Starting a new business is always an exciting process. Unfortunately, the principle “created a company and customers will come right away” absolutely does not work. Success is the result of hard work, a lot of research and marketing planning. Marketing is part of your business plan and one of the most important parts of your overall business strategy. The main success factor is the actual content of the marketing plan. Successful effective marketing methods can turn customer needs into a desire to buy your product.
Just one great product is not enough to succeed. On the other hand, no amount of marketing effort is able to attract a mass audience to a bad product. A successful startup requires that you have both a good product and good marketing. Better, hire an email marketing agency that offer bulk digital marketing services. Launching a marketing campaign is a unique task due to limited resources, be it time, money or talent.
Essentials for Running Effective Marketing
Before you start laying bricks in a new home, you need a solid foundation. A successful launch of a marketing strategy follows the same principle. Before moving on to implementation, make sure that you have an understanding of the following “pillars of your foundation”:
1. Decide on your market
Market research is the first step in developing a marketing plan. Determine who your customers are. The age, lifestyle and income level of the target audience will have a direct impact on your advertising budget.
It is naive to believe that the whole world will love your products. The reality is that only a small part of the population will become interested in your services.
What are your customers looking for? How to choose a market? There are two global criteria that you need to understand before starting a project:
Market size – do you focus on the local or regional market? What is the demographic structure of the market? Men, women or children? How many potential customers in the target market.
Market capacity – Do your potential customers have money to buy your product?
2. Decide on your competitors
Monitoring competitors is important at all stages of business development, especially at the startup stage. Try to find out what marketing methods your competitors are using. This will be required for a real assessment of their strengths and weaknesses and will allow us to formulate new ideas in order to surpass competitors. To be successful, you need to get ahead of them in advertising and promoting your product, first of all, not at the expense of financial costs, but due to a deep understanding of the needs of customers and ways to convey the information they need.
3. Decide on your price for services
Price dumping is not always the best way to get ahead of competitors. It is necessary to evaluate the capabilities and expectations of customers from your proposed price. At the same time, maximum attention should be paid to the costs of your business. It is important that the set price allow you to make a profit. You can be sure: dumping for the sake of entering the market will cause serious damage in the future if you do not have a clear plan on how to return sales to the profitable zone with the help of price increases.
4. Design your brand
Consumers remember images. For the brand, bright and catchy words are important that will remind them of your company and your services. Knowing the portrait of the ideal customer, apply the optimal color scheme in the brand logo, make it simple and memorable. Keep it in sight. Signs, business cards, websites, catalogs of announcements should include your logo and company colors.
5. Consider the official opening
Do not be shy – your entry into the market should be an event. Festively decorate your outlet, let potential customers see your “birth”. Try to invite local public figures to the ceremony; this may attract the interest of local media. Use the Internet and make yourself known loudly. Remember, if people have not shown interest, then the entire marketing campaign will begin to work against you.
6. Build an affiliate network
It is very difficult for an individual entrepreneur or small business to find their first customers. Try to take advantage of existing experience. Join trading partners. There are not a small number of service aggregator companies on the market that offer, for a small fee or percentage, to take advantage of the sales channels they have established. Pay attention to such large players in the market as AVITO, PROFI and YOUDO, which allow you to find potential buyers of reliable service providers.
7. Be online
Website development is affordable and compulsory for a business of any size. The site structure should be based on the keywords that you encountered when researching the sales market. Start with a basic list of keywords. This is a list of three to five short main phrases that fully describe what you are offering to the market. Gradually, you will be able to expand them with secondary key requests of potential customers.
A prerequisite is the expansion of your online presence. To do this, there are social networks that allow you to create additional advertising noise about your company. A large number of consumers discuss various brands or their services with their friends. They do it publicly online , and you can also get your own piece of free advertising.
8. Define success criteria
Success can be different for each startup. This may be, for example, 500 new registrations on your site or on social networks in the first month. But it is better if success is indicated by the sum of the expected income. Regardless of your criteria, success must be determined in advance and documented in the business plan. Just make sure that all those who work for you know the established criteria and are ready to work in this direction.
It is important to stay consistent. And it doesn’t matter how success is defined – registration, revenue, profit: it’s crucial that the criteria are really related to business growth and they are measured in the same way every next month.
