If you’re not a natural marketer it can seem like a huge mountain to climb to put together a successful and ongoing marketing campaign for your business. Then when a new product or service is launched you have to go back to the drawing board.
The challenge is that if you stop marketing your business will be less successful – no matter how good you are at what you do. It’s a fact that a mediocre product with great marketing will outsell a fantastic product with poor marketing – simply because if people don’t know about it they can’t buy.
The secrets of successful marketing are knowledge and planning. First you need to know:
- Who are your key target audiences? You may have more than one group of potential buyers, but you need to look at each group separately.
- What are the demographics of each audience – age range, income, lifestyle, etc?
- How does your product and service benefit them? In other words, how does it reach them emotionally and make them think ‘I want that’?
- Where do you find these people; where do they hang out? You need to check this out both offline and online.
When you’re armed with this information you should have enough to start planning your campaign. For instance, you don’t join a business networking group if your target market are new mums and you probably won’t find many of this target market on platforms like Linked In, but they may be very active on Facebook and visit the doctor, nurse, shops that sell baby things, etc. They may read the local newspaper and probably magazines that talk about baby related subjects and motherhood, but a small proportion are likely to have time to read a national daily or industry-specific journals.
This will help you to decide where to:
- Go networking
- Engage online
- Advertise your products or services
You can’t do everything so start small and work up. Start a plan and do a little every day and you’ll soon find these activities become part of your daily habits.
Put a reminder on your computer screen, enter time in your diary and make it flag up the ‘appointment’, leave yourself notes, make a list – whatever works for you.
