Marketing is one of the most daunting aspects of starting a business. Often new business owners find that their marketing campaigns aren’t yielding the results一clients, customers, or sales一they want. 

Thus, having the right marketing strategy, techniques, and tools is crucial to success. The Small Business Administration (SBA) Office reports that nearly 50% of all new businesses and start-ups fail within 5 years. 

So how do you ensure that your business isn’t part of that statistic?

Essentially, it comes down to your marketing goals, knowing who your target audience is, and identifying the most successful ways to capture their attention. To help you out, here are five simple marketing tips to consider.

Read more: The best marketing tips for small businesses

1. Know Your Marketing Goal

For new business owners, the decision to invest in brand awareness or a lead generation company can be a tricky one. Lead generation is about quickly capturing the attention of a select group of prospective customers while creating brand awareness is all about increasing the size of your target audience over time. Typically, the two must work together to strengthen your overall digital marketing strategy because it will help grow your business.

However, it’s essential to note that sometimes focusing on brand awareness alone is important一especially if your business is just starting. Building brand awareness is an excellent way to lay the foundation for lead generation because an increase in quality leads translates to more sales.

It’s important to know whether your goal is lead generation or brand awareness. Once you identify your goal, knowing where to focus your efforts becomes easy.

2. Know What Your Target Customer Wants

There’s a lot of pressure to be customer-centric and focus on providing the best customer experience. And this is a good thing; it has forced marketers to put customers’ needs at the heart of decision-making.

To succeed as a new business owner, you must focus on your customer’s lives and create innovative content, such as blog posts, quizzes, or videos, that answer their questions and offer solutions to their problems.

Focusing on your customers and solving their problems with personalized content will position your business as a leader in the industry. 

3. Leverage SEO To Understand Your Target Customers

SEO is a cost-effective and long-term investment that allows your business to become more visible on search engines. It generates web traffic, improves brand awareness, generates more revenue, and ultimately brings in more sales.

By leveraging the best SEO strategies, you can tap into a search engine’s data to see what targeted customers are searching for. Once you get this kind of information, you can create customized marketing campaigns and maximize your online presence through the three primary pillars of SEO: content marketing, onsite optimization, and link building.

4. Test And Optimize Your Marketing Campaigns

Consumers are in more places than ever before, often at the same time. Thus, it’s imperative to understand that one online marketing personalization strategy will not always work. There are many online marketing channels to consider when creating a marketing campaign, such as email marketing, pay-per-click advertising, organic social media marketing, and SEO.

Your marketing strategy depends on your business’s goals, marketing budget, target audience, and area of expertise. However, regardless of your choice, you must test and measure the results. Testing and tracking results will help you optimize what works and stop doing what doesn’t work.

For instance, if you’re running Instagram ads targeting two different audiences and one ad achieves better engagement than the other, it’s good to allocate more of your marketing budget on the better performing ad. You can then analyze the performing ad and use that information to create new ads.

5. Leverage Data To Track The Success Of Your Campaigns

Content discovery is constantly changing, particularly with mobile devices. Businesses need to go where their audience is, and online marketing campaigns often spread across multiple channels. Although the results can be engaging and cost-effective, how do you know if your marketing campaign was effective?

Leveraging data isn’t a complicated task. For example, according to the most recent social media sheet by Pew Research, 50% of Facebook users are aged 65 and over. So, if your content targets this age group, you’re more likely to be successful with Facebook advertising than email marketing.

The good thing about running digital campaigns is that you can extract data from your marketing efforts, whether that involves tracking the number of shares your content gets on social media or tracking the number of hits on your website. However, before you look at the data, identify the right metrics to track. 

Conclusion

Often, advertising won’t be effective unless it’s part of a well-coordinated marketing plan. With a mix of simple marketing strategies, such as the ones listed above, you can get the results you desire. None of these marketing tips will draw hordes of customers overnight, but assuming you offer an excellent product or service and work consistently at improving your marketing, you’ll eventually see an increase in buyers and sales.