Marketing Is Key!

As the owner of a new business, you need to learn one rule: marketing is key.

What this effectively means is that even if your idea, concept or product is flawed, if you know how to market, you can still be successful. However, ideally you want to be firing on all cylinders. You want to be selling a fresh product that consumers want. You also need to generate a lot of interest for your product or service.

How do you do this? It’s all about marketing.

Step 1: Build Up A Profile

The first thing that you should be thinking about is how to sell your business as a concept. The best way to do this is by getting active on social media. When you are just starting out, we recommend that you set up business profiles on all the major social networks. This will include Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. We can look at one of these as an example of how you can market your business and drum up interest. If you use Twitter, at the beginning you should be setting it up as a source of knowledge in your industry. So, if you are a freelance journalist, you would be tweeting about the latest updates in world news. That way you can gain followers who are interested in your industry. They will most likely also be interesting in your service or product, and this makes them potential customers. By doing this, you can establish a strong customer base.

You do no need to be active on all the platforms as your business evolves you will see what works for your business. For the platforms you don’t enjoy you can always automate posts so you still have a presence on those platforms if you were to decide to change to them in the future you are not starting from scratch.

Step 2: Brand Your Business

The next thing you should be thinking about is how to brand your business, or how to make it commercially viable. Owners tend to do this by recruiting the services of an advertising agency that deals with a wide range of marketing. By taking a multi-level marketing approach, you can be assured that interest in your business will increase rapidly. You need to think about your business image.

Design a business logo will give customers an image that they can link to your business. It also helps your business appear more professional and official, and can be used across all platforms to develop a consistent brand for your business. 

You need to decide if you want a website for your business.

What is the purpose of your website going to be?

• Just be available for people to find you on Google (you will need to invest in SEO to ensure your website achieves this result for you)
• Be a platform where you can engage with your audience (blog, members site)
• Offer prospective clients with detailed information about your services or products – possibly even take sales through your website.

When you start looking at a website for your business you need to look at the big picture, where do you see your business down the track and what functions would you ideally want your website to have in the future. No good starting on a platform that can not expand and requiring you to totally redo your website further down the track on another platform.

Step 3: Be Bold And Unique

Finally, your business will constantly be facing a lot of competition. This may be from bigger businesses that have more money to spend on marketing than you do or smaller businesses that are targeting the exact same audience as you. For that reason, you need to formulate a way to separate yourself from the pack. You must choose how to do this but a possibility is personalising your business. If you are a small business, you can offer your customers a personalised service. This is something bigger companies will not be able to do and that gives you an edge. Look at what makes you stand out from the crowd and why choosing your business is beneficial to your prospective clients. 

Remember if people can’t find you or your services, they can’t buy from you.