Being a business owner means you care about what you do and what you work hard for. You want to share it with the world around you – and the way that you do that is with effective, strategic marketing. Where many go wrong is that they complicate marketing to the point of ineffectiveness, or shift focus away from the message that they want to market by hyper-focusing on only the product or service.
So when it comes to marketing, you can make it simple by merely condensing it into one rule of thumb to follow: advertise the message that you believe in.
The essence of marketing is making sure other people hear, understand, and digest the message that you’re talking about. Yet in what ways does that usually happen? Typically, with a large marketing firm or a consultant who pushes the idea that business owners need to be ready to spend tens of thousands of dollars to spread a message.
But there are three simple questions that business owners can ask themselves if they want someone else to hear their message.
#1 – Who Are You Trying to Reach?
The first step in getting a message across is by asking who the target audience is – that is, who are you trying to reach with your message? Many people are not thinking about who specifically they’d like to target, simply because they have the mentality that any traction or attention is positive. The reality is that the only traction that matters is that of the people you were trying to get your message out to in the first place.
Should your message be delivered to young people? Older people? Retirees? Are you trying to find people that already belong to a service or people that might be looking for a new service? The target demographic you’re looking to extend your message to matters because they are the ones going to be taking the action that you want to see.
Think about your message. Who will connect to it? Who will it take it personally? In order for people to “buy into” a product or service, they need to relate to the content of the message.
Here’s why this question is so important to yourself: When you figure out who you’re trying to reach, you can then answer the second question.
#2 – Where Are They?
The answer to where your target audience is varies for each business. Traditionally, television and radio are the most popular mediums of advertising. But here’s the issue: marketing on TV and radio can be expensive. If you want to widely distribute a television commercial you can expect to pay thousands of dollars. Radio advertising doesn’t bring back much of an investment return, either.
The best place to find the consumers you’re trying to reach is the internet. Popular social media sites like Facebook have more than 2 billion users a month! To compare that to television commercials, cable TV was recently surveyed and concluded to be an “old-fashioned” medium, with 72 percent of the younger generations saying that they prefer streaming services like Netflix.
As an added bonus, the internet is one of the cheapest places for paid advertising. Social media advertising through platforms like Facebook and Instagram can run $10-50 USD and are budget-based. It’s as simple and cheap as taking a few friends out to lunch!
#3 – How Can You Capture Their Attention?
Now that you know who your audience is and where they are, how do you get their attention? How do you make sure your message is heard loud and clear? There are several avenues you can use to market. In fact, studies show that we retain 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, and 30% of what we see. Whether it’s a graphic design poster or an audio clip featuring your product or service, your audience is bound to notice it if you’re marketing it to the right audience.
What you might not know or realize is that the majority of consumers prefer to learn about a product through a video. A staggering 76.5% of marketers and small business owners are getting results with video marketing. Some companies, like Cisco, predict that by 2020 there will be almost a million minutes of video per second crossing the internet. By then, 82% of all consumer web traffic will be video (source).
The types of video marketing that you can utilize are:
- Vlogs (video blogs)
- Video interviews
- Tutorial videos
- Videos of presentations
- Product demos and reviews
- Video testimonials
- Recordings of live streams
- Video ads
In a world that thrives off of social media, video marketing will also give a business a large Return Of Investment (ROI). It’s estimated that video marketers get around 66% more qualified leads in a year and achieve a 54% increase in brand awareness when they use video to market their product or service. Those leads and awareness quickly turn into profit.
So there you have it! Marketing does not need to be overly complex to be effective. Business owners are often misled into thinking that their budget for marketing needs to be very big and that the marketing tools should be different other than the cheap, simple tools already at their fingertips.
Instead of focusing on high-cost advertising for “outdated” methods, shift your focus to making sure your message gets to the audience it should get to through the channel that makes the most sense.
For questions about video marketing or a free consultation, visit https://collinsmediaks.com/.
