Do you own and operate a small business? Are you looking to grow your customer base, increase sales, hire more employees and grow your business overall?
If so, a multi-strand marketing strategy is something you need to seriously consider.
What is a Multi-Strand Marketing Strategy?
A multi-strand marketing strategy is connecting a variety of online marketing channels to advertise your business, gain more customers and successfully develop an online presence.
These online marketing channels include SMS marketing (or text message marketing), email campaigns, blogs and websites, and social media.
How to Implement a Multi-Strand Marketing Strategy
The article "How to create a multi-strand marketing strategy" discusses four steps to help you connect your online marketing channels with one another so they are working together as one entity instead of as individual marketing systems.
According to the article, the steps are to:
1. Decide what your goal is - Choose a specific goal to measure progress. Being able to accurately measure your results will allow you to tweak certain platforms and adjust as needed. You'll be able to determine what works best for you and what isn't getting the results you want. Be specific with your goal - such as increasing Twitter followers, getting more people to opt-in to your SMS marketing plan or driving sales to your business this weekend.
2. Figure out which marketing strategies you'll use - In other words, decide which campaigns and platforms will best suit your specific goal. If you're looking to get more people to sign up for your SMS marketing service, you may want to send out a newsletter to your email subscribers letting them know they can now receive text message updates about your business. Perhaps give them an incentive to sign up, too, such as immediately receiving a text for 10 percent off their next purchase.
3. Pick your content - What will you say? What message are you trying to portray? How will the allow you to meet your goal? Content can range from sharing an article, an image, a video, a news story, a promotion, a flyer and more. Think about your type of business and choose content that your customers would like. If you own a coffee shop, for example, a flyer or image may be best. If you sell technology, you may want to share an article or a news story.
4. Look at your results - This is where the fun starts. After you've implementing your specific marketing strategy, it's time to measure the results. What worked? What didn't? What needs tweaking? What can you do better next time? Ask yourself all of these questions to improve your multi-strand marketing strategy. If SMS marketing works the best for your business, focus a little bit more of your attention on that. If getting more traffic to your blog or website is what increases sales, that's what you're going to want to focus your marketing on.
A multi-strand marketing strategy should be put in place for those looking to grow their businesses but aren't quite sure what strategies work the best. This allows you to test different plans and see what brings in the most business.
While you should always use social media, websites, emails and newsletters, knowing what has the greatest effect on your business allows you to fine-tune your marketing plan and see results immediately.