If you are familiar with marketing or are a professional, you know that having a clear understanding of your customer profile is crucial. Get to know promotional gifts or branded gifts they prefer, how they are searching and sharing information, or any other factor influencing their decision to purchase.
Knowing these will help you come up with good marketing strategies for every customer segment whose characteristics and buying habits are uniquely different from others.
Consumers in the UK are generally known to be loyal to their favorite brands that provide them valuable after-sales services such as free delivery, free shipping, and product returns. When it comes to where UK consumers prefer to shop, close to 5 out of 10 prefer brick-and-mortar stores while the rest of the UK consumers use online, mobile, and social shopping.
There are several effective marketing strategies you can use to market your product in the UK.
Best way to market your product in the UK
#1. Use a Loyalty Program
Loyalty programs offer special benefits to subscribers. Some of these programs are free while others are paid.
In paid loyalty programs, members can pay a lifetime membership fee or even an annual subscription and enjoy perks like 5% off almost any item, exclusive sales, and free returns on all orders.
Unpaid loyalty programs use a points system, where a certain number of points earn customers different rewards or even free shopping which should equal the value of your points.
Loyalty programs give customers a reason to return to your online store, whether it’s to use the points they have accumulated for a gift, to get free shopping, or to receive a percentage off their purchase price.
#2. Use email win-back campaign
Email helps get in touch with shoppers who have already visited your store and completed their purchases. This is the best channel to market your product and encourage repeat purchases.
Through the use of email, you also get to reengage existing customers who may have not purchased in a while.
The win-back campaign which is a type of lifecycle marketing is one of the most valuable sequences you can create for your product marketing strategy.
Marketing seeks to engage customers based on where they are in the customer journey. In this case, the customer has already purchased so the message sent to them should encourage them to come back.
Set up an email campaign to target your first-time customers. The first email should be sent 30 days after their first purchase.
This email should be sent only to first-time customers who have not made any other purchase in that period.
Set parameters to remove any customer who ends up purchasing at any time throughout the email sequence.
These emails notify customers of another product they might like based on their original purchase. Another email is sent 30 days after the first email. The second email offers promotions like 10% off or free shipping.
A third email is sent 30 days after the second email. This email offers higher promotion than the second one (25% and free shipping). A fourth email is sent 120 days after the first email or let’s say 30 days after the third email.
Since the customer has not shown any interest in your second and third emails, it’s time to get to know why they are not interested. You can include a survey in the email that asks what would lead them to buy from your business.
#3. Pop-Up Shops
A pop-up shop is a temporary retail space used to introduce a new product line, test a new market or generate awareness for a product. If you are running an online business in the UK, a pop-up shop would be a good marketing strategy for your product.
Although online stores have made it easy for consumers in the UK, they still want to interact with the brand in person to strengthen their trust in the product and brand. Therefore, hosting a pop-up event can be a game-changer.
This will allow you to build uniqueness around your products, gain exposure in local media, capitalize on seasonal purchasing, offload older stock, and interact with your customers in person to gain knowledge about their unmet needs.
#4. Entry and Exit Offer
Another good strategy for your product marketing is to make the best use of the landing page itself. Market your product to any visitor who lands on your website.
Entry and exit offers can help you turn a visitor into customers and also direct people to the promotional product as soon as they reach your site.
For your marketing strategy to be successful, you need to think outside the box. You can use your pop-ups to display the entry offers. Make your entering pop-ups more successful for conversion by including offers that will be hard for your customers to resist.
Use exit pop-ups by retargeting the customer when they are about to exit. On-site retargeting is a good way to promote a product that has been viewed but not purchased.
#5. Social Media
Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are the best for promoting products. People are on social media platforms every second and this has forced brands to market their products on these platforms.
Instagram is the go-to channel for brands due to its high visuals. You can promote products on this platform through Reels, Stories, and Posts.
You can also run Facebook ads campaigns to draw users’ attention. Facebook advertising gives you access to a wide audience who are eager for a new product launch.
#6. Cross-Selling and Upselling
With cross-selling and upselling, you get to increase the current value of the product order and show customers better options. These are clever techniques used by marketers to convince customers into buying more items.
Upselling and cross-selling can be used in a variety of ways, such as proposing items on the customer’s checkout page or displaying a product at the bottom of the page.
#7. Referral Marketing
Referral marketing also known as word-of-mouth marketing is one of the best marketing strategies in the UK. People like investing in things they are assured of and referral marketing is the best way to do that.
