Make Marketing Your Friend

Marketing concepts can make your head swim! Disruptive Advertising suggests there are five ways to look at marketing your business, and this week’s graphic is from their article. The five types of marketing include 1) the production concept, 2) the selling concept, 3) the product concept, 4) the marketing concept, and 5) the social marketing concept. You may feel like information overload has set in when trying to apply methodology to your advertising campaign.

A word of advice: don’t get swamped in theory. Dive into action! In the year 2021 we all have websites, but driving traffic to the website is a fulltime job. Understanding algorithms for reaching the top of the heap is like putting together a treasure map without all the clues. Just sitting back and waiting to be discovered is like being a wallflower at the prom. Will anyone ask you to dance?

By taking a proactive approach, you can be steps ahead in the game. What sites are your customers visiting? What blogs are they reading? Engage them there. Go to where the people are. This involves cross-posting on Facebook. It may include hiring a VA to post and direct attention to you. You may ask your VA to write a guest blog and mention you on one of the platforms your clients visit. Instead of waiting to be discovered, how cool is it to meet your peeps where they already congregate?

How does this happen? Here are five easy steps:

1.     Hire a VA to post and cross post your Facebook page.

2.     Make sure you have a weekly blog on your website and have your VA post links from your blog to all of these sites with interested folks.

3.     Let your VA post blogs on other sites to introduce you to other platforms.

4.     Consistently visit with customers. Ask them what they read, if they’ve found any interesting blogs, what Facebook groups they enjoy. Feed this information to your VA.

5.     Like and comment on every post that your VA puts out there to further your business.

Active marketing walks you into a whole new realm of interaction with potential customers. It doesn’t throw marketing theories out with the dishwater, but instead points the way to better investment of your marketing capital as you see where to focus your efforts. Immersing yourself in your customers’ worlds can be exhausting when you have a business to run, but hiring a VA is a good investment. As an example, I work for local businesses in this capacity. I am paid by the hour or fraction of the hour with no benefits required by the business. Finding a VA means you get all the benefits of having an employee without any of the overhead employees typically require. Now, that’s a good deal!

You can find additional tactics on the Weidert site, and it’s worth taking a few moments to check them out. Your VA can equip you with emails, share your expertise in professional communities, attract a wider base, and set up a schedule for repurposing old content. Active marketing takes you beyond waiting for someone to walk in the door to finding the people most likely to walk in the door and nudging them in your direction. Is marketing ever perfect? No, but it’s a smaller pill to swallow when you focus your efforts and minimize your expense. Find and target your buyers! #bluespringschamber