When it comes to marketing your business, you want to take advantage of every relevant strategy to get you the most exposure available. Entering the social media field or fighting for SEO are often effective, but difficult to maneuver when every other business is vying for the same thing. Here are a few marketing strategies that are often underappreciated and overlooked by many businesses!

SMS Marketing

According to Kenect, short message service (SMS) marketing is one of the most effective ways to communicate with your consumers, who are already on their phones for a significant portion of the day. Send updates, special deals and promotions, personalized advertisements for individual customers, or whatever advertisements will pull your consumers’ attention back to you consistently. Furthermore, SMS marketing opens opportunities for chatbot customer service, which allows customers to ask questions of your business and receive answers quickly and easily.

Offline Advertising

While screens are a great place to put your advertisements, don’t lose the benefits offline marketing can bring you. In fact, offline advertising is becoming less common and therefore increasingly effective! According to SignEffx Graphics, signs have many different functions for your business and can last for years when made right. Plus, they can be adapted to a variety of formats: billboards, posters, flyers, outdoor signage, etc. Word of mouth marketing is also one of the best ways you can express your reputation and spread your name, which you can do through networking events and partnerships with other businesses. Mail advertisements, radio, merchandise and more are all great ways to get your name out to the community.

Videos

Reading has become less and less appealing to consumers in terms of receiving information. It requires time and attention that, with today’s technological advances, is fleeting. So, rather than lay out the information in wordy content, Act! recommends using video. Infographics, short how-to’s, promotional videos, sponsorships and more can draw in attention better than most articles or posts. Videos that are colorful, energetic, fast-paced and entertaining will make consumers much more willing to pay attention! Investing in the labor and resources required to make visual content is far worth the return on attention from potential and current customers.

Using various marketing strategies will broaden the scope of your access and deepen the amount of attention customers give you. Research into your target market and what appeals to them, and there might be strategies you haven’t thought of. Try one or try them all and enjoy the success you find!

Read this next: How to Make Sure You Are Finding the Right Demographic

Instagram is quickly rising in popularity for consumers all over the world. As a business owner trying to reach as many consumers as possible, this social media platform is an obvious choice for marketing, sales and overall exposure for your business! This particular app provides a variety of unique features that you can take advantage of to give your business the modern, innovative publicity it needs to succeed in this technologically driven society.

Story Swipe Up Button

One frustration for early business profiles on Instagram was the lack of accessibility to hyperlinked pages. The only available means of links existed in the profile biography. Now, Instagram stories provide a “swipe up” feature that takes your viewer immediately from an inviting advertisement directly to any webpage. Promotional deals, informational articles, whatever content you want can be easily accessed through a swipe up! The only requirements to access this feature is that your profile be “verified” as an official business profile, meaning it is proven as an authentic account for your business, it is exclusive to your business (no multiple Instagram accounts doing the same thing), it has all the elements of an active account (profile, bio, posts) and is something that users will search for. Fulfill the criteria, and you will have access to features like this along with data analysis for your own use and more!

Live Streams

This is an opportunity to connect with customers on a more personable, relatable, and accessible level! You as the business owner or any employee, ambassador or partner can take the wheel as the spokesperson for providing an “inside scoop” on any aspect of your business. Have a live Q&A, interact with the users in real time, share media, give a tour or tell a story that draws your followers further into your business’s brain. If they can see and connect with the vision you have, they will be more likely to support you through buying products or even sharing your content to their personal pages! Make sure that you notify your followers of the live stream well before its scheduled start, so that your curious or loyal followers have time and awareness of this exciting insight!

Instagram Checkout

E-commerce can be a huge beast to tackle. You can cut out the chaos and hassle that comes you’re your own online store, by using Instagram Checkout! Instagram Checkout is a new feature that will let you sell things directly on the platform and receive payments from there. The logistics of shipping, returns, and customer service rest on this new market platform, not you. This is a fantastic way to delegate one of the most stressful areas of running a business, to a well-established entity you can trust.

Stories (and Highlights)

Posts have developed a kind of weight to them that intimidates many users away from posting at all. The permanence and social pressure of gaining “likes” through visual material and well written content is enough to deter some users from creating effective posts. Stories, however, are the perfect tool for any business to provide consistent, engaging material without that weight and pressure, and without the question of overwhelming any user’s feed. Use them as polls for legitimate research or data collection (disguised as fun, interactive and quick posts), as links to your website, advertisements for products, and more. Stories are characteristically more casual and faster than posts, but can hold the user’s attention just as well! Plus, you can save these temporary stories into “highlight” collections that allow followers to go back and view them again and again, and thereby allowing you to keep your information available at all times.

Pin Comments

Customers—both happy and frustrated—can use the comment feature on posts to provide reviews of their experience with your business, for better or for worse. You can pin the comments you want to represent any given posts to the top of the list, so that the casual viewer scrolling through will see the commentary you want them to see! Take advantage of the best comments by making them a sort of subtle promotion, and address the less promotional feedback professionally by responding with a message of your appreciation of their time and concern, and dedication to improve.

Bio

When you’ve captured the attention of a consumer through your content or advertisements, you need your profile page to be a good representation of exactly what your business is—its vision, its function, its brand and its audience. Your bio is a chance for you to wrap all that up in 150 characters—a succinct and charming way to hold their attention. Define your cause, emphasize your style, and encourage consumer interest to invite further exploration into your business.

