How to Start A Business Course – Planning Your Business: Overall Marketing Plan For Small Business – Part 5/27

When you think of an ice-cold cool drink, with the sweat running down the outside of the can, you’d probably think of Coke first, right? This is not because of a great brand but because of the great Marketing.

You might have the best business idea but you need people to know about it first. For a business to be a success there is no luck. There is only, good marketing. 

This is an introduction to Marketing for business start-ups. In this article, we will tackle:

• Your Marketing Plan
• Organic Channels
• Affiliates
• Getting started with Paid Ads

Before we get jump-started, let us start with a question, what is the minimum daily spend requirement on Google Ads?

Let’s take a look at all the ways in which how people can find our business. These are also the channels that we can use to market our business. Of course, people can find our business through;

• Social Media
• Shopping Malls
• Radio
• Work
• Email
• Exhibitions
• Flyers
• Newspapers
• Street Poles

• Magazines
• Events
• Family & Friends
• Instant Messaging
• Streaming
• Promo stands
• Podcasts
• Browsing
• TV

So how exactly do we know which ones we need to choose for our business marketing? For that, we will require a Marketing Plan.

The start of any Marketing Plan is knowing who your audience is and what your business goals are.

The question that we are going to answer in our Marketing Plan is how are you going to reach your audience and achieve those goals?

Your Marketing Plan needs to answer the following questions:

• Where and when will I engage with my target market?
• What will I use to engage them and how will I create them?
• Which objectives are these platforms meeting?
• What will a good performance look like? What does success mean?
• Are you going to use images? Videos? Events? Flyers?
• How are you going to create these things – will you DIY or will you outsource someone? Why are you on these platforms and do they suit your objectives? E.g. Awareness, Sales, Retention.

Look at the table again – these are all the different places you can connect with your audience. You don’t need to be on all of them, but you have many options and for each one, you need a plan.

You need to choose which ones would work specifically for your business and align it with the objectives that you want to achieve. There’s no use in paying for radio ads if none of your audience is listening to the radio. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to marketing as it is very dependent on your business, your audiences, and what you’re trying to achieve in the industry that you are in.

No matter what strategy or method you’re using, all of these can be broken down into PAID and EARNED Media and these can occur both ONLINE as well as OFFLINE and vice versa.

Paid media is media you pay for – e.g. you pay every time someone clicks on your Facebook ad (different from a Facebook post!)

Earned media is potential consumers you have attracted without having to advertise/make a payment.

When you’re looking at Paid and Earned Media, this can be looking for or searching for information. This can be both online and offline. When they are searching for information, that can be from an AD or they can find it via a search result from a website or a blog posting.

So those are both PAID and EARNED. It can also be through sending or receiving an email as well as scrolling through social media. These are ONLINE forms of PAID and EARNED Media online.

And then we also have OFFLINE like going to an event, as well as reading a magazine, or talking to a friend. And again, all of these can both be PAID and EARNED. Talking to a friend would be earned, while paid can be going to an event or reading a magazine.

So when you are setting up your marketing plan, you want to consider each of these types of media. And then you want to apply these Media or methods to your Sales Funnels.

Sales Funnels could also be referred to as your customer journey.

Consumers go through several stages before making a purchase, and in each stage their behavior and the information they look for are different. There are many different sales funnels – it is in fact very subjective – you could even create your own. But the core principle is mostly the same.

Let’s take a look at AIDA Funnel. AIDA Funnel is a traditional sales Funnels created in 1898.

A – Awareness
I – Interest
D – Desire
A – Action

The first stage is AWARENESS. So of course, you need people to be aware of your brand, your product or your service before they can even consider purchasing from you.

And once you have their awareness, you want to find ways in which to drive their INTEREST behind that. So this could also be called consideration, they’re aware of your product, they are not considering your brand or they are interested in new brand.

Then you want to create contents that drive DESIRE. It’s also the purchases or they need or desire your product so much they make purchases and you need to drive them to take that action through your Marketing.

And finally, ACTION. They take that action and then they purchase your product. You will notice that the sales cone becomes smaller. So if like a hundred people have dropped to your funnel, you could imagine that there only be like five would make it through that last stage or Action.

Let’s take a look at the consumer’s point of view.

CONSUMER ACTIONS:

AWARENESS
Seeing an ad, blog post, or social media
INTEREST
Visiting your site, researching your brand, following pages
DESIRE
Researching options, comparisons, submitting a lead
ACTION
Completing a goal/conversion

Here’s an example of business actions during these phases, in response to what consumers are doing:

BUSINESS ACTIONS:

AWARENESS
Developing content and copy for ads/blogs / social media
INTEREST
Offering relevant, valuable content/something else of value e.g. promotional content
DESIRE
User-friendly website / “landing point” for goal conversion, continued content, and communication
ACTION
Clear conversion path, good user experience, and excellent customer service

OFFLINE – ONLINE behavior in AIDA:

AWARENESS
Attending an event and picking up a flyer
INTEREST
Reading the details and searching online
DESIRE
Visiting the website and browsing the information
ACTION
Completing a goal conversion offline/online

 

Start at the beginning – start local!

