As an entrepreneur, you are likely excited to share your dream with the world. You have a great product, a solid business plan, and a dedicated team. Now all you need are some customers. Your family and friends are supportive, of course, but you want to reach a lot of people outside of your immediate circle who you know will benefit from your product. You hire a web designer to create a beautiful site. You establish a presence on all the social media platforms. You know that there is more to attracting and maintaining a customer base, but you aren’t sure what steps to take next.
You are not alone. This is a common issue faced by many small to medium business sized owners. In fact, it is said that in Australia, small business owners face a variety of challenges ranging from attracting customers and generating sales.
You’ll be surprised to know that 11% of small businesses in Australia end up in failure as they are not able to generate the much needed sales and marketing.
It is observed that such businesses are turning to email marketing to generate quality leads.
Email marketing services help you build your customer database while teaching you how to keep the customers you have coming back to you instead of going to the competition. It might seem counterintuitive to hire a marketing service before establishing your client base, but here are 5 reasons why it benefits you to work with professionals now who can help you get set up for future success.
1. Marketing Training
Marketing might sound straightforward if you don’t have any experience with it. Get a good product, tell people how great it is, then watch the orders roll in, right? Unfortunately, it’s more complicated than that. An experienced marketer will tell you that in order to set yourself apart from the competition, you need to have a specific goal and that all of your content and communications should be tailored toward that goal.
A successful marketing campaign needs the right words, the right look, and the right incentives to turn visitors to your website into customers who have a great experience and then keep coming back for more. A marketing services team can provide training that will teach your promising small business how to effectively market your product (or do it for you!).
2. Search Engine Optimisation
Unless you’re technologically inclined, you might not know that there is a whole system for influencing how a website shows up on the top page of search engine results. Simply put, search engine optimisation, or SEO, is all about optimising your website to contain specific words or phrases that a customer might search for when shopping for a product or service like yours. That way, your website will appear in their searches. This complex system can be difficult to unpack and leverage on your own, so getting help from someone who really understands SEO is key to turning casual searchers into dedicated clients.
3. Content Building
Now that you know how to optimise your website, you need content. The quality and quantity of your content can help to drive traffic to your website. Most products have blogs in order to increase the opportunities for success with SEO algorithms. In this case, a marketing service can be particularly important as you can get help to create content if you feel like you’re more of the ideas person than the writing person. The content on your blog is essential for attracting new customers. Your email content is essential for maintaining your customer base which means it, too, needs to be relevant and of high quality.
4. Goal Setting
Sometimes you want to send an email about a new product. Sometimes you want to update your customer base about a change in your company. Maybe you want to offer a sale to convince page visitors to become clients. Whatever your goal is, an email marketing team can help you define it. The reality is, you probably want to do all of those things at some point, but you shouldn’t try to do them all in a single email.
Goal setting for a particular blog post or email series is important as it helps you focus on the specific segment of your growing client base that you want to engage with. Many of your clients might feel like their inboxes are overrun with unopened messages. In order to ensure you have the highest open rate possible, your emails need to be targeted to a specific goal that will appeal to the customer you hope to reach.
5. Strategy Assessment
What happens if you work with a marketing team and everything goes great at first but then things start to fizzle? If you make monumental leaps in your first couple of months, that kind of growth is difficult to maintain long term. But if you find that you are really struggling to connect with new customers or you start to lose your customer base, then an excellent marketing team works with you to reassess your strategy and decide what steps to take to get your marketing campaign back on track.
Conclusion
You don’t have to have a solid customer database for your small business enterprise to make it worth your while to work with a marketing service. Marketing professionals can help you understand digital marketing in order to make it work for you and turn your family and friends email list into a strong, loyal base of customers who love your product.
