Thinking to market your business? First, understand about marketing.
Marketing is all about satisfying customer needs. In any type of business, regardless of the size or capital base, marketing is the catalyst to improving sales by converting potential customers into loyal clients, while retaining the existing ones.
In the modern-day world of competitive business environment, your business can only gain competitive advantage through intensive marketing to generate revenue from existing customers, while recruiting potential ones. As a business owner, marketing calls for streamlining processes and leveraging technology to improve financial processes, integrate risk considerations into performance management activities, and reduce working capital.
If you have just set up your business in Singapore or introduced a new product/service in the market, you may have an insufficient marketing budget and lack potential customers to buy from you. A lack of advertising dollars and a buyer-ready customer base doesn’t mean you just sit there hoping that customers will miraculously find you.
Tianlong’s marketing experts recommend the following low-cost strategies that your business can use to reach its potential customers.
Define Your Target Market
Once you put your heart and soul into building a great product or service, naturally, the next thing to do is showing it to the world. But do you just want to show it to everyone or grab the attention of potential consumers?
Obviously, the latter.
Defining and focusing on a specific target market is the most effective way of identifying your potential customers after creating a new product/service. Your first goal is to get to know your target customers in Singapore, and maximize your efforts to appeal to their demographics, including their age, gender, race, marital status, occupation, annual income, education level etc.
Your target marketing efforts should be directed towards a specific set of customers to accomplish short-term goals. This requires more planning and research before implementation. To gain momentum, the following are key tips can help:
- Examine the characteristics and interests of your existing customer base.
- Look into the target audience of your competition.
- Analyze the benefits of your product/service alongside potential customers.
- Choose specific demographics to target.
- Consider the psychographics of your target, e.g. personality, attitudes, values, interests/hobbies, lifestyles, behavior etc.
- Stay alert to trends that might impact your target market, product or promotion strategy.
Build an Engaging Social Media Presence
The fastest and least expensive way to build your brand is through social media, where the right message can go viral in a fraction of seconds. However, social media marketing can be time-consuming for many businesses because it requires them to keep track of conversations when connecting with potential customers on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, etc. Therefore, it is advisable to outsource such services to budget-friendly professional social media marketers.
Social media substantially produce quicker results by effectively creating a buzz and generating brand awareness for your business. No matter the platform you choose, you can engage both existing customers and potential clients by posting relevant product/service updates using links to your website, photos, videos, infographics, etc. To build an engaging platform from the onset, use the following tips:
- Plan your strategy e.g. setting up new accounts, share organic posts.
- Decide the most relevant platforms to use
- Target the right online audience
- Build relationships by liking followers’ posts, replying to comments etc.
- Use social tools to expand your audience
- Post frequently by scheduling posts
Create an Email List
Many professionals argue that email marketing is dying slowly considering the rapid growth of social media.
Don’t be fooled. Email marketing is up to 40 times more effective than social media! When used properly, it can leverage sales, generate new customers and retain existing customers for longer, whereas social networks first need to engage people so that they can become customers.
You need to keep a list of email addresses for both existing and potential clients and send out regular communications to them. This is one of the best free marketing opportunities in any entrepreneur’s arsenal. You can easily get started by having an email list signup sheet strategically located in your business premises.
When customers walk into your business premises, ask them to note down their email addresses to join your list. Afterwards, send regular email newsletters to them, preferably monthly. Strive to include free gifts and discounts accessible only to newsletter recipients, and invite them to events hosted by your business for free.
Participate in Public Events in your Local Community
High chances are that your business may lack the much-needed budget to carry out widespread public relations campaigns in Singapore. No worries. We recommend that you get busy volunteering in a number of community activities to make the most of local media coverage. You can also sponsor a small percentage of well-publicized events and take on a leadership role of contacting local news outlets when promoting such activities.
Consequently, your brand will receive the recognition it was starving for and open up more opportunities to introduce your business to the mainstream audience in Singapore. With a few media outlets already marketing your products and services in the local market, it is enough to catapult the presence of your business to your target audience.
Partner with Other Companies
Collaborating with different companies in Singapore that offer complimentary products or services is one of the most effective ways to help your business expand its customer base. Furthermore, apart from gaining free advertising into other unique demographics, strategic partnerships also allow you to provide more value to your existing customers.
Whether you are a startup company or an established one, you can partner with our brand so that we can help each other not only to gain credibility but also to generate some referral business. Strategic partnerships have diverse forms:
- Bundled services
- Outsourcing
- Distribution agreements
- Co-branding strategies
- Synchronized promotional activities, etc.
Tianlong’s Business Improvement professionals combine proven marketing services and capabilities for lasting business transformation with sustained results. We enable your business to reach the most sought customer in every target market by smoothly implementing changes and ensuring that lasting benefits are achieved.