Take advantage of all the benefits of each unique feature that this fresh and exciting platform has to offer. These will boost your customer numbers, interest, interaction, and exposure so that you can best connect with the audience you need for your success.

Read this next: How to Make Sure You Are Finding the Right Demographic

If you are a small business owner looking to grow your niche audience and market to the right demographic, this article is for you. The products that you offer attract a certain kind of audience, and you want to make sure that your marketing efforts will reach them. Follow these few tips and tricks to learn how to hone in on the ideal demographic for your products.

Conduct Research

First off, you can’t cater to the needs and tastes of your audience if you don’t know who they are! Make sure that you start conducting research today to find your target audience. Conducting research to identify your current and future target audience will help you to be able to better adapt your products to meet their needs and be more desirable. You can use social media insights to identify your audience’s usual age, gender, lifestyle, and more. Researching will also help you to grow your future audience as you know the demographic that you should be aiming for and can help you to conduct giveaways, spotlights, collaborations, and other activities to attract that target demographic.

Tailor Your Marketing to Them

As previously mentioned, once you have accurately identified your demographic, you will be able to tailor your marketing and your products to their taste. When thinking about how you can tailor your marketing to your demographic, ask yourself, what kind of people do my products attract? What kind of content do these people want to see? How do my products satisfy their needs or solve their problems? These questions will guide you to more personalized marketing. For example, if you are using Instagram to market your small business and notice that a lot of your followers interact with the reels and videos that you post, try including more of that marketing content on your page. As you do so, you’ll notice that your current followers will become invested in your content, grow more loyal to you, and even help attract new followers to your page.

Meet Them Where They Are

It is extremely important to know your demographic well enough that you are able to meet them where they are with regards to their interests and demands for your products. For example, if you notice that your audience has grown a lot on social media and doesn’t respond to pop-up shops or in-person sales, try catering to that interest. You can use social media to connect with your potential customers and even sell your products.

Know Your Competition

To successfully grow your demographic, it is imperative that you know your competition. You probably know a lot of other companies that are selling products in your niche. If you don’t, a quick Facebook Marketplace scan or hashtag search on Instagram should give you a pretty good idea of other companies selling similar products. Use this knowledge to determine why your audience would choose to buy from your company rather than a competitor’s. On the other hand, you should also consider why your competitors may be attracting some of your potential demographic. Once you’ve considered those things, set goals for improvement and try new things to attract your goal audience. This will help you to know what you can do to improve your own services and attract more of your ideal demographic.

The Importance of Communication

Growing and maintaining your target demographic requires a lot of communication, more than most people would think. If your business has a property or a way for you to interact in person with your audience, take advantage of those opportunities. Meet with your audience and ask them how you can better serve them, or what kinds of products they’d like to see in the future. If your business is run remotely and you handle sales online, try having an outlet like social media where you can conduct surveys and ask your audience for suggestions. Remember that your demographic consists of people, not just sales or numbers. Ask them for help!

Embrace Similarities

Although your demographic won’t resemble your personality and tastes completely, it is likely that a lot of your audience is quite similar to you, since they’re attracted to your personalized products. Make sure to take advantage of the similarities that you have with your audience, which will help you to connect to them personally. If you are conducting marketing and sales remotely, show your face in videos or articles! Share your interests and your sense of humor. Even include behind-the-scenes videos to help your demographic really connect with your creative process. This will not only help you to maintain your audience, but it will also help you to grow it as your demographic passes on referrals and recommendations to others.

There are so many ways that you can find the right demographic for your product. Once you’ve conducted the necessary research and put in the marketing effort, you should work to maintain your niche demographic. The more you help your audience to feel that you genuinely care about them and their needs, the more loyal they will be to you, and you’ll attract the right demographic for years to come.

Trying to attract more local traffic? We can help you!

Throughout these last few years, there has been a shift of focus from large corporations to small businesses. People want to shop local. The issue is most small businesses have a difficult time marketing themselves in a way that can attract more customers. This can be resolved by understanding your local market.

Try New Things

If what you are doing currently to attract customers is not working, it may be time to switch up your current tactics. If the fish are not biting, cast your line somewhere new. This could mean that you should sell new products or services in addition to what you sold before. You could also market in new ways, like going to farmers’ markets or putting an advertisement on the local radio. If as the business owner, you have always been behind the scenes when it comes to marketing campaigns, try becoming the face of your business. People respond better when they can put a human face with the company.

Go Where the People Are

Chances are that those locals who you are trying to reach consume some form of media or social media daily. Instead of spending your money on newspaper ad space, move your marketing to mediums where your customers will see it. Nextdoor currently has 74 percent homeowners as their userbase, making them a great place to reach out to local customers. Television and social media groups are also great examples of places where you can reach your desired audience. People will then also be able to review and recommend your business directly to their neighbors, broadening your customer base.

Ask the Locals

No one knows the local people better than the locals themselves. Customer feedback is vital to company growth. Feedback helps you know what your company is doing right and adjust those things that you could improve on. Online reviews are also a great way to increase your rankings locally as well as add more credibility to your business. In many cases, customers trust local reviews more than anything else. You can ask your regular customers to share their experiences on social media. Another great option could be to gather a representative group of your local area and ask them for direct suggestions on how you can reach out to different markets better.  

Your business has great potential to become a local hotspot. When you get to know the locals better, you are more equipped to create marketing strategies directly for them. Just remember, your future customers want to support you, but they must know you first.

Stay on top of your marketing with a revamped marketing strategy! Contact us to get started.