marketing
Businesswoman giving a presentation in an office

By Eileen O’Shanassy

Creating a well-rounded, comprehensive marketing strategy for your business can make the difference between temporary success and lasting success. Marketing’s value today goes far beyond just winning new customers. It also offers you loads of free intel about what your customers (current, future, and past) want and need from your products or services. In this post, find out what may be missing from your marketing campaign that could help your company realize its full market potential.

Email Management Software

Email management software permits you to effortlessly gather email addresses, sort them into relevant list groups, deliver niche messages to different groups and monitor engagement to each sent message. You need this tool in your marketing toolkit because, according to Entrepreneur, email marketing is not only not dead, but it delivers one of the highest returns on investment per email sent and is 40 percent more effective at turning a lead into a paying customer.

Content Marketing Plan

The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) states that developing a strong content plan will help you do three critical things:

  • Boost sales
  • Reduce cost
  • Connect with more loyal customers

Forbes offers five examples of valuable, relevant content marketing that can help you achieve CMI’s three critical things:

  • Infographics
  • Podcasts
  • Videos
  • Books
  • SEO (search engine optimized) website pages

You might also consider hiring on a content marketing agency who can help you develop these and other outreach marketing ideas to get your business to the right people.

Social Media Engagement

If your company has even one social media platform, you can count on your customers finding it and messaging you. This especially holds true if a customer is dissatisfied for any reason, but this expectation of real-time responsiveness is not limited to customer complaints. LinkedIn reports that approximately 67 percent of customers today use social media platforms to contact companies for customer support requests. So long as you respond within about 15 minutes, you are likely to retain a predominantly happy, satisfied customer base. Fall short of that goal, and you risk your loyal customers becoming your competitor’s loyal customers. There is one caveat, however. Before you simply endeavor to answer all queries ASAP, you need to be sure your staff is trained to provide real-time customer support and empowered to resolve issues quickly.

Each of these elements is a powerful tool in its own right, and deserves careful planning, testing and development before you launch. By adding these three elements to your campaign, you can reach customers where they are and meet their needs.

Eileen O’Shanassy is a freelance writer and blogger based out of Flagstaff, AZ. She writes on a variety of topics and loves to research and write. She enjoys baking, biking, and kayaking. Check out her Twitter @eileenoshanassy.