There are lots of foul-smelling marketing ideas business owners still employ, even when the hand is clearly written on the wall that these ideas no longer break the bank.
Customers of this new century are being presented with lots of sweetened offers day in day out by countless businesses. So, what have you done to stay above the flow?
Let me tell you…
Your business can’t WIN or DOMINATE if you’re scared of embracing new and emerging ideas. Why focus on old fashioned marketing laws?
Here are stupid marketing ideas that will cost you heavily this year:
-
Focusing on Sales and Not Retention
The easiest way to grow your customer base is never to lose any of your current customers.
You really need to actively grow your customer base to survive in business, this year.
Customer acquisition is half of the whole equation. One mistake I’ve always seen business owners make is always trying to milk the hell out their customers on their first deal.
You don’t need to think short term when it comes to landing a client for your business…
…think of the LTV and future benefits
Most businesses invest so much in acquiring a customer, after the sale is being made they will abandon that customer.
You need to keep nurturing your existing customers by providing them enormous value via email, chatbots, phone calls etc.
Your retention strategy is how you maximize the profitability of each customer
According to statistics, a customer that has bought from you is 82% more likely to bring out his wallet for you again and again!
Another data point states that:
But in the case where you have refused to set up the right system in place to sell to them repeatedly?
You are indirectly sending them to your competition.
You may earn thousands of dollars from a short-term relationship, but lose a MILLION dollars for not keeping a long-term term relationship, with your customers.
PLAY THE LONG-TERM GAME
Here are few customer retention strategies that might help you this year:
- Always ask for feedbacks after the first deal
- Feeding and re-engaging them via email, chabots and phone calls
- Always be transparent and honest with your customers
- Incentivize your customers whenever they take an action (social shares, mentions, testimonials)
- Provide an excellent customer service
- Save their money sometimes (coupons, discounts and specials)
-
You Can Do it All Alone
Seriously,
There’s no way you can do it all by yourself.
If you aren’t good at keeping accounts, find someone who can.
If you don’t understand how marketing and sales funnels works, hire an expert and crush in lead generation and sales.
And focus on those aspects you’re potentially good at. Everyone has a role remember?
This is one of the bad marketing ideas business owners employ. Not delegating tasks.
Businesses in 2020 need to place their focus on their core business processes while delegating mundane, exhaustive and time-consuming processes to external hands.
This is one of the steps you need to take in your business, in order to dominate.
There are places you can get helping hands at affordable prices:
-
Not Branding You
One of the ultimate mistakes most business owners make unknowingly is trying to front their product and services instead of themselves.
They got it wrong!
You must brand YOU and not your products, not your services.
As a business owner, you must have to work towards becoming the ideal Attractive Character people would want to emulate, people should like and want to become.
Remember people buy products from people and not companies. Not just people but those they know, like and trust.
Business owners must strive to building and developing their personal brands in 2020.
When you invest in building your personal brand, you gain authority in your area of expertise and also help you to set the stage to capitalize on future favorable circumstances.
What personal branding will do to you is that it will:
- Make you stand above the rest
- Make you become an expert in your field
- Help you build trust and recognition
-
Thinking You Need a Website
Another horrible marketing idea most businesses, especially new entrants in the online marketing space make is that they always ponder on the need of getting a good looking website.
Nah!
Totally wrong.
There are so many failing businesses now that have websites that just don’t function for them in any way.
The first steps they took after launching their business is paying a designer a huge sum of money to set up a website.
I wouldn’t blame them because they were told so by SOME marketer, or they saw other businesses in their space launching websites.
Building a website isn’t the best considerable option when setting your business online.
The entrepreneurs of this century look beyond having colorful websites.
To be frank here, websites aren’t designed to bring you sales. In fact, they do not help you accomplish the mission of generating leads and building relationships with new visitors.
Websites can’t follow up with people who leave your page.
Once they’re gone, that’s the end!
Most of your first visitors will never step a foot back to your webpage.
Bad news you’d say?
But truth!
You only have few minutes seconds to win and capture them (contact info) while they’re on your site, so you can be able to warm and remarket to them via email or messenger chatbot.
I’ve been expecting you to ask me one critical question. If I don’t need a website…
…What then do I need for my business to dominate online?
In a simple sentence. YOU NEED A SALES FUNNEL!
Sales funnels are the SECRET to successes online.
This is a marketing system that helps convert your cold prospects to lead/warm prospect to customers then to repeat buyers.
With a sales funnel you’ll be able to develop series of pages interlinked together into processes called funnel.
This is where every prospect must go through till they become a diehard customer to your business.
Sales funnel gives you a lot of functionality to make your business succeed online, because an awesome sales funnel tool will provide you with:
-Landing page builder for sales
-Email Autoresponder for remarketing and nurturing your prospects
-Shopping cart software for sales
-Web hosting
-Photo editing software
-Payment gateway etc
And most importantly, NO NEED TO PAY ANY WEB DESIGNER
Read this post see the complete lists of online funnel building software and choose the one that matches your business goals.
-
Ignoring Videos
This year, Video marketing will be everything! Know this if you know not.
This form of marketing isn’t something you should turn a blind eye to, one bit.
Video is defensibly the most entertaining, engaging and addicting form of content online.
No matter the type of business you operate. Online, Offline or Warmline. I made that “warmline” up, lol.
