An entrepreneur can succeed in his or her endeavors without being a marketer or sales expert. In fact, you don’t have to have one marketing bone in your body in order to find success with your business. This may sound a bit strange because after all, every entrepreneur goes into business to sell something, right? While that’s true, it still doesn’t mean every entrepreneur was born with marketing talent or has a background in it.
If you’re supposed to be marketing your business but don’t know how to market, here are some tactics to use that will have you pitching your business like a real pro in no time flat.
Produce Content and Plenty of It
Today, online sales happen through content marketing. You will be a success at generating sales if you are a success at marketing content. You may be surprised to learn that businesses that maintain blogs have 97 percent more inbound links than their non-blogging counterparts. The key to producing content is to produce a lot of it as businesses with websites of 400+ pages get six times as many leads as websites consisting of 100 pages or less. How do you get more pages? B adding more content, of course. Just make sure your content is created with your targeted audience in mind and geared toward helping them by offering new information, tips & hints and solutions to problems they typically have.
Create a Mailing List
Remember that old Rolodex your grandfather had on his desk? The modern day email list is the equivalent of that snazzy little gizmo. Compared to content marketing, email marketing is a well-aged channel for engaging online consumers. The fact that email marketing has been around for many years shows that it is a reliable way to convert leads into buyers and buyers into loyal, repeat customers.
By far, creating and curating an email list is one of the most important things any business owner can do. Once you’ve got your list, create emails that are tailored around providing help, solving problems and delivering useful content instead of directly trying to sell something. While this may seem counterproductive when you’re supposed to be marketing, it actually helps drive sales – that is if you craft great content your recipients will deem valuable and useful.
Self-Promote via Networking
There’s no one that knows your business better than you and there’s no better form of marketing than self-promotion. Therefore you should focus on spreading the word about your business using a bit of self-promotion combined with a splattering of bragging while rubbing elbows with people. Of course, you don’t want to be “that person” who shamelessly talks nonstop about themself and their business. When networking with others, save your pitches for those people who have a need for your business instead of pitching to everyone you encounter. Good salesmen establish positive relationships so show the people you’re networking with that you are interested in them. If there’s a good story behind your business, by all means tell it as people like hearing how businesses got started, what inspired the founders, etc.
