Market your business

Much like a CV to a job seeker or a show reel to an actor, a marketing plan is the DNA of a small business. It’s what you can use to differentiate yourself from your competitors. With a strong marketing plan, your current and potential customers can understand who you are and what you offer.

A successful marketing plan consists of 3 steps:

1. Initial plan: This is what you would like to cover in your first marketing plan, the various tools you will use and the timescales in which you will complete it.
2. Execution: The physical implementation of the plan. What and where you will be advertising, posting and selling.
3. Re-iteration: Markets change, products evolve and as a small business you’re always hustling, always pivoting. Your marketing plan should be renewed and reviewed often. Ideally, sanity check the plan once a quarter. Does your plan still allow you to reach your target audience? What new technology out there can give you the edge? Review and then repeat steps 1-2.

Having a polished and professional website is an essential in today’s world. Ensure you explain your brand. What do you want customers to feel when interacting with your brand? What is special or different about your product or service?

Social media is a cost-effective way of engaging customers. There’s a variety of platforms to choose from, you just need to work out which one(s) your customers are most likely to use.

Tips

• Make sure you know who your audience is.
• Make sure your ads and images are high quality and high resolution. If your design looks bad, it may give the wrong impression about your business.
• What are your competitors doing? Is there anything you might want to copy or do differently?
• How are you testing whether your advertising is working as well as it could be? Find, try and measure different ways to deliver your message so you can be confident you’ve found the best way to say it.

Search engine optimization or SEO is fine-tuning a website so that customers looking for businesses like yours can quickly find you on search engines.

Search engines index and rank websites according to content and the number of hits they get. A free technique you can try on your own website is modifying the content and structure of the text to match likely searched keywords.

It’s not just keywords that matter, though. Links are important too. Because search engines also look for words that match your website content, your website ranking may be disadvantaged if the content and links don’t match. To take an obvious example, if you’re selling shoes, it boosts your SEO to have links related to footwear.

• Social media platforms offer an ad service and pay-per-click service is used by many companies to successfully improve their visibility on the search engine. Some ads only require you to write text. Others allow images and/or graphics.
• Promotion is two-fold. You need to think about all the different ways you can promote your business, e.g. where can you be seen and what you can feature on (often referred to as ‘brand awareness’). What incentives you can offer, e.g. discounts and exclusive previews? These will help people move from seeing to buying.

Tips

• Make sure you know who your audience is.
• Make sure your ads and images are high quality and high resolution. If your design looks bad, it may give the wrong impression about your business.

Irrespective of whether you have started building an email list, here are some tips and tricks.

• Work out what might be seen as 'spam' by your customers and what will feel like valuable or useful information.
• Aim to email your customers no more than once a month.
• Make sure you’re telling your customers something worth knowing. A new range, a time-sensitive offer or an upcoming event make it a useful interaction for them as well as you.