You’ve just launched your business and you’re ready for all of the customers and sales to start rolling in! Any excited new business owner wants to see their project have great success from their top-notch marketing plan. However, this can often be accompanied by a dangerous assumption…the expectation that results are immediate. There are so many marketing “rules” to abide by and articles that guarantee some specific percentage of growth such as, “Get your advertisement in the most popular local newspaper”, “Post consistently and at the best times on social media”, “Use these keywords in your Google Adwords”…and on and on.
There comes great frustration when you have followed every single marketing strategy rule in the book, and yet, you aren’t seeing the results that you expected! Perhaps your website isn’t as high on Google as you would have liked or you’re not seeing more sales from your radio ads.
Our advice? Don’t panic…and slow down!
Seeing real and lasting results from your marketing strategy takes time and effort. A greater advertising budget won’t necessarily render high sales. The real recipe for successful marketing, repeat business and brand awareness is time.
Why Does Marketing Take Time?
Brand Awareness
As stated above, successful marketing doesn’t necessarily require a large budget, but rather time and consistency. Creating a beautiful and captivating advertisement is important, but what’s more important is the frequency at which it is seen by your viewers. The longer your brand is visible in the market, the greater the number of people who know who you are and start to recognize your brand simply by its logo!
Remain consistent with your marketing strategy and keep pushing high-quality content on appropriate channels.
Slow and steady wins the race!
Quality Over Quantity
It takes time and effort to create a beautiful advertisement and compelling content. Avoid publishing“filler” content, and instead, create ads and content that provides your audience with valuable information. Over time, people will begin to see that you have a genuine brand AND you’re extremely knowledgeable about your customers’ needs.
It’s imperative that your customers view your advertisements as genuine and helpful rather than just trying to make a sale. As a side note, if you’re creating a digital advertisement, valuable content looks good to search engines and leads to more effective search engine optimization (SEO).
Establishing Repeat Business
Building repeat business is essential to business success. While you can offer a stellar sale that could potentially bring in lots of people at one time, a more effective technique is to bring in quality customers that plan to come back to your store on multiple occasions, rave about you to their friends, and leave genuine and positive reviews.
Instant results create short-term excitement for any business owner, but repeat business is what will ensure your long-term sustainability. Reviews are one of the main resources that convert potential customers into actual customers. If some is thinking about visiting your store, for example, then a positive review will likely close the deal.
Building Trust
Building trust often is a result of having an excellent product that works and a genuine demeanor, both in person and in your ads. It’s also a result of your business genuinely wanting to provide happiness and solutions to your customers and being able to convey that. Over time, customers will begin to trust you and feel that they have a personal relationship with your business.
Ensure that the genuine tone of voice used in your ads is matched by you and your employees when the customer meets you in person. Inconsistency between ads and the customer experience will break down trust over time.
Again, this will lead to greater brand awareness, more repeat business, and excellent reviews.
Marketing Strategy Adjustments
Finding out what is and isn’t working in your marketing strategy is not something that happens quickly. For example, you’ve run a promotion for three months and aren’t seeing any boosts in sales. This would then inform you that either the promotion simply wasn’t reaching the right audience or you need to change the messaging.
IF you’re using digital marketing, for example, through your website, search engine optimization (SEO) requires that you use popular keywords tailored to your specific audience. You can observe the efforts of your SEO by connecting your business website to Google Analytics to find out how many people are visiting your website, when they’re on, where they’re from and so on. This is a very popular tool for digital marketing and provides with you information that you can use to adjust your ads to become more effective.
Another tactic you can try is asking your customers how they found you. If you’re learning that most of your customers are coming from, for example, a radio advertisement, then put more effort and time into that channel. Marketing is truly a trial and error effort, so it will take periods of weeks and months to find out what is and isn’t working in your marketing strategy.
If you need assistance with identifying your specific audience, defining their needs, and developing an effective marketing strategy for your business, contact Kudzu Brands. It’s our mission to help businesses grow and get seen in the market. Call (828) 357-8350 or email katlyn@kudzubrands.com
Heather Johnson is the senior principal at Kudzu Brands. As a skilled marketing professional, her expertise is in crafting compelling narratives and strategic guidance that elevate brands and connect them with their target audiences. Heather is passionate about every client’s success and works alongside businesses and nonprofits to deliver expert marketing plans designed for growth and sustainability.