This marketing approach is common among brands and businesses where they persuade others to advocate the product in a way that increases exposure and sales.
This approach offers something to customers so they spread a message about your product to their friends and families.
#8. Affiliate Program
This is a good marketing strategy for small and medium-sized businesses that can’t afford to spend a lot of cash on hiring marketing professionals. The purpose of the program is to make affiliates who will market your product on your behalf for a commission.
In affiliate programs, users have to sign up for the program. They can be bloggers or a vlogger.
#9. Influencer marketing
This is one of the most effective ways of marketing your product. Influencers are the god of social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn with a good number of followers.
There are so many social media influencers in the UK who can help you make your product.
When it comes to influencers, go for those influencers with a reasonable number of followers. Also, make sure you pick influencers based on your niche.
#10. Use Google Business
You can promote your new product using your Google Business Profile as long as you have a Google My Business account.
Being an online store owner in the UK, it is a must to take advantage of Google Shopping. According to Google reports, Google ad has generated 59% ad clicks compared to any other marketing channel.
Google shopping uses a different approach from conventional text ads. With text advertisements, you select the target terms that will cause the adverts to appear while google shopping has complete control over the web searches that will result in your advertising being displayed to customers more effectively.
This helps shoppers to find your product more easily.
How to market
Once on your GMB dashboard, go to the posts tab and create an ‘offer’ or a ‘what’s new’ post. You need to repost after every seven days since GMB posts expire every seven days.
You can also upload photos of your product to your Business Profile via the Photos tab of your GMB dashboard or as a new item via your Products/Services tab.
#11. Blog content
Blog posts are an effective way to market your product. Existing customers and people interested in buying a new product can use blog content to research how good a new product is.
For example, if you are marketing a facial product, you will need to convince them that the product is worth purchasing.
You need to talk about its ingredients and its benefits and all this information can be delivered well through a blog.
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#12. Customer reviews
When marketing your product, building customer trust and loyalty is a very powerful tool. Customers love gaining knowledge about the product before buying it. There is nothing more fulfilling than seeing your client’s testimonials and reviews whether bad or good since they help you understand your strengths and where you need to improve.
#13. Trade-ins and upgrades
You can use that additional resource to help market your new product if you have existing customers. For example, if you deal with laptops and you introduce a new laptop with different features, you can offer a discount or a gift for existing customers that purchase the product within the first 30 days. These marketing strategies help to strengthen customer loyalty while bringing your product to market effectively.
#14. Contests
The contest will give you exposure and help you in generating more leads. Giveaways are one of the best ways of organizing a contest. In this contest, you can offer freebies to users who win the contest. For your contest to be successful, you need to do research and pre-planning. Have contest rules and timing. If you will run the content on Instagram then hashtags play an important role while Facebook caption helps in drawing attention.
#15. Be visible in search engines
UK customers are practically online shoppers who are constantly looking for information and new products online.
Since a lot of web traffic comes from a Google and Bing search, you should ensure your product is searchable on these major search engines.
Google Maps can be of great help especially if you have a physical location so that customers can find you in the search results when they search for a particular kind of business within your locality.
According to Google, the phrase “near me” has increased in searches, so make sure your business name, address, and phone number can be found in local searches.
Adding location markers such as the name of the street or road or other prominent landmarks can help you narrow down your search keyword for your business.
Customers can also review your business, and with 65 percent of the UK tagging themselves as loyal customers, it would do you well always to provide your customers with a positive experience and by doing so you would be encouraging them to leave a positive review for your product.
These customer reviews can positively impact your ranking on the search engine.
You can also use paid search to market your product. Paid search places your business name at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) as long as you use a good set of keywords, and this brings us to the next marketing channel which is search engine optimization (SEO).
UK consumers usually prefer researching products and services online. According to UK marketing experts, this kind of organic search is what’s leading about 49 percent of UK consumers to e-commerce retailers. With SEO, you want to make sure that search engines can find you as you use words or phrases that users typically type in their browser whether they’re found in your content, product description, or in links to your site.
Conclusion
Now that you know 15 effective ways to market your product, it’s time for you to go get those customers and benefit from your business.
Marketing is a crucial aspect of any business and it should not be overlooked in any case. You might have a quality product but without marketing efforts, it might not get the recognition it deserves.
Products can’t sell themselves, marketing plays a very important role in selling. Use the strategies above and make your product successful.
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