5 Mistakes to Avoid When Opening a Business

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  Opening a business can be an frightening journey filled with opportunities and challenges. However, numerous pitfalls can hinder your progress. Here are five critical mistakes to avoid when embarking on your entrepreneurial endeavor: Neglecting Market Research: One of the most common mistakes new entrepreneurs make is pitching into a business idea without thoroughly understanding the market. Failing to conduct comprehensive market research can lead to a disparity between your product or service and customer needs. Analyze the demand, competition, target audience, and current trends. Understand your customers' pain points, preferences, and purchasing behavior to tailor your offering accordingly. Ignoring a Solid Business Plan: A well-crafted business plan is a roadmap for success. Skipping or hastily drafting this crucial document can impede your business's growth. A solid plan outlines your objectives, target market, financial projections, marketing strategies, and op...

Digital marketing for SMEs: 8 actions to attract customers

The digital marketing is also for SMEs , although not many years ago most trusted him directly to large companies, considering it was not for them. Now, digital marketing for SMEs has become an essential resource to survive the fierce competition in the market.

The digital transformation has always been a challenge for SMEs, but with the pandemic, this fact has become a must. SMEs need to adapt more than ever and have an online presence to attract the attention of their target audience and, thus, attract customers.

In this article we will see 8 digital marketing actions that every SME can incorporate into their marketing plan. Do not miss it!

1. Make a strategic approach

Before starting any action, digital marketing has almost an obligation to develop prior planning and, above all, work on the definition of various aspects. The idea is based on identifying and establishing the foundations of your digital strategy to ensure that you are allocating your resources in the right direction. In this way, we will not only organize ourselves better by focusing on the right information, but we will also avoid many errors.

What steps must be followed to design a digital marketing strategy for SMEs? These are our recommendations:

             Identify what your competitive advantage is . To develop a certain marketing strategy, either online or offline, you must be clear about how you differ. Competitive advantage refers to the characteristics or attributes that a product or brand possesses and that give it a certain superiority over its immediate competitors.

             Describe your business model in great detail . Defining your business perfect is like knowing what your DNA is, how it is made, how it can be modified, how to polish, how to change, how to mold ...

             Audit your company . Once we know exactly what the characteristics of the business model are, how it is structured, what is its line of products and services, etc., it is advisable to continue analyzing. The ideal is to perform a SWOT analysis to present in the form of a square matrix the conclusions about:

o             Weaknesses and strengths: focus on your internal characteristics and prioritize impartiality in your analytical capacity.

o             Threats and opportunities: analyze the external situation of the SME.

             Definition of your buyer persona : the buyer persona is the archetype of the ideal customer for your service or product. Be clear about how is, what its characteristics, needs or concerns are, how it can reach your product or service, in which circles or online sites it operates, what is its economic situation, etc. In this way, you can later trace the buyer journey and define much better digital marketing strategies to target exactly who you want to reach.

             Clearly visualize what resources you have . Bearing in mind that being an SME it is usual to have a tight budget, it is more important than ever to ask yourself this question at an early stage. So you can invest in those actions that can really have an impact on your goals.

2. Owned media for a content strategy with SEO

If you have a website, you will know that working on SEO is essential. And if you still do not have a website for your business, you can start now, as it will be the basis with which to develop your digital marketing strategies.

As you knows, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the set of onpage and offpage actions and strategies that allow a web page to be positioned in the top positions of Google search results.

To work on SEO, first of all it is convenient to identify which are the main words for which you want to position your website . Later you can design a strategy to achieves it.

In addition to working on all the page of your websites so that they are well optimize at the SEO levels, you can go one step further and work on generating visits through your own channel in which you put a content strategy. Sound great, right? ... but how do you get it?

You must generate a content plan based on the keywords that best satisfy the search intention of your buyer persona. Once you have it, it is time to creates content to publish it on your blogs. If that content is well optimize for SEO and is relevants to your buyer persona, it is a matter of time to get your post to reach the top positions of Google.

This is how we will get to owned media , which is the term with which we call our own medium or channel to achieve your marketing objectives. In addition to the blog or the news channel on the website, it is advisable to have different corporate profiles on social networks and even a YouTube channel where you can, for example, upload the videos of your interviews with external collaborators.

But we can still go further and make use of paid media. So over time you will also achieve earned means.

If you want to know more about the difference between own, paid and earned media, I recommend this

3. Lead scoring, segmentation of contacts

The next point in your digital marketing strategy for SMEs goes through the segmentation of contact.

Knowing your databases is key to being able to communicate with it. So working on the lead scoring technique can help you a lot.

This technique consists of, through an automated marketing technique, classifying the leads in your database based on how they approach your ideal customer and when they are on the buyers journey.

If you are generating your database, it is the best time for you to spend time defining your own scoring system and, in this way, you will have an ordered database that you will know well and, therefore, you will be able to get higher performance.

To do this, asks yourself:

             What information do I need to identify if a contacts matches my buyer persona?

             How is my purchase process?

             What is the trigger that indicates that a contact has enough interaction with my brand?

             What is the behavior of a contact who is in the decision phase?

             When is a contact ready to move from marketing to sales?

             How to identify and classify my client to work on them personalized loyalty actions?

             How to identify sleeping contact to direct engagement actions on them?

4. Email marketing

Once you know your database in depth, designing a communication strategy with it through email marketing will serve as a speaker.

A tool like email marketing can help you send emails to your database with personalized content adapted to different situations to achieve a variety of marketing objectives. For example:

             Educational emails focused on accompanying and guiding users in their purchase process. With this channel you can make an ideal accompaniment in each phase of the user's purchase process, providing the appropriate information at the most convenient time. This is what is known as lead nurturing or lead maturation .

             Newsletters to maintain contact with the user . For example, keeping you informed of the news in the sector and positioning yourself as a reference. In this way, they do not observe this channel as something merely commercial, but also a means with which to keep up to date, considering us useful.

             Communications necessary to support a good user experience , for example, to send the user downloadable content or thank you for subscribing. You always have to appear helpful and clearly guide the user about the next action to take.

             Loyalty emails , to encourage recurrence in the purchase, disseminate special offers or look for upsellings. Believe it or not, it is one of the most effective numerical marketing techniques to achieve sales among the most indecisive or those who seemed to forget about us.

In this way, we can start to implement inbound marketing and try to get the user we are interested in to make certain conversions.

5. Online advertising

An online marketing strategy conceived as an accelerator of results for SMEs is online advertising. Place like that, it seems like a very general way of speaking. But previously we told you that, just as you have to work with an owned media, you also have to resort to paid media. And one of the most effective for short-term results is online inbound advertising (POI).

What this type of advertising does is take advantage of the downloadable content that you have been able to generate in your content strategy to promote them on social networks. In this way, you will be able to capture records in the initial phases of a purchase process and boost the stage of attracting the target audience.

This is an well-organized way to feedstuff the upper part of the funnel . Once you get a series of contacts or you manage to increase the number of web visits, you will have a better chance of reaching a second phase. In other words, after promoting content through payment channels (such as Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn Ads), you will have the opportunity to accompany and educate the user until the moment of the final transaction, putting your segmentation and maturation strategy to the test. of leads.

Another choice is to invest in transactional campaigns using traditional connected advertising . That is, directly promote your products or services. However, from the inbound marketing methodology, this is something that we indorse once the contacts have gone through lead scoring and are in a more advanced stage of the purchase process.

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