You’re someone with a company that’s been marketing quite well in the past, but not to the margins you hoped for down on paper. You’ve met some targets here and there, and fallen short of a couple more, and you know you’ve got some things to improve. But just how do you do that? How do you up your game in the marketing world, and take a completely different or new direction that you know nothing about? Isn’t that a little too much of a risk for your small business?
Well, with a couple of the ideas below, you might find some inspiration in refining your current marketing strategy. Business is all about taking risks, of course, but there’s always ways to minimize any potential losses on the plans you have to advertise.
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You Use a Focus Group
First, you ask the public you’re trying to sell to. You bring in a select few of the target market you knew your product would be perfect for, and you sit them down in a room with a few questions and a few prompts. You show them an advert you’re working on, or the free samples you’re planning to release in the shops to pique people’s interest, and you get them to tell you what they think.
You ask them to be as honest/critical as possible, to make sure you’ve got real information and opinions to work with. After all, you need to know where you’re going wrong in the eyes of the people you want to buy your products, and the more detail they can give you, the better.
As we mentioned above, make it easy for your focus group members by providing the questions for them to answer. Hold an event to try and maximise the amount of people who come along to give their thoughts, or just sit a few people who answered an email down in a room and give them a survey to fill in. Even make their answers anonymous, so there’s no doubt about how honest they’re being!
You Talk to a Professional
Next, you ask a professional who knows what they’re doing. You go along to a marketing agency and enroll their services, to make sure you’ve got the best of the best on your side for the marketing plan you’ve come up with. After all, it can be both hard and expensive to try and find a marketing expert of your own on job sites and in newspapers, so it might be better for your company resources to make use of a service in the short term.
This is an experimental time, and if you have some professionals around to strengthen your chances of success, you’re going to find the next 3 to 6 months a lot more informative than you would if you were working on your own.
Your marketing strategy is going to grow and change as time goes on, which is only natural. So make sure you’re setting up properly.