• Take advantage of any local marketing opportunities there are – e.g. community notice boards, events, and local newspapers.
• Start marketing (either organic or paid) within your local community, particularly if you have been an active member.
• Use your own network – friends, family, LinkedIn connections, you name it.
• Encourage reviews of your service/product, on social media channels and on Google My Business if you have a listing (which you should!).

That Over 50% of people research online & purchase offline. Even businesses with a physical location and offline processes need to have an online presence.

Consider what your budget and resources are at your disposal and try and work out what is going to be the most efficient for your business.

 

ORGANIC MARKETING

As a Start-up, your best friend is going to be Organic Marketing. Particularly when you’re starting out, you’ll not have a huge budget for ads spent, and therefore you wanted to use organic. What is meant by organic? People are exposed to a business through earned / natural ways vs. through paid marketing.

Organic examples:

Word of mouth – someone recommending a service/product

• Family & friends
• Colleagues
• Influencers and affiliates
• Reviews

Facebook posts – followers seeing posts from Pages they follow.

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest

Search Results – Using a search engine for information

• Google

 

 

SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media and search engine marketing are all about content. The content can range from YOUR Social Media Posts, to blog posts or even the information on your product pages on your website. And to ensure that users are finding your content, you want to implement Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

 

SEO

Is the skill of increasing a page’s organic ranking in the SERPs (search engine results page).  Organic results fall below the paid ads, which usually take up the top 3 – 4 spots.

So this is a highly competitive area. Everyone would want to appear on the first page of Google. So landing up on the first page of Google is really important, as well as any other search engine in the market but Google is the top-used search engine.

Now there are over 200 ranking factors that search engines use to rank your website. We’re going to look at some of the top ways in which you can contribute to your search engine ranking. 

Let us take a look at what Search engines want to know:

• What your website is about
• How frequently your website is updated
• How authoritative you are in your industry/topic
• The experience of the user while on your website

So the way that Search engines know what your website is about is through your content creation and specifically, it picks up the Keywords. So you would want to create and distribute quality content across all the channels that you choose and for your website, you want to include keywords closely-related to your topic or offer.

When we refer to your content, we’re talking about your Social Media posts, your blog posts, the actual words on your website, as well as any other online forms. With an email, you want to use keywords that the users would look for in searching for your product or your service.

An SEO is found in content with more than 2000 words is preferred. Of course, the more words you have, the more Google can start identifying what topic you are an expert on, and the more information it can find on your websites, your social network, and online about the relevant topic or your service or your product offering, the better it would understand what the website is about and provide you with more authority.

CONTENTS

Contents can be repurposed across multiple channels. For example, if I write a blog post, I can take certain figures or facts out of that blog post and I can then insert them into my Social Media post. This really helps us link all our online platforms up with each other and it would inform Google that all of these platforms belong to our company.

You can also turn an article into a comment or your recipe into a video, your blog into a podcast, images into a video, etc. So try and use images into different content types with the same copy or at least include the same keywords.

 

 

KEYWORDS

Keywords are one of the most important factors in your paid and organic advertising. Choosing the keywords that best suit your business takes research.

Let us use our fictitious business sample, Silver Tree. Some of their main keywords might be:

• Jewelry
• Silver rings
• Jewelry design

These are the keywords that would need to be present in their content, to signal to Search engines that this is what their website is about.

There are also keywords called LSI keywords – Latent Semantic Indexing. This is just the term given to the way Google associates different keywords with each other.

In the past, Google would scan a website for the main keywords and accept that this was what the website was about. Now, among other factors, Google looks for keywords associated with the main keywords before confirming that a website is about a certain topic.

For example, associated LSI keywords for Silvertree could be:

• Gemstones
• Carat
• Emerald Cut

This provides Google with more context.

There are various sources for keyword research – start by making a list of the keywords you think are the best fit, and build on from there.

Put your keywords into tools like:

• trends.google.com
• answerthepublic.com

You can also input your keywords into a search engine and see what other recommended searches come up. Scroll to the bottom of the search page and see the related searches that appear. Do the same exercise on YouTube.

The above tools are free, though with answerthepublic.com you can pay a fee to access more granular results.

There are many other paid tools to assist with this, as well as the Google Keyword planner, available on the Google Ads platform.

