Mastering the Marketing Cycle: A Guide for Small Businesses

Marketing is crucial for any business, especially small businesses because it determines the sales and the number of customers gained and retained. Mastering your marketing cycle will be the one thing that will improve the bottom line of your business.

Small businesses that strategise their marketing correctly tend to have increased brand visibility and create a platform for customers to share their experiences with the business. Marketing, just like any other activity in the business, is essential for the overall survival and progress of the business.

The small business marketing cycle has stages that serve a purpose for the whole brand, product and services being marketed. Every stage tends to benefit the business differently and exponentially. Therefore, every stage in a small business marketing cycle can significantly benefit the business if utilised correctly. The marketing cycle stages show the process which a product or service goes through before customers purchase and the business makes sales.

What is the Marketing Cycle?

The marketing cycle is a process that helps the customer from acquisition to purchase. It then follows them all the way past to keep them engaged so you can sell them newer products or services down the line. Mastering your marketing cycle can be difficult, but the tips and tricks are down below.

The marketing cycle stages aim to positively influence the customer before, within, and after purchase. The small business marketing cycle has three main stages which are:

Attraction

The first stage of a small business marketing cycle is the attraction stage. This stage is where you capture the attention of potential customers to your brand by igniting curiosity in your customers on what the brand is all about, and they will want to look into it. You can grab potential customers’ attention in the following ways.

– Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is where you have your website ranked higher than others through keyword search. Using specific keywords can make you attract customers when they search for products online. This will make your website pop up on top of other websites, attracting customers.

– Create beautiful designs and packaging for products, we live in a world of social media, and people today love taking pictures of the things they have purchased. If your product design and packaging are attractive, customers will purchase the product. This attraction can even drive potential customers without an idea of your brand’s existence.

– Engaging website, the key to good marketing also lies in a good website. People today like gaining more information about a brand and what it offers before purchasing anything. Updating your website regularly with your latest products and services will attract more customers to continue purchasing your brand and attract new customers through word of mouth.

– Paid Ads are another way you can attract potential customers. However, this can be expensive and broad, so don’t expect huge returns until you narrow down your audiences and find the perfect avatar to send more ads to.

The next step is to engage your new leads throughout your marketing cycle.

Engagement

This is the second stage in a small business marketing cycle. This is where you nurture potential customers to be part of your brand and interact with your products and services. You can achieve this through.

– Content Creation: As a small business. It is essential that you create content for your brand that aligns with what your current products are, and the content that you create should align with your customer’s needs as well as different ethnic groups and cultures.

– Email drip campaigns are where you entice your customers with emails about your new offers and products. It acts as a way of reminding your customers about your brand and creating awareness about current offers and products. You must only send emails periodically as not to be pushy. Once in a while can be good for the business. The most important part of email campaigns is to give your customers value before you sell to them.

– Buyer information, you can only nurture your customers if you know who they are and their age groups. This can be done by creating forms on the website where you ask the customer a few questions about them and the products they are interested in. Avoid coming up with many questions since this can drive customers away. Ask about their age, their history of using similar products, and which products and why they want to try them. The best time to ask questions is within blog posts, social media posts, or emails themselves.

– Landing pages, creating landing pages such as links and referrals through your other marketing channels to your website is very important since it will help customers to quickly interact with your product and know more about your products and services. Creating links as a small business on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram is easy for potential customers to be redirected to your main landing page. The best converting landing pages normally include some sort of ‘one time offer’, discounts for followers, or something to boost future engagement like refer a friend and get 50% off.

Conversion

This is the final stage in the small business marketing cycle. This is where your leads convert into customers. In this stage, the customers make purchases and translate into profits to your business. This is the most crucial stage in marketing because what need is the existence of marketing if it cannot convert. You can ensure and increase conversion rate while marketing through;

– Social proof shows that your products and services can be trusted. This is through reviews and ratings about your website online. It has been proven that many customers check reviews online before purchasing any product. You should include social proof on your website to show potential customers positive testimonies from previous customers about your product. Social proof also tells potential customers that your product is worth the money and experience.

– Track customer interaction on your website: Tracking customer interaction with your website will help you know at which point in the marketing cycle the customers are pulling out and how many are converting. This will help you make necessary changes to your website and improve your conversion. This can be done through website tools that show a record of what customers are clicking on and whether many are choosing a particular product over another.

– Abandoned cart email campaigns: Creating an abandoned cart email campaign will increase your conversion. Since many customers tend to forget about the products they added to their carts and proceed with other things. Sending your customers abandoned cart emails and adding the occasional discounts can entice them to return to the website and purchase as soon as possible before the offer is closed.

Mastering the Marketing Cycle

The marketing cycle can be hard to get right.

Softwares like MailChimp, Zapier, WordPress and Owlee can seriously improve your outreach when marketing. You can use them like this:

• Owlee: This is an AI-driven advertising software that works to focus your marketing effort to get your products and sales in front of the best people who may make a purchase. The company that runs the software has a focus on small to medium sized businesses, to help them improve their marketing effort by making advertising as easy and as lucrative as possible.
• Zapier: This software can be used to connect all of the tools you use. When you run a Facebook ad campaign and you capture peoples emails, you can export them straight into MailChimp using Zapier, then from your campaigns you can connect your online shop to filter in the customer details. Anything is possible.
• MailChimp: Email campaigns made easy… Make full email campaigns, one-off blasts, or full nurture sequences in a matter of minutes. You can get basic templates and fully created content from the MailChimp archive, which you can use to engage your leads and introduce your brand with ease.
• WordPress: The only website builder you will need. This blog is a WordPress website with a theme and specific plugins which can be used to alter the look and feel of the site. You can host WordPress using multiple services, and it takes minutes to set up. But most importantly a WordPress site can be used to point your customer to a purchase page, improve their journey, and be a focal point for your customers to return to for support. After all, a top website is essential for mastering your marketing cycle.

The biggest thing that will improve your marketing cycle is to consistently work on it and improve the journey your customers are taking. It is always best to have a strategic plan in place before throwing money at marketing.

Conclusion

The small business marketing cycle helps the business understand the stages it undergoes before potential customers convert into actual customers. The small business marketing cycle goes through three stages: attracted, engaged, and conversion. Each stage within the cycle is crucial to the growth of the small business. It determines the sale of the business products and services. All of the tips in the article will help you in mastering your marketing cycle.

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