Best Marketing Strategies for Senior Entrepreneurs 2024: How to Promote Their Business Through Digital Marketing

As a senior entrepreneur, you have plenty of experience under your belt through years of successfully managing a business. But, the true hallmark of a great entrepreneur is the ability to adapt with time. In 2024, the need of the hour for all businesses is to leverage digital marketing to the best of their ability in order to get their brand in front of as many people as possible, develop a competitive advantage and enjoy an increase in revenue.

While some traditional modes of marketing, such as billboards and television ad buys are still relevant for certain industries, a pivot to digital marketing is essential. This guest article by Teresa Greenhill will serve as an in-depth guide to the best marketing strategies for senior entrepreneurs to use in today’s digital world.

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Best Marketing Strategies for Senior Entrepreneurs

1. Create a Strong Marketing Plan

A marketing plan follows a similar format to a business plan but is specialized in marketing activities. Ideally, your plan should be for a minimum of 12 months but can be made for 24-36 months as well. Here are the main features the plan should include:

• Marketing Objectives: Digital marketing objectives can be of two types – monetary and non-monetary. While naturally, you will want to focus on monetary objectives as those are the ones bringing in sales and revenue, non-monetary objectives should not be ignored either.

 A prominent non-monetary objective is brand awareness – i.e., the extent to which customers are familiar with your brand. For instance, when one thinks of cold drinks, Pepsi or Coca-Cola are brands that immediately come to mind. Your goal should be to develop a similar connection in customers’ minds. Your objective for brand awareness can be to receive 2 million views across social media posts within the first year. While this directly will not increase sales, in the long term, it will establish a strong digital presence for your brand, allowing you to outperform competitors unknown to the public.

 Comparatively, monetary objectives are easier to track. For example, the objective can be to earn $5000 from running advertisements on Instagram for two weeks. The preliminary budget can be set at $1000 and adjusted based on campaign performance.

•  Choosing a Target Market: According to research by Backlinko, 4.48 billion people across the world use social media. As a business, it is not feasible to target all these customers. The better approach is to select a target market of customers who have a demand for your product offerings and channel time, effort, and money toward converting them into paying customers.

Choosing a target market will involve conducting thorough market research and leveraging customer data at your disposal. Use categories such as age, purchasing power, income, and location to create customer segments that can then be used to create targeted market campaigns.

• Create a Budget: Setting a marketing budget can be challenging, especially when starting out. But, according to Web Strategies Inc., on average, companies across industries allocate between 6-14% of their overall budget towards marketing. Finding the right number for you will involve running multiple campaigns, tracking performance and its impact on the bottom line, and making appropriate adjustments.

2. Invest in an Amazing Website

A website serves as an all-in-one platform for your business to promote products, collect customer data, make sales, and provide customer service. Without a website, many customers will question your credibility. This is the reason all businesses, from handymen to multinational corporations, create websites. 

There are numerous drag-and-drop website creators on the market that you can use for free! These applications are developed to help entrepreneurs with zero experience in website design create aesthetic and functional websites. Any website builder will provide you with numerous customizable templates to choose from. The key will be to edit the website in line with your brand guidelines, font specifications, and business messaging.

Additionally, having a blog on your website is a necessity. Over the years, blogs have become much more than a medium to educate customers on products or share information. Blogs are crucial elements used by search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc., to rank websites on their search listings. The criteria used to rank websites is called SEO (search engine optimization). The higher your website’s SEO score, the higher it will rank on search engines. Being on the first page of any search engine will drive significantly more traffic to your website compared to competitors. If you’re interested in learning more about SEO, here is a resource for reference!

3. Continue to Network

As an entrepreneur, you are no stranger to networking and the benefits it provides. Similar to how you visit events and seminars to meet industry leaders, suppliers, and other partners, use social media to do the same.

LinkedIn is one of the stand-out platforms for networking. Use the platform to find companies in your niche to partner with. Similarly, it can be used to learn about incubators, accelerators, and VCs in your community looking to onboard new businesses. Some of these promote exclusively on social media platforms as they have a higher reach compared to traditional marketing mediums. Being digitally active will open doors to various new opportunities that can provide benefits for the business.

Additionally, social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat are great for networking with influencers. Influencers are people with a substantial following who can be used to promote your products directly to customers. Compared to running advertisements, influencer marketing has a higher rate of success. This is because customers that follow influencers trust them and are willing to buy products suggested by them. Typically, influencers will charge either a flat fee, commission, or both depending on the product and promotional requirements.

4. Use Digital Marketing Tools

Whether it be posting on social media, creating performance reports, customer service, or more, there are numerous digital tools readily available online that can handle these tasks competently. Compared to managing these tasks manually, digital tools will significantly reduce the investment of time, money, and effort. Here is a list of must-use tools for your digital marketing efforts:

• Social Media Management Software: This tool allows you to manage all social media handles from a common dashboard. Not only does this make posting super easy, but it also helps to stay on top of views and engagements across the platform. This level of performance tracking can be used to pinpoint platforms that are working well and those that aren’t. Use this information to channel resources towards successful platforms, as they will provide higher returns.
•  Google Analytics: As the name suggests, this is a website analytics tool developed by Google. Once google analytics is connected to your website it will provide in-depth data regarding the performance of every page and the site as a whole. Additionally, it will track important metrics such as the bounce rate, session times, page load times, and more in real-time. These can be used to repair any errors on the website, make the user journey seamless and increase SEO scores.
• PDF Software: As all your marketing efforts will be managed digitally, your data needs to follow the same approach. Rather than wasting resources on storing paperwork, convert documents into PDFs and upload them to a cloud-storage platform (such as Google Drive or Dropbox). Once documents are on the cloud, they can be shared with employees in an instant. For instance, once the marketing plan is complete it can be shared with all relevant stakeholders in the organization. If edits are suggested, learn how to merge PDF files within a few clicks.

 5. Hire Digital Marketing Experts

Similar to any other business project, hiring experts will be crucial to the success of your digital marketing efforts. Here are a few types of experts you should consider hiring:

• Social Media Managers: They will bring expertise regarding how to grow your digital presence on various platforms. This will involve creating a promotional plan for each, running campaigns, and tracking performance.
•  Graphic Designer: Rather than using ready-made graphics (which most of your competitors are using as well), hire a graphic designer to create illustrations, and designs for your website, in addition to creating unique social media posts.

If you do not have the budget for hiring full-time employees, use freelance marketplaces, such as Upwork and Fiverr, to hire talented freelancers on a project basis. Prior to hiring, remember to vet candidates based on their experience, portfolio, and compensation requirements. If the arrangement goes well you can choose to hire them for future projects as well.

Using digital marketing to promote your business is bound to reap positive results in the short and long term. In the initial stages, your focus will be to create a sound marketing plan, post which you can start selecting the best software, such as a social media management tool and a PDF merge tool. If your business lacks in-house expertise relating to digital marketing, don’t hesitate to hire skilled freelancers who can get your projects off and running at an affordable price.

These are some of the best marketing strategies for senior entrepreneurs. Which of these tips for senior entrepreneurs will you implement starting today? Your comments below.