INSIGHTS

1. Set short-term marketing objectives
   Before you set goals for your marketing activity, make sure they are actionable and measurable. These goals should be in line with your overall brand and business strategy to help you achieve your longer-term goals.  For example, if you want to stay in touch, send offers to your customers and create loyalty – you need to build your customer database.For example, one of your marketing objectives could be: To grow our customer database by capturing new customers’ contact details via our website newsletter subscription and social media campaigns.
2. Do your research!
   Make sure you carry out some competitor and customer research to identify what your competitors are doing well, and not so well, so you can identify their weaknesses and capitalise on them and define your ideal customer and build personas for them to understand their needs, their interests, what channels they use to research for new products and services and how best they like to consume content – ie written, video, audio. Only then can you build n effective plan to outline how you can target them.

3. Start by making a plan!
   To help you achieve your goals, you need to define tactics and marketing activity will work best.  Consider what marketing channels (online and offline) you will use to reach your target audience, and what type of campaigns and messaging you will need to create and what content will work to turn them from followers and fans to loyal customers. Once you have all of these defined, write them down in a plan with details of how you will actions these, when and how you will measure each activity to see if they were successful or not.

4. Help people find you locally in Search.
   Set up a free Google Business Profile to manage how your local business shows up across Google products, like Maps and Search. If you run a business that serves customers at a particular location, or you serve customers within a designated service area, your Business Profile can help people find you.

5. Have a social media presence.
   Every modern business needs a social media presence to build awareness of its products and services and to help drive traffic to it’s new website. Creating social media presence is powerful and also costs nothing to set up. And can really help you to attract new customers, across the globe to your business, it helps to build trust and loyalty and is an excellent customer service tool to manage enquires, answer customer questions directly and open that line of honest communication.

Check out our useful marketing resources:

• Watch our one hour webinar on Creating a Social Media Content.
• Download our simple Marketing Plan Template.

Get in touch with Carol if you need help writing a marketing plan to launch your new business into the market.