How to: Marketing quickly and efficiently
It has never been so easy to promote your business as it is nowadays. A rich supply of social media offers relatively cheap options for paid promotion of your business – or – if you are a clever content creator, you find out very soon that you can promote your business even without spending a dime.
And yet, never ever it has been so complicated. Consumers have too many options, ads are popping up on their screens every few seconds. Unless something specific captures our attention, we scroll down our screen, ignoring everything that doesn’t interest us. And while the business owners became very easy to promote their business through social media, it is increasingly hard to get the new clients that way if you don’t know what you’re doing, and what is supposed to be done. Many business owners spend tremendous amounts of money on their advertising campaigns to get very little or nothing back. Marketing agencies mainly don’t care how many real customers their clients get. They evaluate clicks, cost per click, and website visitors, but is that enough?
I am currently running my third business, so I know a thing or two about commonly made mistakes – and also about how to avoid them.
I had my first company when I was eighteen. I knew absolutely nothing about marketing, strategy, and planning, and my business reflected as much. From the shining success of the first two years in the business, I went straight to bankruptcy in its third year. And the problem wasn’t the industry or lack of money in it, or lack of potential clients, no. A problem was me, my lack of knowledge, and incompetent people I surrounded myself with, my need to be perfect in everything I was doing, my inability to accept defeat… oh, this list could go on and on and on.
When I started my second business some years later, I was determined to have a different business experience. After a decade of working for international corporates, educating myself, and mainly, working with some of the best people in the industry, I knew what should be done differently. I hired people that were supposed to help me with the marketing, and strategy – some of them good, some of them not as much. They were throwing at me flashy words I didn’t understand,(SEO, PPC, ROA…), giving me advices – some good, some not that much, and charging me a lot of money for that. Trust me, I learned a lot from that – but more importantly, I successfully applied what I learned to our business strategy, and the business strategy of our clients.
Below are the basic questions you should ask yourself to help you to simplify your Marketing Strategy, and the observations about the most common mistakes you can make on the way.
1. What is your content strategy and business goals for your marketing?
Most people think about the marketing strategy only as the polished posts on the social media, or the paid ads. In reality, your marketing strategy starts way before you post your first post, and it is called a Content Planning Strategy. Before you start posting, you should know a few things like – What is your business goal for your marketing? Are you trying to increase awareness about your brand, and grow your website visitors, or you’re selling something? What audience are you trying to attract? Do you know where to find them? How often will you be posting, and where? I know that these are unpleasant questions but unless you answer them, chances are that your marketing strategy will turn into unorganized chaos, and a few sporadic posts.
2. Are you trying to be an octopus?
There are people who are naturally good at marketing, and then are those who are not. Everyone has its strengths. If you’re one of those people who loves social media, and can create a message that hits the nail on the head, bravo! If you’re not, no shame in it. HIRE someone to help you. There are many platforms offering relatively cheap freelance specialists that know how to do their jobs much better than you. Don’t try to be an octopus and do it all, hire people who know what they’re doing, and can do it better and faster than you.
3. What is your added value?
One of the companies I collaborated with, stopped sending the Newsletter to their business partners after they thought one of them copied the article they posted, and implemented what they learned from the article to their business model. Mind me, that published article was not any confidential know-how, but the company owners freaked out so much, that since then the only material they sent to their business partners and potential clients were the Sales Offers. If the only way of interaction with your audience are your sales messages, you will lose your audience soon. Nobody is interested in what you have to sale – unless you add the value to their business and life. Hence, ask yourself – what is your added value?
4. What problem are you solving for your audience?
People are not in the least interested in what you have to sell. They want to know how you help them to resolve their issues. Stop telling everyone “we are using the newest technologies.” You must appeal to your reader by being in their skin, solving their problems. People are not really interested i
5. What is the best channel for your business?
On one side, there’s an ideal audience you want to reach (and by this point you hopefully know who they are if you did your homework), on the other side are your natural skills and inclination to certain types of social media. You might try to want to be everywhere – TikTok, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest. But the truth is that if you’re trying to be everywhere, you end up nowhere. Your messages are not targeted and specific enough, because it requires an enormous amount of time to craft them for each media. Hence, my advice – write down the criteria of your offering. Is it photogenic? Can you present its qualities in the pictures? Think about Pinterest or Instagram. Is it something you can present in talking? Consider youtube or TikTok. In any case, concentrate on 2, maximum 3 main media where your right audience sits.
6. Are you consistent?
I know, you might be thinking now “Didn’t she say in #3 that her coach forced her to post daily even when she didn’t feel like it, and that was a mistake?” I still stand by the #3. I still believe it’s wrong to try to be inspiring when you don’t feel like it. But here is the trick you can use – WHEN YOU FEEL INSPIRED, HIT IT ON. I can guarantee you that at least once a week you’ll feel that tingling in your fingers, you feel an urge to share, to create, to motivate others, to speak about your business. Use those moments, and create high-value content. Prepare your posts for a few days in advance. Schedule them through some schedulers (there are many tools you can use, but my favorite one is Buffer and Hootsuite). Build your credibility by appearing in your chosen social media channel consistently. Don’t let people hang around guessing when they might hear from you next.
8. Perfectionism always kills creativity
If there is a killer of any creativity (not only in marketing), this is the one. Are you one of those people who spent hours if not days on polishing and tweaking every single post, article, video they create, re-do it, and are not happy again? One of my clients had her store on Etsy for a few years when one of her clients pointed on the spelling mistake she had in a description of the product. While it was slightly embarrassing, that product was sold over 20.000 times. Lesson learnt? You don’t have to be perfect to make sales. You only have to start.
9. Sell through the storytelling
If there is a killer of any creativity (not only in marketing), this is the one. Are you one of those people who spent hours if not days on polishing and tweaking every single post, article, video they create, re-do it, and are not happy again? One of my clients had her store on Etsy for a few years when one of her clients pointed on the spelling mistake she had in a description of the product. While it was slightly embarrassing, that product was sold over 20.000 times. Lesson learnt? You don’t have to be perfect to make sales. You only have to start.