Marketing is an essential part of your business. Whether you are a startup or an enterprise, here are some marketing tips that will stand the test of time.    

Marketing is the lifeblood of any business regardless of its size and stature. Whether you are a struggling startup or a successful enterprise, you need to have a marketing campaign in place. Without it, your business will not survive for very long.

As a business owner, entrepreneur, or marketer, you are responsible for the marketing of your business – from conception, development, and implementation.

If you want your brand to be successful, you need to do your homework and make sure that you know all the tricks in the book. Here are three of the most tried-and-tested marketing strategies that you can use in your business:

Get personal.

There is no doubt about it: people love to hear the sound of their name. They instantly pay attention whenever their name is used in a marketing message, which is why you need to use personalization in your marketing strategy – whether you are using direct mail or email marketing.

Know that personalization goes beyond using the first name of a customer. In order to create highly personalized marketing collaterals, you need to come up with a buyer persona first. A buyer persona allows you to understand your audience, and get to know their wants and needs. You can use this information as guiding principles for creating highly effective marketing messages.

Another way to incorporate personalization in your marketing is through customer segmentation. Segmentation allows you to segment or group your audience together based on their common characteristics such as gender, age, geographic location, job title, industry, interests, and many more. This process allows you to craft personalized content that is geared specifically towards your targeted audience.

Using buyer personas and segmentation will make your job easier because you only have to think about the common denominator among the people in your prospect list in order to create marketing messages that are personal.

Offer your help, then sell your product.

An effective way of marketing your product is all about helping your customers first and building two-way conversations to address underlying needs or concerns. Before you can promote a product or service, you need to create useful content first that provides real value for your prospective audience.

Before you can persuade your target audience to buy from you, you need to come up with relevant, useful, and fluff-free information, and communicate it back to them. Help solve people’s problems with your content. These can come in the form of infographics, white papers, blog posts, how-to guides, best practices, tutorial videos, and other educational content. This way, they will keep coming back to you and depend on your expertise.

Producing authentic content will position your brand as a leader in your industry, and improve brand visibility. Once you have established a reputation in your niche, you will be able to comfortably sell your product and be met with little to no resistance by the audience who have been consuming your content right from the beginning.

Go face to face.

Too many times business owners make the mistake of using emails and blog posts to market their product and think that they’re enough. Nothing can be further from the truth. The best way to get immediate results is to market directly to your target audience. So aside from using content, it pays to meet with your prospects and clients face-to-face.

Get out in front of the customers, decision-makers, and thought leaders within your industry. There are a lot of marketing events that your business can go through such as product launches, trade shows, conventions, charities, and so much more. During these events, make sure that your brand is visible at all times by using branded merchandise such as giveaway tokens and printed coffee cups.