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Whether you are working as an influencer, a self-employed writer, running a small business, or a large enterprise, marketing is vital to success. This means you need to have a marketing plan that is easy to follow and monitor.
Marketing is how you get yourself seen, if you are trying to succeed without marketing it is likely that you won’t get very far. So, what do you need to include in your marketing? Let’s have a look in more detail below:
What to include in your business marketing plan
A Detailed Plan
You can’t get very far if you don’t have a marketing plan. It might seem tedious but it is an important part of your business marketing. You need to know what you want to achieve, the marketing methods you will use, your marketing budget, who is going to run your marketing, and what your goals are. If you are creating this plan yourself, you may want to use a freelancing service to go through the plan with you.
If you have a dedicated team then make sure you hold plenty of meetings to piece together the best plan. Once your plan is in motion it’s all about having regular catch-ups so you can assess what is working and what isn’t.
Market Research
This is an extremely important part of marketing. You need to do as much research as possible. You should look at things including.
- Your target audience
- Where your target audience shop
- Which social media platforms get the best reach
- What are the latest trends
- What is your competition doing
- What do your target audience want?
- What marketing methods are working for your competitors
- Who does your target audience engage with?
- Do your target audience interact with competitions?
- What keywords are people searching for?
There are many more areas you can research. It might seem a little endless, however, market research is your bread and butter when you are looking for the best results.
Your Target Audience
There is no way you are going to be able to successfully market your business if you don’t know who your target audience is. It’s a vital step to starting your business. You can use the research you conduct to help you to establish it. Once you have an understanding of your target audience, and what you are going to sell or provide, you can think about the way your target audience will benefit from them. You will also have a clearer idea of who will want them. You need to establish:
- Their age
- Location
- Education
- Marital status
- If they are a family
- Occupation
- Their income
- And more
Once you learn these you will be able to better understand where to find them. For example, someone who is older may respond better to newspaper or TV adverts rather than social media. If you are targeting millennials, then social media is the way to go.
Simple Low-Cost Marketing
One of the first things you should look at with your marketing is the basic, low-cost methods. These include things like printing flyers, business cards, newspaper adverts, etc. They are simple to do and cost-effective. Some people will say that these are old-fashioned, however, if you are just starting out having some leaflets you can place in your local shop o business cards for your friends to hand out can be a great way to get you on the right track.
Competitions And Freebies
Something that works well at the moment is holding competitions and giving out freebies. They work particularly well on social media platforms. You have probably seen quite a few crop up. Usually, your followers will need to follow you, and your brand, like the post, comment on the post, and possibly share the post to their story to be in with a chance to win something.
Now most people won’t enter a competition that is solely for Promotional Products, however, you could throw some of these in with another prize. It could be one of your products, another popular product, or a trial of your services. You will see a huge variety of prizes some even as extravagant as a trip away.
Another great way of doing this is to have an incentive for people to sign up for your newsletter. You could offer them a discount for signing up. For example, a 25% voucher off of a £50 spend. Just make sure your budget can allow for these discounts.
Email Marketing
Once you have people’s emails, you can start to use email marketing. A weekly newsletter is a great place to start./ You could send out the latest blog post and some good deals or you could send out some relevant news about an upcoming sale. You can also send out the occasional discount voucher, again you need to make sure your budget can allow for you to offer a reduced price. You might want to limit to number of vouchers available if you can’t allow too much to be reduced.
Bear in mind that if you send emails too often you may appear in the spam folder or become annoying. You don’t want your customers to unsubscribe if they get frustrated. There is a fine line between making sure you are on the radar and becoming a nuisance. If you notice your subscription number going down rather than up you may need to look at this.
Social Media Marketing
This is something that no business can afford to pass up nowadays. Even if you are a freelance writer, you could benefit from having a website with a blog that is linked to a social media platform. Whether it is Facebook or Instagram think about getting yourself set up online. You could start small by sharing relevant images that represent your business and brand and then move up to doing reels and videos. These are great for engagement and can get your business to appear in people’s ‘For you’ pages.
Social media is a very low-cost method of marketing that has high results. You can reach a wide audience and it gives you the benefit of being able to engage with your customers too. If you do post something on your social media platforms it is best to make sure you do respond to some of the customer comments. This doesn’t mean that you need to reply to all of them, however, social media only gets better if your customers can see that they are being spoken to too. You need to address any message that contains complaints or questions regarding your products or services.
Social media can often be very time-consuming, therefore, it might be worth hiring someone to look after it for you. It could be an in-house marketing team or you could outsource the work. All you need to do is make sure you have regular catch-ups and set some guidelines.
A Professional Network
If you don’t have many connections when you start you need to put in some time and effort to build your professional network. This is a vital step in becoming successful. When you have some industry experts on hand it can help to give you a competitive edge. You will be able to find networking events online. It’s worth signing yourself up for some and arming yourself with business cards. You can then keep in touch with your new contacts through social media or LinkedIn. You may even be able to collaborate and help each other. It might even lead to further work, especially if your contacts have people they can’t help but they know you can.
SEO
This is something that you need to learn about. It’s extremely important. SEO (search engine optimization) is all about making sure your business is ranked to appear on the top results of a search engine like Google. The consumers of today aren’t very likely to look any further than the first page of results so you need your business to appear here. You need to keep this in mind and put steps into place to make sure you rank higher than your competition.
You need to look at all the content on your website, social media platforms, and other areas including things like popular keywords. This means that it’s a good idea to do some keyword research before and after you write any content that goes online. If you look before you can create content that already contains popular keywords. You also need to look at the relevance of the content you are putting online. Does it relate to your business? Does it answer any issues that your customers might have? Are answering questions your customers want to know?
As you can see marketing has a huge impact on your business and how successful you could be. There is a lot to think about, even more than is in the post. However, if you follow these tips you will be able to get a good start to your marketing strategy. Are you going to use any of these tips?
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