How To Master Marketing When You’re Brand New

Starting a business can often be quite daunting. When you’re not a natural entrepreneur or you’ve not had much business experience, you can be fearful of it. But you needn’t be. There’s a lot about business that you can learn as you go along, and this definitely applies to marketing. When you start a small business, you really don’t have to be an expert of professional in order to get results. You just have to be willing to learn and grow. Because as you’re starting to absorb different ideas and tactics, you can try them all out for yourself. Most of the time, you just need to drop the fear and have fun with it instead.

Yet, even when you know you need to do this and you feel willing to step up, you won’t always know how to get started. And that’s only natural – because you’re brand new. So, you’re not expected to be a marketing master right now. But you can be soon. You just need to try out some different ideas, work with different tactics, and get creative too. And you really do need to let it be fun. So, take a look at some of these ideas and see what works for you.

Set Goals

To start with, you need to make sure that you have goals in place. We all need goals. And you need them for different parts of your business – but you definitely need them for marketing. So, ask yourself – what do you want to achieve with your business? What do you long to create? When you write this all down, you’ll find that it’s easier for you to come up with the most suitable campaigns.

Know Your Audience

But then also, you need to make sure that you know your audience incredibly well. Because you have to remember that your business isn’t about you. It’s about them. Serving them, creating something for them. And if you’re going to be able to promote what you do and market to your audience effectively, you’ll need to know your audience well. So make sure that you know exactly who you’re talking to, and what they need.

Do Some Research

From here, you then need to make sure that you’re doing research – and enough of it. You don’t have to spend weeks and weeks on this, however. The aim is to just get enough knowledge of the areas of marketing that you know nothing about. You don’t need to become an expert, as you’re going to learn a ton as you go along.

Consider Working With Professionals

Next up, you may want to think about working with different professionals to help you here. Maybe you don’t want to do it all alone, or you feel as if you could use the help of experts in your industry. Whether this is finding a specialist PR person, a team that knows franchise marketing, or a consultant in your field, take a look around. You may find that working with professionals is exactly what you need here.

Identify The Right Platforms

If you’re going it alone, or even if you’re working with a few professionals, the next thing that you need to do here is work out which platforms you’re going to be on. And this isn’t about the ones you want to be on. But rather those that you know your audience is on, and that you feel you can connect with them on. Because that’s the winning formula here. Remember, it’s about them.

Set Up Social

When you’ve made that decision, you need to set up your social profiles. And there’s a way that you can go about it. You could think about setting up the bare bones of the profiles on each platform, then creating your strategy. Or, you could look to master one platform first, find your feet with it and connect with your audience, and then move on to the next.

Aim For Engagement

But now you need to make sure that you’re using your social platforms properly. It’s not enough to just get set up or to start talking. You need to be doing more than that. You need to engage your customers on social media, and connect with them. You need to get in front of the right people and start to build relationships with them. It isn’t a numbers game. It’s a quality over quantity thing every single time.

Master Your SEO

If you’re not already concentrating on your own SEO, it’s time to do exactly that. Because it’s simple, especially with an SEO guide. Sometimes, something with a fancy title can scare you. But when you step back and learn the basics of SEO, you’ll realize that things are starting to come together. By just using the right words and aiming to get your best content out there on the web, you’ll start to appear in searches properly.

Try Something Paid

At some point, you’ll also want to try out something paid. And this can be fun. You may often find that there’s only so far you can get with your organic activity, and that at some point you’ll need to run ads. But whether you do this with paid search or paid social, it’s down to your own data.

Push Your PR

The next thing that you’ll want to be able to do here, is really push your PR. And no, you do not need a PR professional to support you here, you can absolutely do your own PR. You just need to be consistent with it, know what constitutes a good story, and start to put things out into the media. Stay on top of it, and watch buzz for your business start to grow.

Harness WOM

From here, you’re then going to want to make sure that you start to harness the power of conversation. Never underestimate the power of recommendations. If you do a good job and you know that your customers love you, they’ll be more than happy to recommend you. And there are plenty of strategies that you can go for here, but you just need to be authentic and truthful to yourself. And your customers will start to do the rest.

Work With Your Data

Above all else, you need to make sure that you’re always checking in with your data. If you know that you want to go with decisions that’ll pay off and allow you to connect more, you need to look at your own results and data, and go from there.

Be Creative

Finally, you’re then going to want to make sure that you’re being as creative as you can when it comes with your different ideas. Don’t just follow the crowd. It’s cool to come up with different campaigns and to go with new and exciting tactics to get your business out there. Try to let yourself be as creative as possible and come up with fun ideas because of it. You’ll see you get better results when you do.

To summarise, when you’re new to the world of business marketing can seem confusing. It’s also something that has the potential to make you feel vulnerable. However, it doesn’t have to. Because as you can see, there are a wealth of ideas that you can turn to in order for things to work out for you. Just handpick some of the different options and see what kind of success you can make because of it.