Marketing strategies to grow your business
• Some of the marketing strategies that you can adopt to grow your business are brand advocacy ratio, PR strategies, influencer marketing, and customer research.
• Brand Advocacy Ratio tells you how good your product is today.
• PR strategies make you stand out from the crowd using different strategies.
• Influence marketing involves getting associated with an influencer to attract relative audience.
• Customer research involves understanding your customers and their needs.
Different types of marketing strategy with examples
It takes a lot of time, money, and efforts to create a campaign that resonates with your intended audience. If you market in a way that makes your audience listen to what you want to say, then you will grow tremendously.
Golden Statement:
You need will power to do something, not a season.
Every medium will gather around, you just need the wealth of determination.
Today, we will discuss 4 types of marketing strategies:
• Brand Advocacy Ratio
• PR Strategy
• Influence Marketing
• Consumer Research
1: Brand Advocacy Ratio (Make this a Key Note)
How many brand advocates do you have?
How many people, who purchased your product, turned into your advocates?
For example:
Bada Business has many advocates whom we are very thankful to. We give them good content on YouTube and they share it further.
Create Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) based on the following questions:
• How is your customer perceiving your brand?
• What is your customer writing on social media about you?
• What words would they use to describe your brand?
Brand Advocacy Ratio tells you how good your product is today.
For Example:
• Total number of customers who have purchased your products = 10,000
• Out of 10,000, No. of customers who became your advocates = 1000
• These advocates are bringing more customers to you; they are sharing information about you; and talking about your product.
• Brand advocacy ratio = Brand Advocates/Total no. of customers purchased the product x 100
• Brand Advocacy ratio = (1000/10,000) x 100 = 10%
• Hence, your Brand Advocacy Ratio for this sale is 10%.
You need to see that if you increase your brand advocates, you won’t have to bear the extra cost of sales, media promotions, media buying, advertisement, and employees because your customer will bring more customers.
This is the best model wherein customer brings more customers, promotes your product, and praises your product. This will decrease your cost of sale but will keep on increasing your sales.
For example:
• Many saints and gurus do the same for their products.
• When Baba Ram Rahim made movies on himself, it was his followers who advocated about the movie and went to watch it.
Advocates are those who become your devotees and work for you. Think about how you can increase your advocates.
Golden Statement:
Your brand advocates are more valuable than any advertisement you could do ever.
No matter how much advertisement you do, it will never be able to come close to the kind of advertisement that an advocate does because advocates bring you revenue through their references.
2: PR Strategies for Small Businesses
If it’s difficult for you to hire a PR agency, then you can do it yourself or through your team.
For example:
• During lockdown, Bada Business was also managed their PR, many news channels, TV channels, and print media covered their world records.
• It was also covered in the digital media on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
A good PR helps you achieve the following:
• Raise Awareness
• Get New Customers
• Builds Brand Trust
• Attract New Employees
• Attract New Investors
• Generate New Leads
All you have to do is:
• Use social media to invite participation
• Bring start up influencer to build traffic
• Stand out from the crowd with a publicity stunt
• Position yourself as an expert of the industry
• Do viral marketing campaigns
• Become part of a cause
• Collaborate with agency
For example:
• Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar associated with the cause of river water to gain the public’s attention.
• On the other hand, the Iskcon temple association picked up the cause of feeding the poor to attract people.
You can also pick up any cause.
If possible, work with an agency. Covering local media is very easy and it doesn’t cost you much money but does wonder for your promotion.
3: Influence Marketing
You should find an influencer for your business.
There are many types of influencers.
Sachin Tendulkar, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, and Salman Khan are one type of influencers.
But, there are other influencers, who have a huge traffic on social media.
• 80% marketers find influencer marketing more effective nowadays.
• 71% of marketers rate the quality of customers & traffic from influencer marketing better than other marketing sources.
• 89% marketing gurus say influencer marketing ROI is much better than other marketing channels.
So, use the influencers for marketing your products.
Find the right influencer from your industry. Your and your influencer’s customer should be the same to attract the required traffic.
How to find influencers?
Entertainment channels can use influencers like Amit Bhadana, Bhuvan Bam (BB ki Vines), and Ajay Nagar (CarryMinati) for influencing students.
While selecting the right influencer, you should keep in mind:
• Target customer should be the same
• Non-competing brand focusing on same customers
For example:
Someone who prints a wedding card and a wedding band has the same customers. They can promote each other.
To know the right influencer for your business, you need to:
• Identify your influencer
• Negotiate with them
• Give them a final offer
• Approve their content
• Let it run
Which social media platform to go to?
You should go to the social media platform that has more traffic for you. You can select the platform from the following list:
• YouTube – Serious traffic
• Tik Tok – Non-serious traffic
How does a deal with influencers work?
Influencers charge you in the following manner to be associated with a brand:
• Commission
• Growth percentage – Nano/Micro influencers
• Barter – corporative sales or gross promotion influencers
• Cost per Impression (CPM) – Others
• Cost per subscriber
Golden Statement:
People will influence the people, influence creates affluence.
4: Consumer Research
Research about your consumer.
Understand your customer using following points:
• Who will buy your product?
• How often will they buy your product?
• What is your ideal customer?
• What do they need? – This is the problem of the customer that you are solving.
• What do they want? – This is the product.
Map out the profile of your ideal customer; understand your market size; and identify the customer triggers to buy, i.e. when the customer buys your product.
Determine the following about your customers:
• Age
• Gender
• Education
• Family status
• Household Income
• Occupation
• Geographical location – city, village, rural, urban, or sub-urban area.
• Class
• Lifestyle
• Personality traits
• Generation
• Interests
• Hobbies
• Behaviour – brand affinity, shopping habits
How will you do consumer research?
You can do customer research through:
1. Primary Research:
In this, you do research yourself. For this, you can conduct surveys using forms that will be filled by people. These forms contain questions like Yes/No Tick Box, Multiple Choice Questions, Checkbox, Rating scale, etc.
You can also do personal survey. If your client number is less, then you can do one-to-one survey.
You can also use telephonic survey. In this survey, you can use 100 call method wherein you get to know in 100 calls whether the customer will buy this product or not. This method also removes your fear of rejection.
Apart from this, you can do the following types of surveys:
• Mail surveys
• Online surveys
• Group discussions
• Data observation
• Google surveys
b. Secondary Research: When you take the help of Google search for customer research.
Stopping marketing activities is like stopping your clock.
Can you save your time by stopping your clock? No.
Just like that, you will have to do marketing to make your customer listen to what you have to say.
Golden statement:
Good marketing makes the company look smart.
Great marketing makes the consumer feel smart.
Conclusion :
• Use marketing strategies to boost your business
• Increase your Brand Advocacy Ratio to get more customers
• Work with agencies or your team to make PR strategies and get noticed
• Identify and tie up with an influencer to promote your product and bring more customers
• Know your customer well by researching about them and understanding their needs.