For your business marketing to fly it’s essential to retain relevance

I was recently tidying up my office and came across a flipchart sheet which contained various phrases from a business marketing workshop I’d delivered. The one that jumped out at me was “retaining relevance” and I thought it the perfect topic to share with you.

Retaining relevance to your target market

Not long ago I sat with a long standing and successful beautician reviewing her website, her services and her pricing. She hadn’t looked at any of these things for many a year because she was very busy – but actually she could have been busier and more profitable. There were services and products that had gone out of fashion and services and products that had come in, and we sat and honed her whole business model. She’s now retaining relevance for a contemporary customer whereas her previous website risked attracting only an older and shrinking customer base.

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Retaining relevance in your social media channels

However much we may have wanted to ignore it, social media is a MAJOR marketing channel. In terms of retaining relevance in this space, of course, it’s essential to find out which social network your potential clients or customers are using. You may love Twitter but they may actually be on Facebook. You may hate the thought of getting to grips with Instagram but that’s where your target market may be communicating...

Retaining relevance in your marketing methods

Unfortunately you can’t use the same old same old marketing methods as they may not be the ones that engage with a contemporary market. For example television advertisers have seen their impact fall away as we watch on-demand TV.

Suddenly it‘s all about content marketing, about “help not sell” and about producing educational and sometimes entertaining resources in the form of blog posts, PDF downloads and video. Increasingly video and, more scary than that on Facebook,  live video  when a change in Facebook algorithm meant that use of Facebook Live plays a big part in gaining good engagement.

Retaining relevance in the face of algorithm changes

And on that note, things change. Social networks and search engines constantly work to improve their interaction with their users which means businesses have to keep up with changes in order that they don’t lose reach.  You will probably find out when this happens as you will hear much publicly shared wailing and gnashing of teeth in the marketing and business communities :-)

Retaining relevance in terms of technology

Suddenly we could use our smartphones for accessing the internet which meant we all needed responsive websites that could be simply navigated on a small screen.  Our competitors were using apps which meant we had to think whether we had to do the same. Suddenly there were thousands of widgets that could vastly improve our reach, our communication, and the time it takes to market our businesses – if we only knew about them, had time to test them and the courage to use them.

So what’s the answer? It’s simple - to retain relevance you must make time in your business to  research, test and apply and you have to do this on an ongoing basis because for your business  to fly it has to be well fashioned not old fashioned.

I hope you found this helpful. In the same way as I support my clients, I’ll do my best to help you via this blog throughout the year.