Depending on your industry, you may have a great deal more competition than others. The CBD industry, for one, is booming and it's hard to grow a successful brand just by discussing CBD oil benefits on your website.

 Here are nine ways to beat your competition and grow a successful brand:

1. Use a customer relationship management platform

Manually tracking transactions takes a lot of time and leaves plenty of room for error. As the business grows, it becomes even more cumbersome. Using a customer relationship management (CRM) platform from the start makes it easier to scale quickly.

Systems like Insightly or SalesForce integrate with many of the other applications you're likely already using — such as Quickbooks for accounting and Mailchimp for email marketing. This allows you to create automated workflows and helps you to keep track of your customers much easier.

One of the best ways to use your CRM is to keep customer notes each time that they reach out to you for support. No matter what customer service representative comes in to help, they can see the notes and know more about the customer's history with your company. This assists them in creating a more personalised experience.

2. Find new opportunities

Consistently look for new opportunities for your brand. By seeking to understand your demographic better (from the direct competition, all the way to distribution channels, foreign market analysis and other potential industries), you can find plenty of new opportunities to pursue in order to grow your business. 

3. Build a first-party data strategy

Recently, Google announced that it will be getting rid of third-party cookies, which is something marketers use to provide a personalised experience. The cookies tell their server if you've been to their website before and allow you to change what you serve to them. Firefox and Safari have already blocked them by default.

That means that connecting with your audience will be more difficult — unless you get consent and collect the data yourself. Focusing on a first-party data strategy (for example, asking people to create accounts, sign in to your site or sign up for your email list) will get you in good shape when the cookie disappears from Google Chrome.

4. Aim for position zero in Google

Search engine optimisation will remain an important part of digital marketing. But Google aims to serve up more of its services in the results, preventing people from even needing to click through to find what they are looking for.

Looking for phrases that you can optimise for position zero can do wonders for your brand recognition, even if people don't click through. Position Zero is also known as the featured snippet that appears above the organic results. How to do that isn't clear cut and some areas will have far more competition than others. 

5. Optimise for voice search

Voice search is a crucial area to prepare for, as data suggests that soon 50% of searches will be voice searches. Google says 20% of its mobile queries are voice form. It was thought that by this year, 30% of web browsing will be screenless.

The stat was originally published in 2017 and now that we're here, the 30% projection is thought to be the low end.

6. Build a stellar customer experience

From 2020 onwards, we'll see an even more dramatic shift in beliefs about what marketing is. It's not about convincing people to buy from you or work with you. The priority is now about great customer experience because that's what keeps people coming back for more. Implementing CRM is one of the ways that you can improve the customer experience but you have to do more than give them information.

7. Customer acquisition matters, but don’t forget retention

Consider developing a customer loyalty programme. Not only are they a great way to increase sales, but it also costs up to three times more money to get a new customer than it does to sell something to an existing customer.

Depending on the source you find, you may see this number as up to 10 times more expensive. But no matter how you look at it, new customers do cost more.

8. Pick a couple of social platforms

It's tempting to try to be everywhere on social media but the reality is that, even with automation and scheduling tools, it’s impossible for a business to cultivate a good social media experience on every single platform.

Don’t waste time on the platforms where your audience isn’t spending time. If you're dealing with an older audience, skip Snapchat and focus on Facebook or Twitter. It's better to do one or two social media networks well than to carelessly manage five or more.

9. Use video marketing

According to Google, 60% of people would rather watch videos online than television. And according to Insivia, mobile video consumption increases by 100% every year. The most powerful reason why you need to consider video as part of your branding is that by 2022, online video will make up more than 82% of all consumer Internet traffic. This is 15 times higher than what it was in 2017.

For more information, visit www.penguincbd.com.