral program to reward them for spreading the word about your business to their network. This gets you plenty of low-cost promotion from your authentically engaged audience – a marketing goldmine.
Measure Your Results
No digital marketing strategy or business promotion is complete without this step – how will you know what’s working if you don’t measure your results on a regular basis?
Marketing and advertising analytics get more sophisticated every year, so be sure you’re taking advantage of these improvements to get a close look at how each element of your marketing is doing.
To see more success in 2021, you might want to set up more regular reviews of your marketing data so you stay on top of trends and can fix small issues before they become big problems. The business world is certainly experiencing a lot of volatility right now for most industries, so make sure you’re up to date on how your marketing is faring.
You can use tools like the C1M app to keep track of your leads and your digital marketing efforts. What gets measured gets improved – it’s just a fact.
If you’re not looking at and acting on your data as often as you should be, then this is the perfect year to start. Doing so will give you a clear idea of what areas of marketing and advertising to invest in for the future, and spend your marketing dollars wisely without waste.
(Want to know more? We wrote a whole book on this topic!)
Need Help with a Custom Strategy for Promoting Your Business?
One-size-fits-all solutions don’t work for businesses anymore, not with such a crowded competitive field to play on. You need to create a totally custom strategy that works for your business and your customers, and you won’t get that with a plug-and-play template found somewhere online.
Instead, you need to:
- target your ideal audience closely
- create a unique brand identity
- wrap that into everything you put out as part of your digital marketing strategy
- keep fine-tuning your approach according to the data
Does that sound like a lot of work for a busy business owner? That’s why Content First Marketing has helped businesses like yours grow through smart promotion, and we’re here to help you in the year ahead too.
We’ll develop a completely custom digital marketing strategy based on your business and data-backed approaches, and get you real results you can see clearly in the bottom line of your business.
Schedule your free business review today to learn more about how we can work together to promote your business the right way in 2021. You can use these insights for inspiration, and let us do the marketing for you.
Sources:
https://www.thebalancesmb.com/budget-friendly-
