If you’ve recently embarked on the journey of starting a new business, congratulations! It’s an exciting time, sometimes overwhelming, rewarding, hard work and a huge learning curve.
In the early days of establishing your new business, you may have limited time, resources and awareness. Leveraging proven marketing techniques will help you position your business positively from the beginning that will lead to sustainable business growth.
Let’s begin by taking a closer look at what marketing is and the top 5 tips for marketing your new business.
What is Marketing?
Marketing is not just one thing. It’s a collective approach of strategies aimed to create success and longevity for your business. Marketing incorporates your brand, research, identifying your ideal customers, understanding their needs, creating value, building relationships, product or service development, pricing, promotion and distribution. All these elements form the basis of your marketing and future success.
The benefits of marketing include:
- Develops brand awareness
- Helps you reach your target audience
- Creates interest in the products and services you offer
- Builds relationships and trust with your target audience
- Assists you to educate your target audience
- Creates a consistent source of sales
- Helps inform your future business decisions
- Leads to business growth and profitability.
Marketing is not a set and forget activity. In fact, it should be an activity that you constantly review, measure and adjust. Your marketing plan, strategies and activities should be reviewed on a regular basis – we recommend every 3 or 6 months. This will help you measure the success of the marketing strategy to determine whether it’s been a successful and provides a return on investment. If a particular strategy is not helping you achieve your goal (for example, generating sales), you may need to adjust it, drop it or try a different strategy.
5 Tips for Marketing Your New Business
1. Develop a Marketing Plan
A marketing plan is the first step. During this phase you will research, research, research. Establish clear and defined marketing goals that you can work towards. Identify and learn everything you can about your target audience, their pain points and how your product or service addresses these.
Your marketing plan should incorporate a number of elements including:
- Marketing goals
- Brand identity
- Market research
- Target audience
- Competitor analysis
- Products and/or services
- SWOT analysis
- Pricing & sales targets
- Online and offline marketing strategies
- Marketing budget
- Review & measure success
Intrinsic Marketing offers Marketing Action Plans for new and established businesses. The Marketing Action Plan provides your business with the road map to accelerate business growth.
2. Create a Professional Website
Let’s face it, we all search for information online before we commit to making a purchasing decision. We often visit a website to ensure a business is legitimate, aligns with us and our values, offers exactly what we need, find out more information about products, services or who we are going to be working with. A website can also help educate us on topics we are unclear about. Your target audience is likely to be doing the same.
You want to provide a positive user experience for a customer – after all your website is a place where your target audience can access information 24/7 from anywhere in the world. It helps your business become more visible in search engine results such as Google and allows you to showcase your product or services.
Things to consider when building your website:
- Branding (consistency is key to building brand awareness)
- Images, styling, colours and language that aligns with your brand
- The user experience and the ease of locating information visitors are looking for
- Content that clearly articulates what you offer and is easy to read online
- About Us page (it’s the second most visited page on most websites after your home page)
- A call to action and easy to access contact information
- Social media links so visitors can also follow you.
3. Leverage Local Area Marketing
As a new business, it’s important to build a strong local presence. You can use local area marketing strategies such as partnering with other local businesses, attending community events or sponsoring local initiatives that will help establish your business locally. This is particularly important for businesses who have a physical presence and shopfront.
Also consider targeted advertising in local publications, create a business listing in online directories or connect with local influencers to expand your reach. You may like to read our article, 10 Local Area Marketing Strategies for more insights.
4. Secure Social Media Accounts
Once you have an understanding of your target market, it will help to inform which social media platforms you should be using. Begin by developing and posting content to platforms that your target audience is using, rather than trying to be present on all social media channels.
We recommend starting off with one or two social media platforms and building your social media presence from there, and only if you feel your business needs to. However, we also recommend setting up social media accounts on some of the most popular social media platforms and parking them. This allows you to secure the business name on these social media platforms, rather than finding out it’s been taken if you choose to use it in the future and helps protect your brand identity.
5. Create a Marketing Calendar
A marketing calendar is a big picture calendar that allows you to strategically plan out marketing activities and promotions throughout the year. Planning ahead is much more productive and successful than trying to pull something together at the last minute for a specific time or event.
To get started, pinpoint the events that align with the business, products or services you offer. You could include some of the following events in your marketing calendar:
- Special events such as valentine’s day, easter, mother’s day, father’s day and any others that align to promoting your products and services. For example, if you’re a florist the peak events in your calendar are likely to be valentine’s and mother’s day.
- Awareness days that align with your business, products and services. For example, if you run a pilates studio you would include World Pilates Day and World Health Day.
- Seasons or times of the year when your product or service is more likely to be in demand. For example, if you run a gym you can begin promoting health and body awareness and getting into shape for summer.
Begin to strategically plan your marketing campaigns to align with events in your marketing calendar. You will be able to identify any peak promotions and then plan other promotions for quieter months or seasons.
Consider what you will be offering, what visuals and messages will get your target audience’s attention and what is required to get the message out. Will you require window signage, advertising, brochures, social media advertising?
Be Consistent & Persistent
When it comes to marketing your new business keep in mind consistency and persistence are important. It takes time to build brand awareness and customer loyalty, so stay committed to your marketing efforts and be adaptable to changes in the market. The most successful businesses continuously review, evaluate and refine their marketing strategies and activities based on data driven metrics.
If you are finding marketing your business challenging or don’t know where to begin, we would love to hear from you. Our aim is to make marketing accessible and as easy as possible. Register for a free 30 minute Marketing Chat and let us know your biggest marketing challenge.
