You’ve done the hard work of getting your business on the road – now you must ensure you’re seen. Marketing a new business is one of the hardest things to do. To have the greatest chance of success, you’ll need to research the market, develop a marketing plan, and target your audience.
What is marketing?
Marketing is every stage of turning a prospective consumer into a satisfied customer, from acquisition, to satisfaction, and then retention.
It’s about building relationships with your customer base and engaging them in meaningful ways.
Social media has become the first port of call for many businesses to market themselves and is a good way of illustrating the nuances of marketing.
Let’s say that a cafe posts a reel that goes viral on TikTok and Instagram. Millions of people see the video, and the cafe’s social media profiles gain a few thousand followers, but there’s no uptick in sales.
Why?
- Views (also known as impressions) don’t create a meaningful connection with new audiences.
- Most of the new audience is likely to be spread beyond the cafe’s geographic area. Knowing that someone in Australia has viewed the reel is great, but it’s unlikely to lead to a sale.
In the above example, the cafe could replicate their content to get more views and build up a loyal following over time. However, without a nurturing strategy to turn followers into customers, these views will remain inside the platform.
Before you post on social media in the hope of getting more views and followers, you should create a marketing plan.
How to create a marketing plan
Set your marketing objectives
To market your new business successfully, you first need to know what success looks like and what you’re trying to achieve.
Perhaps you want to increase traffic to your website, increase your sales pipeline as quickly as possible, or position the brand in a particular area.
>See also: How to market a physical therapy practice
Prioritize your wider new business objectives and then see how marketing can help achieve those. Examples of these include increasing brand awareness, improving reputation, launching a product, and increasing revenue or profits.
Whatever the objectives are, make sure they’re SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic (and relevant), and time-bound.
Understand the importance of research
Surprisingly, this next step is one many businesses skip.
Market research won’t just allow you to understand the market as it is; it can shape a Unique Selling Point (USP) by spotting any gaps within it. In other words, it gives validation for why your business exists.
As Chris Peach, research director at research agency Walnut Unlimited sums up: “Believing in what you offer is important, and showing you are passionate about it can be very compelling, but success will come from convincing many others about the benefit of buying from you, so knowing what it is that they think makes you unique and better is crucial.”
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How to conduct market research
How can you conduct market research for your business? One port of call is Google. It’s possible to understand the demand for a product or service by seeing how many searches on Google it generates.
Another method is to conduct surveys. Find which online communities your target audience reside and conduct polls for almost immediate insights.
>See also: How to market your gaming app
You can also go face-to-face. Conducting interviews can help shape your customer personas – what interests they have, what motivates them, what they think of your business and your competitors. Similarly, focus groups can provide instant feedback on how you to improve your product or service.
Pricing research of the competition can also show if your price-point and brand image line up.
“Research is essential to our process,” Tom Edington of market research and design studio The Yard Creative says. “Research enables us to truly understand what will resonate with our clients’ target audience to ensure the creative solutions we provide stand out within their marketplace and connect to the consumer.
“Our preferred method of research is to always pair primary and secondary research. Conducting secondary research whilst analyzing our clients’ data enables us to cast our net wide to really understand the market and our clients existing and target consumers.
“Having an understanding of our client’s market, sector, and consumer then allows us to be very focused with our questioning when we move into qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys.”
Know your business marketing strategy
To market successfully, you will need to create a marketing strategy to align marketing efforts with the overarching aims of your new business.
The marketing strategy should include the four Ps of marketing (also known as the marketing mix): product, price, place, and promotion.
“The most important part of a marketing strategy is product and price,” Tom Welbourne of The Good Marketer explains. “Promotion, place and people can be tweaked accordingly as time goes on, i.e., you can target a new audience through ads or run a payday sale.
“For start-ups, consider starting with three or four products to give customers variety and to generate a good average order value [AOV].
“Generally, start-ups think lower-priced products will be more successful, but often, that’s not the case. We encourage start-ups to aim for an AOV of around £40-£50 to be profitable on the first order.”
Paul Whitney, director of business consultancy and accountancy firm Xeinadin, says having a marketing strategy was crucial to its rapid success.
“Don’t be afraid to adjust your strategy,” he says.
Regularly assess the effectiveness of your selected media marketing mix and evaluate the return on investment compared to your budget. If a strategy is underperforming, do not persist with it; instead, pause the activity and experiment with different messaging and media to analyze the outcomes.
Many business owners focus on increasing their brand visibility without realizing that the message they convey is crucial.
If your message does not resonate with your target customers and is indistinguishable from your competitors, why would they choose you?
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Develop your new business marketing strategy
At this stage, a well-defined marketing plan is essential. This plan should include the brand proposition, outlining the brand’s purpose and target customer. Why should customers care? What are their priorities when choosing a product or service? It is also crucial to highlight what sets your brand apart from others in the market.
The communication plan will specify the channels to target, such as social media, email, events, and direct marketing, and establish a consistent tone of voice across these platforms.
Emphasizing the importance of choosing the right language, Peach explains, “Small businesses may offer bundled insurance packages for specific sectors like ‘hairdressers,’ recognizing that business owners value efficiency and time savings.”
The advantages of creating a marketing plan include:
- Defining your target market
- Identifying your business’s unique selling proposition
- Understanding your competition
- Optimizing marketing budget allocation
- Maintaining a consistent brand voice
- Establishing a strategy to reach potential customers
Lastly, ensure the marketing plan is accessible to all stakeholders for alignment with the brand and to track progress towards objectives.
> See also: How to craft an effective marketing plan
Targeting your audience
Once you have identified your target audience, it is crucial to engage with them effectively. Creating customer profiles can help understand the communities your audience engages with.
Subsequently, focus on engaging with them, with social media being a prominent platform for interaction.
Jack Shepherd, co-founder of The Social Shepherd, recommends that small businesses identify the social media platforms where their audience is active and concentrate efforts on one or two platforms initially.
He emphasizes that short-form videos perform exceptionally well across all platforms and should be a priority strategy for small businesses.
Shepherd adds, “Video content is ideal for reaching new users, with reels and TikToks having high discoverability on social media. Utilize Instagram stories and static posts to nurture your audience.
“Once you have tested various content pieces and identified what resonates with your audience, leverage paid social strategies to extend the reach of top-performing content. Since organic reach has limitations, incorporating an advertising strategy is advisable to target your ideal customers.
“Consider providing educational content about your product or service to prospecting audiences. For retargeting existing customers, deliver content that builds social proof and trust to drive conversions.”
Further insights on marketing
Innovative advertising ideas for small businesses – Small Business UK
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