Marketing
Every business needs marketing in some shape or form to be successful. Learn why marketing is vitally important, the different types of marketing and what makes an effective marketing strategy.
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Successfully attract and convert new prospects and get them interested in your business.
Create a robust marketing strategy that supports your business goals
Create engaging content and visual media that is user and SEO-friendly
Design and manage all types of ad campaigns covering print, outdoor or digital ads.
Identify market gaps, target markets and key differentiators that will make your brand stand out from the pack.
Apply SEO in your content marketing to increase hits and shares and improve search engine rankings.
Amplify your presence and increase awareness with smart PR strategies.
Develop effective offline marketing strategies to engage your audience
Create promotional marketing materials to use across your business
Create or customise business signage, banners, posters and other promotional materials.
Implement direct marketing strategies to increase conversion
Solutions for telemarketing including strategy, software, tools and a committed workforce.
Rope in customer service professionals to manage your customer interactions.
Devise a robust marketing strategy to fuell your business growth.
Find talented sales professionals to acquire and retain customers
Invest in a customer retention strategy and get sales professionals to execute your plan.
Implement creative and strategic branding activities that align with your brand strategy
Deploy a door-to-door team of sales professionals while adhering to the law and learn to increase conversion.
Win new customers for your business with the help of sales professionals.
Optimise your website to have the highest chance of outranking your top competitors.
Increase sales or leads through SEO, social media, content marketing, email, ads, PR and online marketing.
Market face-to-face at trade shows, seminars, conferences and networking events.
Build a campaign to mail your promotional materials direct to customers and prospects.
Use visual content such as videos, infographics and ebooks to amplify your content marketing campaigns.
Create or customise brochures, pamphlets, flyers and other printed handouts to market your business.
Create content to increase brand awareness, educate your customers or get sales and leads.
Use social media for branding, building a fanbase and acquiring sales and leads.
Can anyone share some advice on how to create a marketing strategy for a new product?
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Does anyone have any top tips to market your business events on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn?
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Hatty Bell, Community Manager at SavvySME
Would love to hear your thoughts on this too @Shelby Hopper
Can anyone share any advice to write a marketing plan for an event?
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Steve Gray, Director at Gray Capital Investments
First let's start with a question... You got started in business, did you include marketing costs in your original budget? Did you have enough capital to cover that cost as well as the rest of the start up costs?
When you did your initial plan did it include a marketing plan? Target market - who they are - what challenge you will solve for them - how you will get into their heads?Oh and a swot analysis of your competition?
Did you take a look at what marketing the competition does, did or otherwise? Did you say to yourself, I wonder what that costs, and did you do your research to find out what they are payng to market the way they do?
Is your brain hurting yet? :)
Now take a look at whats available, in short, heaps... but it falls into a bunch of loose categorires.
Now you could do TV adverts at 3 am and get a very cheap rate on those adverts and that would be awesome and be a budget conscious way togo, but the results? probably not so hot, unless you are aiming at nightowls etc. ;)
Forst thing is who do you want your customers to be? - If you sell a product or service to plumbers then get your message in front of them where they will see it, not in some obscure place where the advert was cheap but no plumbers got to see it.
Second thing, you need to know is, how often people need to see your 'advert' before they twigg you even exist... then how many before they actually buy, there can be a BIG difference! You might have a cheap advert in a magazine that goes straight to your target market, but if you only put it in once, don't expect a big result, or any result for that matter.
Thirdly, make your business stand out with a professional logo, masthead or similar and be consistent with the image and colours etc.
If your business is localised, you could do social media adverts and set the criteria for where your advert shows up to your area only, that can work well.
Your next challenge is the copy writing, to ensure the advert hits the mark for the reader.
Do you have a page on social media? If so your work here is to get the numbers of readers, followers etc to grow over time so each time you ad something to it you get a good response. The same with an email sign up on your website. Grab people as they get on board and feed them.
Most people give up on social media becasue it tends to take up a LOT of time, especially initally as they have a hard time figuring out what to say about what they have, do or otherwise.
Welcome to the minefield of marketing, it can serve you well or it can BLOW UP with one wrong step, so tread carefully. :)
Hatty Bell , Community Manager at SavvySME
Amazing insight @Steve Gray - so much to think about! Where do we start?!!!
Hatty Bell, Community Manager at SavvySME
Would be great to get your insight here too @Tim Stokes @Farhad Khurshed @Sandy Moore @Tanya Williams
Hatty Bell, Community Manager at SavvySME
Would love to get your thoughts on this @Maxwell DesMarais @Chris Getman
Tom Valcanis, Copywriter at I Sell Words
I was a Marketing and Communications Manager at a not-for-profit once and I did a lot of thumb-twiddling and call-answering. But when it got busy around event time, I was working 12 hour days. So it all depends on what your strategy is and whether you need a dedicated team or not.