Endeavor to use video marketing in growing your brand and keep up with consumers.
Another reason is that many of your potential consumers spend almost the whole day dwelling on their mobile phones either watching their favorite content creator on YouTube,
Scrolling through their Facebook feed; watching live updates, new product launch, or a video ad on the platform.
There are couple of ways you as a business owner can dominate this year using video marketing.
Some of them are:
-
Live videos
Using the video feature on Instagram and Facebook can serve as a means to show off your new and existing products and services where you can offer:
-demonstrations
-tutorials
-interviews
-Q&A sessions and many more
A live video is a free and simple way to boost awareness and initiate conversation between you and your audience.
-
Vlogging
Vlogging is another amazing way to grow your customer base and business in general through YouTube.
One thing I personally love about video marketing is its affordability. All you need to get started is a smartphone, maybe an editing software and YouTube or IGTV channel of course.
Video content boosts conversion and sales because your consumers are more likely to engage and take actions based on what’s inside a video unlike written texts.
-
Partying on Social Media
The sooner you realize the fact that Facebook, Instagram, and a few other social platforms have freely given us access to use our personal profile to market and expand our business to countless audiences…
…the better for your entrepreneurship voyage.
Business owners this year must do everything possible to turn their personal Facebook profile into a lead generation machine for their businesses.
Now is the time to take social media seriously!
Why should you spend your precious time updating about:
- The latest happening in the entertainment industry
- Seeking for opinions related to the trending celebrity gossips
- Political happenings and the incompetence of the politicians
- Soccer and fashion
With your personal profile. Like?
To be honest with you friend, nobody cares about all that!
Your business needs you on social media. Thousands and Millions of prospects with problems you can solve awaits you.
What’s stopping you from making your Facebook profile the central point of your business on social?
- Your friends
- Family members?
Remember nobody cares more than you do!
Once you start posting valuable contents about your business on your personal profile and stop partying, I guarantee you’ll start getting massive results and positive growth all around your business.
Here are surefire tips that will help you optimize your personal profile:
-Get a simple professional headshot as profile picture
-Get a good cover photo depicting what you’re all about
-Make sure your BIO speaks about what you do, who you serve and results you/products brings
–Tell stories with your updates and go visual
-Get into industry related groups and interact
-Add those you share same interest with as friends
These will build your CREDIBILTY.
Once you optimize your profile around your business, there’s no way people aren’t going to listen or interact with your content and offers whenever you make an update.
Making sense?
-
Not Building Contact List
For many of you small business owners, building a contact list, especially an email list might sound archaic.
It’s more than a stupid idea to not build lists this year.
Building an email list is the number one priority of every online business owner, and that should be your priority as well.
Email marketing is still prevalent and effective when done rightly.
That is one major way to keep your current customers and build trusts with potential and new customers.
Another method businesses could build and nurture their contact list is through messenger chatbot. Don’t forget that people are now using messaging apps on the go 24/7.
There are lots of tools out there that you can quickly use in building your first bot. Or better still hire a builder to get it done.
Do consider carrying out any of the below activities that shall help in building a list:
- Continue to collect email addresses and send messages to your subscribers.
- Make sure you get an email marketing software
- Always ask for your customers email address after purchase
- Host a giveaway which requires participants to give contacts
- Run a Facebook messenger ad campaign that requires opt-in to your chatbots
-
Sinking in old ideas
The importance of embracing new marketing ideas and emerging digital marketing tools and tactics can’t be overemphasized.
Adaptability and constant inquisitiveness will be the distinguishing characteristic of businesses this year.
In order for you to avoid adapting bad marketing ideas – unknowingly- and create a suitable working marketing strategy, you must be ready to dump and stop relying on old traditional marketing formula.
Times and trends are changing the way businesses market to customers. In order to keep up with the ever-changing scene, you need to step up with the evolving trends.
Here are most of the leading new marketing trends and ideas that you should embrace come 2020:
- Influencer Marketing
- Interactive Chatbots
- Monitoring and tracking of every online activities
- Voice search
- Artificial intelligence
- Visual search
Conclusion
Being aware of these silly marketing ideas won’t make any difference in your business…
…But what actually matters is taking massive action on them to be able to triumph in your space.
Nobody is perfect. I know
Don’t be discouraged if you went through this piece and realized that you’ve been:
Focusing on new sales instead of retaining existing ones
Doing it all on your own
Not using videos as part of your marketing strategy
Fronting your products and service instead of YOU
Planning on paying a huge sum just to get a business website
Not building a contact list
Dwelling on old marketing tactics
The first thing I want you to do is to identify and accept these are unfavorable marketing ideas and then take the necessary steps to correct them one after the other.
Not trying to correct them all at once. You might get fed up.
Adapting one of these marketing tactics can help you incorporate others easily, as well.
Let’s say you have decided to setup systems that will help follow-up and keep existing customers.
Doing that will make you want to:
Build a contact list through the use of email marketing or messenger chatbot
Getting a helping hand to help with automation and few other marketing activities
Getting a sales funnel that will make the whole process easier
Using your product description video on your sales page
Presenting yourself and become the attractive character people loves
You see?
As simple as that… Don’t get overwhelmed!
It’s just a matter of little actions ny applying new and profiting marketing ideas.
What are your plans to adopting most of these ideas? Have you started already?
If there are other amazing marketing ideas, I wouldn’t mind to know.
