marketing

Marketing Strategies & Ideas For Small Businesses and Charities

| JDriver

About These Marketing Ideas

The list is large, and contains many ideas that span the whole gamut of media. Use it as a mind-mapping start point, and choose what is suitable for your business. See if you can combine particular ideas, or turn them on their head to come up with something unique and surprising.

Bonus: Social Media Checklist

Stuck for marketing ideas, or other ways to ensure that your message is reaching your audiences? I’m pleased to offer this extensive list of marketing ideas. I hope that it gets your creative juices flowing.

Marketing Ideas and Social Media Checklist

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General Marketing Advice Tips

| JDriver

Marketing is a vast and complex subject. It needs careful consideration if it’s to be done right, and can be an expensive mistake if done wrongly. Here are some tips about marketing in general, and its aims.

1. What are your strengths and who will appreciate them?

Marketing isn’t a ‘one-size-fits-all’ exercise; carefully targeting your marketing to a specific group means that it’s likely to be more effective and that your efforts aren’t wasted by trying to appeal to people who won’t want/need your product or service.

2. Understand the wants and needs of your customers

What need or desire of your customer will you be fulfilling? Think about what you are offering and which needs you will be meeting.

3. Differentiate yourself from the competition

How will you be different from your competition? There’s a number of ways you can do this, will it be price? Level of service?

4. Be clear about what you and your business stands for

People love consistency and consistency will help you strengthen your brand. What is your message? Will people remember you for it?

5. Fail to plan…

…and plan to fail. Trite but true. Figure out your goals and a way to measure results.

6. Don’t assume people want what you’re selling

This is particularly true of new products. Although it’s great to find a niche and fill it, do your research first. What problem is your product resolving?

7. Marketing isn’t…

Just having a website, placing an ad in the paper, having a leaflet, or trying to sell the same thing to everybody.

Email Marketing Tips – Some Fundamentals

| JDriver

Email marketing can be useful if done correctly. Unfortunately, making them effective can be difficult as people can get inundated with emails clamouring for their attention and people are less forgiving when it comes to regarding emails as spam.

1. Greet Them Personally

Using the recipients first name makes the email seem more legitimate as it makes them think that the sender is known to them, therefore they’re more likely to read it.

2. One-Click Unsubscribe

Should a recipient wish to unsubscribe, you should honour the request graciously and promptly. If you categorise your various email communications, recipients can then have the option to stop receiving one type, whilst choosing to receive another type.

3. Consistency

As with all of your companies marketing materials, keeping a consistent look and feel means that you strengthen your brands image. Not to mention that it looks professional.

4. People Buy From People

Emails are typically a bit more informal than other means so don’t be afraid to inject some personality into your marketing emails.

5. Give People A Reason To Read The Email

Although you are passionate about your business you can’t expect your customers to be as enthusiastic. There should be a good reason for the recipient to read to email and to continue receiving them. Make it useful, make it informative, add discount coupons, exclusive deals or what ever else you can think of.

6. Test And Test Some More

Once you start sending email out you need to keep and eye on how well they’re performing. Commercial email marketing software will provide analytic results so that you can see various information, such as how many people open the email etc. Ideally you should test two slightly different emails at the same time, so half of your mailing list receive one version the rest receive the other version. This is called A/B SPLIT TESTING. Comparing one email against another means that you can see which is more effective and then keep altering and testing to make them as effective as they can be.

6.2 Test Your Subject Line

The subject line is one of the primary aspects of a marketing email that will dictate whether the recipient will open the email or trash it. A/B split test your subject lines.

7. Avoid Assassins

Spam assassins and other tools can silently take out your email without the proposed recipient ever seeing it. Here’s some common pitfalls just to get you started:

  • DON’T USE ALL CAPS
  • Avoiding using multiple exclamation marks
  • Words such as ‘Free’, ‘Sex’, ‘Discount’ and ‘Click Here!’ will give spam assassins itchy trigger-fingers
  • HTML emails must be properly coded
  • Avoid large image to text ratios. A common tactic of spammers is to use large images instead of text in order to disguise the content
  • Use only permission-based email lists

8. Tell Your Providers

If you’re campaign is likely to be quite substantial, let your email service provider know. Otherwise you may get blacklisted as a spammer.

9. Give The Option of HTML And Plain Text

You should also give people this choice. Personal freedom aside, HTML emails are displayed differently by the various email clients there are. An email viewed in Outlook may well look different to one viewed in Gmail for instance.

10. Keep The Best Content At The Top

Nearly all email clients have a preview pane, allowing recipients to view an email without actually opening it. Keep your best content at the top of the email to make sure they see it.