You can build a good marketing team without having the team be on site all the time. I don't think a business will need video production five days a week. Having them come in for strategy and tactical sessions every so often makes sense. Marketing professionals are used to collaborating with many different companies at once - it might seem counter-intuitive to non-marketing people, but it's common for me to work with a certain video production company and their competitor all in the same day on different projects. It's the nature of the industry.
Hatty Bell , Community Manager at SavvySME
Good points @Tom Valcanis . Outsourcing makes it easier to hire experts suitable for a particular project or suited to a certain style.
Director at Hystericalz Pty Ltd
CMO at Four Drunk Parrots
Founder at Harbren Marketing
Whether you are a newly established startup or you’re an established business with a loyal customer base, staying up to date with marketing is vital.
Marketing encompasses so many things and overlaps with other areas such as advertising and sales.
At first glance, it can feel a little overwhelming trying to understand what’s what and how it applies to your business.
So, we’ve broken it all down into bite size chunks so you can understand the fundamentals of marketing.
In the most simple sense, marketing is the process of promoting your business and driving sales and other profitable customer actions.
This is achieved with a range of strategies and activities such as direct marketing, online marketing, social media and search engine marketing.
Marketing is critical for all areas of a business, from sales and product development to HR and logistics.
In case you’re wondering, “Do all businesses need marketing?” The answer is a simple yes.
There’s only one way your business can survive, and that’s if:
The bottom line of marketing is to create strategic messages and distribute them across relevant challenges to attract consumers to your brand.
Regardless of how unique your business offering is, many businesses would cease to exist without marketing because they would fail to reach the target audience and generate sales.
There are many different types of marketing. Some are age-old strategies that have survived the digital evolution and others are much more recent.
Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of some of the most popular strategies:
As you can see, there’s a lot! That’s why it’s imperative to get to know who your target audience is and where they’re spending their time so you can effectively reach them.
While sales and marketing teams work together to achieve the same business goals, they do work in different areas.
Marketing works on how best to reach and engage a target audience to promote, inform and educate about a particular product or service, while advertising or sales teams close leads generated by marketing and implement advertising strategies to increase revenue.
Digital marketing is a subset of marketing and simply refers to marketing used on digital and online mediums.
In a sense, digital marketing is simply marketing, but in today’s world.
It’s not a case of whether digital or traditional marketing is ‘better’, but rather which type of marketing gives you the best ROI in reaching your target customers.
Many businesses use a combination of traditional and digital/online channels.
The 4Ps of marketing is one of the most widely-known marketing concepts that underpins the four key elements of any marketing strategy:
Businesses use this model when planning a new product or service launch, assessesing an existing offer or how the business can have a greater impact within the target market.
A marketing strategy refers to the what, why and how.
It’s your roadmap detailing how your marketing efforts will contribute to your overall business goals including your business’ key brand messaging, unique value propositions and your target audience demographics
A marketing strategy is usually long standing and addresses the bigger picture of where you want your business to be in the future. It is used to nform your marketing plan, i.e. the type of campaigns and tactics you will use to achieve the bigger picture.
Look at every marketing campaign and activity you do as smaller pieces of a large marketing pie (the strategy).
Half the battle is laying down a solid marketing strategy from the get go.
Here are some top tips to help you devise a good marketing strategy:
If your target audience is other businesses, there are some key differences in business to business (B2B) marketing.
Did you know that 97% of marketers use social media to reach B2B clients and customers,
Video content is also on the rise, with 73% of B2B marketing saying that video had a positive impact on their ROI (Review 42, 2020)
That being said, here are some ideas to help you create an effective marketing strategy:
If your target audience is individual people, your business to customer (B2C) marketing will need to encapsulate the personal element.
Here are some B2C marketing ideas:
Like anything you do in your business, it’s important to be able to track the effectiveness of your marketing strategies and assess their performance.
There are a number of key metrics, also known as performance indicators (KPIs) used in marketing:
Sales revenue: Income generated from the sales of goods or services.
The best marketing ideas for a small business are those that will continue to have a big impact in the long run.
Small businesses usually can't compete with big businesses in terms of budget, so your marketing strategy should be strategic and resourceful.
As you can probably see, marketing is vast and if you are struggling with where to start, don’t worry.
While it’s absolutely possible to do your own marketing, many business owners decide to outsource some or all of their marketing to an agency.
Learn more about how marketing agencies can help you gain traction and drive your business forward.
Marketing automation is built into software to manage multiple marketing processes across a variety of channels, e.g. targeting customers with automated messages via web, email and socials. Marketing automation streamlines your activities and makes life a lot easier.
Marketing collateral is any type of promotional or brand material used to market a business, products and services. Anything you use to promote your business is marketing collateral, be it a business card, flyer, website banner or e-newsletter.
A marketing channel refers to any channel you use to communicate with your audience and distribute key messages and promotional material. Examples of popular marketing channels include:
If you’re just starting out and you’re looking for some inspiration on how to start marketing your business, here are some examples of marketing objectives and goals for startups: