Strategizing your next business move is crucial in leveraging tight competition. It must include implementing traditional (offline) and digital (online) marketing methods. In this way, businesses can benefit from this powerful combination, increasing their traffic, prospects, and overall sales.  

Check out the top 8 things to include in your next business strategy which can help you attain your sales and marketing goals.  

1. Audience Segmentation  

An essential aspect of any business strategy is profiling, which is a part of audience segmentation. It involves identifying your target customers by gathering their common characteristics, interests, personalities, and behaviors.  

2. Direct Mail Marketing   

Reach your target audience directly and cost-efficiently using a direct mail marketing strategy. It’s a business strategy that uses postcards, business cards, and other mailers to be sent to target customers. By implementing direct mail marketing, you can establish a good long-term relationship with your audience.   

Here’s how direct mail marketing works:  

• Work on A Concept: Determine the purpose why you’re sending mailers. For instance, thank you cards are essential in showing your appreciation to your customers, giving them value for doing business with you.  
• Design Mailers: Once you have decided on the mailers’ content, it’s time to design them. Determine the mailer requirements that were set by the United States Post Office (USPS). You can work with a professional to know your mailer design options. Printing material options vary from specialty paper to boards for flyers, postcards, and brochures. 
• Bring Mailers to Post Office: You don’t have to know your target customers’ exact address or purchase an address list (usually done in email marketing) because USPS will take care of it. Just bring your mailers to the post office after printing, and then choose a route where the mailers will be distributed.  

3. Logo and Branded Merchandise  

Having a great company logo and printing it to your branded merchandise boost your marketing efforts. How is this possible? Your logo serves as your company’s face value, and you can use it to your advantage. Here are some examples: 

• Printing your company logo to your employees’ uniform to show professionalism. 
• Wearing or using branded merchandise and take pictures and videos for added social media exposure. 
• Make your company logo as your social media and other online account profile picture for consistency.  

4. Business Idea Validation  

Validating your business idea involves creating your ideal customer or buyer persona and good value proposition to build a stronger customer connection. With a business model template, you can validate your business idea, even a new product or service.   

Here are the benefits of business idea validation:  

• Increases Brand Awareness: Distributing your marketing message across different channels following a business model template raises brand awareness and encourage the customer to purchase.   
• Promotes Better Customer Experience: Of course, validating your business idea will also help you promote better aftersales service and overall customer satisfaction.  
• Guides Your Marketing Team: Using a business model template, your marketing team becomes more aware of the essential things they need to focus on, such as nurturing customers in every stage of the sales funnel.  

5. Working with Social Media Influencers   

If there are social media celebrities, they are called social media influencers. These people are social media users who have earned a considerable number of followers. Social media influencers can be public figures or ordinary people. Working with ordinary people with many followers is newer, fresher, and more realistic than celebrity endorsers, who are often perceived as too advertorial or gimmicky.  

Take a look at the following key benefits of working with social media influencers when building your business strategy:  

• Better Consumer Reception: Social media influencers have a loyal follower base; they can use their platform and their influence for better endorsement compare to the other brand endorsers.  
• Increase Brand Awareness: Social media influencers are ‘citizen journalists’ who spread information in a fast-paced and quick manner. Hence, increasing brand awareness will rise through them.
• Shape Consumer Opinions: Influencers bridge the gap between businesses and their intended audience. Because many influencers are self-made, their followers find them trustworthy, compelling them to try a new product or service they endorse.  

6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)  

When it comes to digital marketing, don’t underestimate SEO. This pertains to ranking a Google, Bing, Yahoo, Internet Explorer website, or other search engines through the use of the right keywords, keyword placement, and links. In analogy, SEO is your plant fertilizer to grow fruits and become appealing to harvesters. If you don’t use SEO, your website won’t bear fruits and remain unseen.   

So, how do you include SEO in your next business strategy? Check the following SEO marketing tips:  

• SEO Web Design: It’s a way to develop and design your website in a search-friendly manner. Incorporating SEO as your business strategy will make your e-commerce business and your website rank up efficiently and that’ll increase your business visibility and exposure to customers.
• Create Great Content: Learning the basic SEO concepts and activities including keyword research, keyword placement, and link building and applying them will help you a lot in making good content for your business. Creating great content using SEO will help you ensure a positive effect on your search engine ranking and help you gain business benefits.
• Social Media Integration: Did you know that Facebook, YouTube, and other social media channels are considered search engines? Millions of people are searching for different social media stuff, such as houses of sale, car dealerships, antiques, and even jobs. Social media has indeed become more than social interaction, which is now a broader and more interactive marketplace, both for the consumer (business-to-customer or B2C) and business (business-to-business or B2B) markets.   

7. Embrace Innovation  

One critical aspect you need to include in your business strategy is innovation; making your business thrive and become more competitive. Know the current innovative solutions that can help you in promoting your brand, such as the following:  

• Artificial Intelligence: The use of AI varies, depending on your business needs. Some examples include using chatbots, smart devices, and other automation software programs)  
• Virtual and Augmented Reality: VR and AR involve simulating real-life settings for more immersive business marketing. 
• Management Systems: Some examples of management systems include enterprise resource planning or ERP and customer relationship management or CRM. These software programs make business marketing workflow faster, more accurate, and more efficient. 
• Mobile App Design and Development: Because millions of consumers are using mobile devices, it’s essential to consider embracing mobile app design and development. The first stage is brainstorming with your team to gather insightful ideas of what mobile app features and benefits your business need.  
• Cloud Technology: Unlike hard drives and external drives, cloud computing is a far more secure and advanced method of storing business data, including customer information. This technology utilizes the internet cloud server or remote server. With cloud technology, your marketing team can collaborate anywhere and anytime without staying in the office. 
• Wearable Technology: Smartwatches and other wearable devices for on-the-go marketing are used to increase consumer brand awareness. For instance, businesses related to health and fitness take advantage of wearable technology to promote their products, apps, and services. 
• Online Tools: Some good examples of online tools include SEO, lead generation, and analytics tools. For instance, you can use Google Analytics to analyze your traffic or how many users visit your website, including what cities or countries they come from. Also, Google Analytics allows you to see what devices your visitors are using in accessing your website and track your marketing campaigns.  

8. Audit for Best Results 

Evaluating your business marketing performance is crucial in attaining success. But how do you assess your strengths and weaknesses? Below are some helpful auditing tips to gauge performance: 

• Set Key Performance Indicators: Set your KPI or business metrics to lay the groundwork for your performance evaluation. For instance, you can set your conversion rate or the number of web visitors who became paying customers to assess your content marketing strategy’s effectiveness. 
• Use of Analytics Tool: As previously mentioned, you can use Google Analytics or a similar tool to track your marketing campaigns, including the channels traffics, such as your blog or video marketing campaign. 
• Gather Customer Feedback: The best judge is your customer. So, it pays off to gather customer feedback through surveys, face-to-face interviews, quizzes, or social media comments to find out if they’re happy with your products and services or you need to make some improvements.  

Conclusion   

When planning your next business strategy, make sure to include offline and online methods, such as direct mail marketing, social media, and SEO. Incorporate your company logo in your online profiles because it acts as your brand identity. These strategies will help increase your marketing reach and leads. On the other hand, audience segmentation and business idea validation improve your business processes by strengthening your sales and marketing workflow.  

Of course, one way to achieve a more successful business is embracing innovation. Be receptive to changes to make your business marketing workflow more seamless. Don’t miss auditing your business marketing performance, so you can plan your next move and attain your sales and marketing goals.