You’ve taken the leap, left the safety net of your full time job and started your own business. You know your product or service inside out and everyone you know tells you it’s a great idea.
Then it starts to get sticky.
You need a website, you’ve signed up to ALL social media sites, a friend has done some business cards and told you that you need to be better at marketing if you want to be a success.
That’s when you start to panic.
Marketing.
First Things First
Well, the clue is in the name: MARKETing… it’s about understanding your market.
Do you understand your customers?
Facebook promotions, Instagram posts and ads in your local paper are all tactical outputs of marketing, but they should all flow from the starting point of understanding your customer.
Success Starts With Strategy
The first step to marketing nirvana is to create a marketing strategy. Strategy conjures up images of huge documents, board rooms and dour consultants. You can take this approach, but for most start ups, I’d advise against it.
Instead, to create a marketing strategy, just answer these three questions in as much detail as you have:
- Who is going to buy what you’re selling?
- Why are they going to buy it?
- What are your SMART objectives?
When you’re answering these questions use your own experience, but also talk to people to get their input.
Avoid family and friends, they’re usually the least critical audience you’ll ever have. Instead, get groups of people who fit the profile of your customers and talk to them about the problems they have and how they solve them. Talk to customers (and potential customers) to understand their pain and how you can fix it.
SMART objectives are also crucial, they’re not just a line from a bad management handbook. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound and they help sense check the assumptions you’ve made about the target market. They’ll also help you budget and understand what you need to sell to stay in business.
And finally, make it visible. Put the highlights on a wall in your office, see who you’re talking to every day and know what your objectives are – it helps keep the customer at the heart of what you’re doing.
Move Fast And Break Things
Facebook once had a motto of move fast and break things, which is useful, to a point, for your marketing.
Once the new marketing strategy is stuck on the walls, many small businesses are left paralysed. They are overwhelmed by the plethora of channels available and end up doing nothing.
I can’t tell you if your marketing strategy is right or if your marketing strategy is wrong. But I can tell you that if you don’t implement your strategy, then it will never work.
Get started. Look at the analytics. Review what you’ve done. Track where the sales are coming from. Ask your customers how they heard about you. Use this data to improve what you’re doing. Don’t be afraid to kill things if they’re not working.
Tide Banking <> Andi Jarvis, Strategy Director and Founder of Eximo Marketing