Marketing: Our Definitive Guide

If you haven’t yet read our guide to Marketing Fundamentals, that’s a great place to start – once you’ve read it, here are the next steps you need to take in order to turbocharge your business marketing!

Research your Market

Planning a way to stand out from your competitors requires that you first know who’s actually out there. This kind of market insight will be really important for developing your marketing strategy, and will save you plenty of time once you actually implement it. Take data from wherever you can – sites like Ebay, for example, list how much products have sold for in the past, and how often they are sold. This kind of data will be invaluable! Are there online communities that are interested in the general type of product you’re selling? If so, tap these resources for valuable insight into what your potential customers might want, what their values are, and how you can speak directly to them.

Make a Marketing Plan with Goals

Once you know your market, you’ll want to create a plan of how you’ll market to them. Remember, great marketing is about sharing information with your target consumers – your marketing plan should specifically identify how you’ll speak to this audience. It should include where your marketing messages will be displayed, how often, as well as the general gist of your marketing campaign. It’s best to have one overall message, even if your individual ads are different – this helps to establish your brand. All of the above are important elements of your marketing plan – the last element is setting hard goals. These will look like specific follower counts, sale numbers, or ad impressions, all of which are qualitative things that can be measured.

Elements of your Marketing Plan:

1. Who will this advertising campaign be targeting?
2. Where/How will I speak to this audience?
3. How often do I want to speak to this audience?
4. What is my overall message?
5. What is my quantitative goal – and what tools will I measure this with?

Boost your Website’s Web Presence

Your web results are one of your business’ most important resources! In today’s market, this is how a majority of your customers will find you, especially if you don’t sell goods in person. In order to boost your web results, here are some things that you need to be doing:

1. Keywords: If you had to describe your business in a word or two, what are the words you would choose? The answers to this question are your keywords – how search engines know how to direct people to your website. So for example, if you sell handmade kites, it’s very important to use the words “handmade kite” throughout your website. Also remember that when you’re uploading images to your website, search engines also search the file names as well. So as a bonus, name all your site images as your keywords!
2. Consistently Add Content: Weekly or monthly additions of new content shows search engines that you’re still active – this will boost your web presence!
3. Backlinks: The more people who GENUINELY post links to your site, the higher your ranking will be. But it’s very important not to just post your link all over the internet – search engines will actually rank sites lower if they perceive the site to be linked to spam.
4. Social Media: Link your social media back to your website in order to boost the digital presence of both!

These tips are a great start for marketing your business online. Also, take a look at our Guide to Social Media for Business, which explains how you can best leverage the tools of social media to further grow your business!