 

INFLUENCERS AND AFFILIATES

Influencers

People who have influence over others. For example, they impact the perception and purchase decisions of other online users. You can use influencers to promote your brand for you.

Who are these people and where would you find them? Here are some examples:

• Community leaders – are people who we trust and look up to.
• Industry experts
• Blogger / Vloggers
• Individuals with many social followers
• Celebrities

Influencers are generally paid a certain amount, particularly if they are celebrities and you would pay them a certain amount to promote your products/service. You need to be really careful when it comes to using influencers. You want to ensure that they are relevant to your industry and that they are the right fit for your brand.

You want them to subscribe to your brand values because they are the ones who are representing your company. And you want their followers to be relevant to your product or service that you are trying to sell. It isn’t going to help you if you are going to use influencers that have followers that are not the right audience for your product or for your service. So ensure that you choose wisely.

Affiliates

People or entities who market your product in return for a percentage of every sale they bring in. This differs from influencers because influencers are paid a certain amount for a certain number of posts but an affiliate only gets paid based on the number of sales they make.

Who are they? And where would you find them?

• In your area – people as well as businesses
• Within your network
• Social media channels
• Publications (websites, magazines, etc)
• Affiliate networks

When approaching influencers and affiliates:

• Do your research
• Be direct but not aggressive
• If you don’t know them, first introduce yourself over time (e.g. comment on their posts, make your presence known)
• Know exactly what you are going to offer them – what % of each sale are you willing to pay? Or are you going to pay them a flat fee?
• Draw up Terms of Service (rules) to protect yourself

This is a really great way for you to drum up your reach and your brand awareness.

 

PAID ADVERTISING

Is the opposite of Organic Marketing. You can run your Paid advertising campaigns through:

Social Media

This is wherever people publish and consume content, and interact with others, online. But if you think about it, this fits with offline too.

Facebook

Boosting posts – promoting content posted from your business Facebook Page. The option to boost a post is available under each post, in most cases. When it is not available, it is because it does not adhere to Facebook’s advertising policies.

When you click on boost post, it will provide you with the option to see what results you’d like either to get people to react or share, or you can connect and chat with your potential customers that have messengers. You can also add a post button where you can add to learn more or people can add shop now, for instance, it depends on what action you’re trying to drive from your users.

And then you can also choose a link from your push buttons so that you can direct your users to a specific landing page or specific landing page of your website.

And because you are tracking your website with analytics, you would then be able to see the traffic coming in from your socials. If you scroll further down, you’d be able to target your specific audience by choosing their location; you can also separate it from people who liked your page, as well as people who like your page and their friends. The likelihood that if they are interested in your page is that their friends will be too but you can also create your very own audience if you want to.

And I would recommend setting your automatic placements and that would maximize your budget. Once you’re happy, you can click on boost.

Facebook Ads – Business Manager

Take boosting a step further. If you have the budget, create a Facebook Business Manager account on business.facebook.com. You need to have a Facebook profile and page. Once you have created your account, you would link your page to it. You can also advertise on Instagram through this platform.

Facebook ads do have the advantage of offering more reach than any other social networks due to the sheer number of users.

Using Facebook ads provides you with:

• Multiple targeting abilities
• Run several campaign types to fit objectives
• The ability to target anyone who has engaged with your content
• Requires installation of a Pixel, much like Google Analytics

A restriction in Facebook ad is that it has a required minimum monthly budget for:

• Impressions: $30
• Clicks/Engagements: $150
• Claims/Installs: $1200

But this is only assuming that you are running the entire month, which you don’t have to. You could run an ad for a week or boost a post for a week. This is why it is nice to use Facebook for ads, especially if you’re just getting started.                    

And then you want to use Google Ads.

Google Ads

You can advertise across Google and these adverts will appear on the search engine results page, other websites, within Gmail, and on YouTube.

Campaign types are more suited to different objectives:

• Display campaigns – Branding and Awareness
• Search campaigns – Sales, Leads
• YouTube campaigns – Branding, Awareness, Engagement

If you are looking to drive all of these goals, these are the types of campaigns that you would want to run.

Now let’s revisit the question at the beginning of this article. What is the minimum daily spend requirement on Google Ads? And the answer is, NONE! So this is a really good platform to use in marketing your business as a start-up.

So between Organic and as well as Facebook Marketing and Google Ads, there are many available tools for you to market your products and get your brand out there.

And in this world that is undergoing huge changes, anything you do to up-skill or extend your knowledge will make you a valuable candidate workforce.

“Future-proofing your career is less about picking a safe job and more about constantly updating your skills throughout your career.” By Joseph Aoun from the Book, Robot-proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.