16 Marketing Tips for Business Owners in 2016

We work with a lot of business owners who depend on Stokes, McNutt and Partners to help them turn their advertising dollars into profit. With a new year, comes new opportunity. Here are 16 marketing tips to grow your company profitably in 2016: 

1. Engage your prospects and customers: Information informs, but passion persuades. Be sure to create emotion-evoking messages that captivate your prospective and established customers.
2. Update your ads and campaigns regularly to avoid punch-line fatigue: An easy way to update your ads is to showcase a different feature or benefit of your product or service. Just be sure to maintain your energy level and show you can continuously improve things for your customer.
3. Market to qualified prospects only: Improve your revenue and profit by reaching only the prospects you want to convert the most.
4. Build your own app: Stop investing in other media organization brands, and start investing in your own. On a weekly basis, provide real value to your app subscribers by pushing information to them that will help them generate orders. Make your print materials come alive with an Augmented Reality Channel in your new, exclusive app, available in The App Store or Google Play. And, update your website weekly—publish new BLOG POSTS, graphic sliders & revise key sections. If the content on your website is growing tired, chances are prospects and customers have grown tired of visiting your site. Keep your site fresh, share valuable content consistently, optimize your search engine visibility, and reduce your customer acquisition costs.
5. Weave video into all of your marketing: A picture is worth a thousand words and a well-produced video will start a productive relationship between you and your qualified prospects.
6. Bring in AUTOMAGIC RESPONSES with a robust INBOUND MARKETING PROGRAM: If you want your marketing working 24/7/365 for FREE, then implement these strategies:
7. Put your ads in more places, more often: Sales is about timing, so you want your ads to be in front of qualified prospects when they are looking for your products or services. And, get your marketing working together—an integrated, consistent, strategic message will attract more future customers. Use multiple advertising mediums that fit your business.
8. Use a strong, single image with a concise message to maximize ad effectiveness: Be direct and grab your audience’s attention in the first five seconds, especially in radio or television ads.
9. Calculate customer acquisition costs: Once you understand how much it costs to close a new customer, there is no limit to how much you can grow.
10. Clearly understand the value of your average customer: In my experience in business, existing customers are worth five times what a new customer is worth. For this reason alone, set processes to deliver exceptional customer service to see your company grow.
11. Promote urgency and scarcity: Prospects will respond to limited time offers and want to be part of exclusive groups.
12. Build your brand strategy: What does your band say to prospects and customers? Since everything your company does contributes to your brand, develop a personality and an attitude with your brand. Create ads about your clients, not you. Since potential prospects don’t care if a company claims to be the biggest or greatest company in the industry, our own tagline is: Advertising Momentum for Your Business. Potential prospects don’t care if you claim to be the biggest or greatest company in your industry. They only care about why they need or want your products or services.
13. Establish a customer advisory board: Learn exactly what your customers want through this low-cost focus group strategy. You’ll also generate qualified referrals, too!
14. Create a marketing budget: Inspect what you expect regarding your marketing and advertising spend. Track the number of qualified responses that are generated by every campaign. Your marketing investment should generate 5X+ in revenue.
15. Place customer testimonials in every communication (on every page of your website!): We call testimonials TESTIMONEYS because they generate money for our clients who share them. You will build relationships with prospects earlier in their buying process with impactful testimoneys!
16. Seek the fresh-eyes, informed advice of an advertising agency or marketing professional: If you haven’t been professionally trained in marketing, don’t just make your marketing plan up as you go. Set a sound strategy, and then, implement it.

1. Create a Video Email Funnel.
2. Establish consistent email marketing
3. Share your core messages through all social media channels and promote those posts.
4. Build response-generating landing pages, and share informative tradable reports to obtain contact information from prospects in buying mode.

Remember, hope is not a strategy on which to grow your business. Be purposeful in expanding your business. If you have questions about how to implement any of these 16 Marketing Strategies in 2016, feel free to give me a call at (404) 775-0194 or send me an email at [email protected]. 

Let’s Get After It in 2016!

Ford Stokes                    

Founder & Strategy Partner

Stokes, McNutt & Partners, LLC

www.stokesmcnutt.com