Why is marketing so important? The heart of your business success lies within a clear marketing strategy, most aspects of any business rely on it. Marketing gets the word out to the public about your business; helps generate sales through lead generation; grows and defines your company’s reputation and creates an environment of healthy competition.

When you initially start up your business, it is imperative to enter the market with a strategic marketing plan in place. This will ensure that your brand is communicated effectively and precisely and will help you avoid costly mistakes – at the end of the day, every company’s goal is to have a successful cost-efficient business. Here are some top marketing tips to take on board when launching your new business:

1. Know your target audience

To make any marketing effort successful, you must know who your target audience is, this will help you determine who your potential customer is and inevitably enable you to come up with the best strategy to target those individuals. So how do you determine your target audience? You should ask yourself the following questions:

• Who would use your business/product/service?
• Where do they live?
• What is their demographic?

It takes specific, in-depth research to ensure that your target market is defined. Once defined, you must learn to know and understand your audience in-depth and then create your own target audience definition.

2. Understand your customer

You should learn to know what your customers want before they do as they are the ones who help your business either succeed or fail. So how is this done?

• Stand in your client's shoes and look beyond your core business so you can offer your customers a full range of services/products
• Follow up: Client service is of paramount importance, keep in contact, get feedback and use this feedback effectively to improve
• Learn through your client, listen to what they need and want and offer them just that!
• Always be ahead of the game, research trends within your industry, keep a close eye on your competitors and constantly consider what your client will want tomorrow
  
  

3. Create a visually pleasing and user-friendly website

Everything these days is online, first impressions of a business is not only via the branding but the initial thoughts when a potential client logs onto your website. It is all about visual physiology, people don’t have time to read pages and pages of content, content on your website should be to the point and highlight your key messages in short forms. Plus, always remember to use the power of imagery – and let’s not forget, it must be user friendly! So what does your website really need?

• It must be visually pleasing and have the perfect balance
• Speed - nobody likes a slow website, nor high bounce rates
• Contact information - this should be easy to find!
• Three-click rule - it shouldn't take more than three clicks to get to where you want to go
• SEO compliance - It's one thing to have a bunch of 'pretty' content but for this content to be truly useful - it must be SEO compliant
• Social media quick links
• Mobile responsiveness -There is nothing worse than trying to look at a non-compliant mobile website on a mobile!
  
  

4. Have a content marketing strategy

Content is the key to good organic SEO but it is pointless without a good strategy in place. A content marketing strategy involves releasing good content which is consistent throughout all of your marketing platforms including; blogs, social media, website and corporate communications. Here are some tips to implement a good content strategy:

• Decide on content that would interest your customers
• Have a monthly plan of what, where and how to release your content
• Throw in key words – the more keywords the better
• Blogs – create appealing, informative, interactive content
• Make your content to the point, which covers the facts and don’t waffle!
  
  

5. The power of technology

Use technology to run an efficient, cost-efficient organic or paid marketing campaign, it is important to capture your clients effectively, plan your strategies and monitor them:

• The more you can be automated the better – this helps with quick response time and reduces human errors. Implement a good CRM system and use it wisely, integrate your whole business into the CRM. This will help with cross-department efficiency, lead qualifying, automated responses, communicating with your clients etc.
• Project management to manage your campaigns and team. There are many useful project management systems which can be used for example Trello and Asana
• Scheduling your social media using systems likes of Hootsuite will help you see your month of posts, see if they flow well, pre-determine dates and times to post at the most effective times of the day
  
  

6. It is always the right time for PR

PR is key with a new business, landing an editorial feature in a popular magazine or online magazine or a blog post from an influencer is extremely beneficial to your success as they cost nothing! It gives you the advantage to have mass marketing to the public at little to no cost.

7. Measure, measure, measure

There is no point in running any campaign without measuring its effectiveness. Do lead analysis, determine your client acquisition cost, determine your lead to enquiry to client ratios, all of these measurements will help you determine which campaign is producing the best results. Most CRM’s, if used correctly, can do this for you, so integrate your social and website with your CRM and get automated reports to measure this extremely important information. Without measurement, you are spending your marketing budget blind and this is not recommended under any circumstance. It is important to realise that it is all about a quality audience rather than quantity!

What to remember when implementing an effective marketing strategy?

With these simple marketing tips, your business can really get to understand your client therefore target them effectively. Measure your leads and campaigns to ensure you are spending your budget wisely and always be ahead of the game. So, what are the key elements of succeeding in marketing your company?

• Know your client
• Be consistent
• Use technology and use it wisely
• Always do your research
• Your website is key
• Measure, measure, measure!

If you are interested in forming a company in Dubai, Abu Dhabi or Oman, PRO Partner Group can assist you with this process. For more information please contact a member of the team on info@propartnergroup.com in Abu Dhabi +971 (0)2 448 5120, or Dubai +971 (0)4 456 1761.