SOURCE: MINUTEHACK

Being a small busi­ness can be hard, being a new start-up ven­ture can be even more so. From learn­ing to do your own book-keep­ing to get­ting the keys to your first bricks-and-mor­tar store; the major­i­ty of entre­pre­neur­ship is learn­ing on your feet and grab­bing valu­able life-lessons as you go along.

Your mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy can be the dif­fer­ence between hit­ting the ground run­ning or not get off to a fly­ing start at all.

Here are five marketing lessons you can take from the pros…

Create a strategy

Just like the big brands, you’ll need to cre­ate a con­cise and struc­tured mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy. Fail­ing to plan and sim­ply jump­ing from idea to idea, week on week, only sets you up for fail­ure and gives a dis­joint­ed mes­sage to your cus­tomers. Do your research, clear­ly define your tar­get audi­ence, and set mea­sur­able and achiev­able goals.

Hav­ing a clear mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy in place is an essen­tial part of any busi­ness strat­e­gy and sets you on the path to suc­cess. Ensur­ing that you have an accu­rate way of mea­sur­ing how well the mar­ket­ing efforts of your busi­ness are per­form­ing is a key com­po­nent to devel­op­ing your busi­ness further.

creating strategy

Your Ranking Matters

Search Engine Opti­mi­sa­tion (SEO) is an invalu­able and essen­tial mar­ket­ing tool. When it comes to search­a­bil­i­ty and vis­i­bil­i­ty for your brand, being on the first page of a poten­tial cus­tomers search engine result is a must. Strong SEO will max­imise your brand’s pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, and allow you to tar­get poten­tial cus­tomers with precision.

Reach­ing the right cus­tomers will then turn clicks into con­ver­sions and gen­er­ate a real-time rev­enue stream. Just start­ing out? Con­sid­er employ­ing an SEO com­pa­ny who can work with you to eval­u­ate your com­pa­ny’s needs and dri­ve the right traf­fic to your website.

Never Underestimate The Power of Social Media

In this dig­i­tal age, social media is an easy and free way to get your busi­ness on people’s radar. Being an active pres­ence on social media is one of the best ways to encour­age brand engage­ment and pro­duce user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent. An iron-clad and proac­tive social media strat­e­gy is a sim­ple and effec­tive way to organ­i­cal­ly grow your client based and cre­ate authen­tic brand relationships.

Listen To Your Customer

As a busi­ness own­er, cus­tomer feed­back both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive is invalu­able. Hav­ing an insight into your cus­tomers true brand sen­ti­ments can help shape your busi­ness and inform your future deci­sions regard­ing it.

Active­ly lis­ten­ing to your cus­tomers and ask­ing them for their opin­ions, shows them that you val­ue them and their input. In turn, this can make sure that your cus­tomers are more like­ly to return for repeat custom.

Offer Incentives

Every­body loves some­thing for free. One of the best ways to get con­sumers atten­tion is to offer an incen­tive. Peo­ple love being offered a dis­count, a free prod­uct or the chance to enter a com­pe­ti­tion to win a prize. It’s is a great way to attract poten­tial buy­ers and gain a big­ger client base across online and offline mar­ket­ing efforts.