There are many factors that go into owning a successful business. One of those factors is successfully marketing your business. In our current media and business environment, there is no question that you MUST effectively and efficiently promote yourself and your business if you wish to find long-term success. 

However, given everything business owners must do to have a successful business, marketing often takes a backseat (if not altogether forgotten). 

At Beacon, we often find that many businesses fail to market themselves and their businesses, because they unnecessarily complicate the process. 

But while marketing your business does take a combination of time, effort, and (potentially) money, it does not have to be complicated. 

There are ways you can simplify the process that will allow you to get the most of your marketing efforts and ultimately grow your business.

Map Your Customer’s Journey

A common struggle for many marketers is not quite knowing where to get started. And even once you get going, how do you continue marketing yourself and your business in an efficient and effective manner?

A great way to solve both those dilemmas is to map out the path your target audience takes from discovering your business, to engaging with your content, to ultimately contacting you or making a purchase. Understanding where you have opportunities to engage with prospective customers will simplify your marketing efforts because you are able to visualize how you wish to interact with your target audience. 

This will give you a much better idea of where to start and how you can continue to maximize your investment into marketing your business. 

Develop a Strategy

As you may be familiar with, at Beacon Marketing, we believe that success in marketing starts with strategy. If you take the time to understand the path a potential customer takes from finding your business to actually spending money, the next step is to develop a plan to engage your prospective customers and move them down your marketing funnel.

That is what a strategy does. 

It details how you plan on attracting leads and turning those leads into paying customers. A marketing strategy simplifies your marketing efforts because it details how and what you are supposed to do when it comes to marketing your business on a daily or weekly basis. 

Master One Marketing Channel at a Time

Another common struggle marketers encounter is managing multiple marketing channels at once. It can be easy to over extend and burn yourself out, especially if you are just getting started marketing your business.

This can be a mistake. 

To be honest, this is something we struggled with when we first got started. After developing your marketing strategy, there may be the inclination to jump full bore into using all your marketing channels at once. 

To simplify the process of marketing your business, master one channel at a time. This does not mean that you do not use or engage multiple channels at once. After all, we do strongly believe in a multi-channel approach to marketing. 

What you want to do is focus on learning how to best use one marketing channel, whether that be email marketing or a particular social media platform. This will allow you to understand the best practices for that particular channel while creating a process that will allow you to get the most out of the resources you devote to using that channel. 

Focus on Your Niche

As you promote yourself and your business, there is a temptation to list everything that you do or offer. After all, you took the time to develop the services or acquire the products, you should do everything to sell them, right?

Wrong. 

Truth is, when you look at your sales there are probably a handful of products and services that you sell the most of. And if you look closer, you will probably see that of those handful, only two or three have truly high profit margins. 

THOSE are the products and services that you should focus your marketing efforts on. Those products and services will help you maximize the investment you are making in marketing your business. 

This is not to say you do not promote your other offerings. You can include those products and services on your website and refer to them in follow up emails. The point here is that your offerings with the highest profit margin should be the “star” of your marketing efforts. 

Create a Process

One of the best things you can do to simplify your marketing efforts is to create internal processes that detail what tasks need to be completed to promote your business each day, week, and month. Not only does this make it easier for you to get things done, it allows you to train others to complete the tasks for you in a timely and reliable manner. 

Marketing yourself and your business is a necessary process, but that does not mean it has to be complicated. In fact, the more you are able to simplify the process, the more successful you will be in promoting your business. The above steps are a great jumping off point to simplifying your marketing efforts. Determine what steps might work best for you and try to discover if there are other steps that might be best given your particular needs.