You’ve worked hard to get your company up and running; now it’s time to make sure it’s seen. Marketing a new business is one of the most difficult tasks. To increase your chances of success, conduct market research, create a marketing plan, and target your audience.
Set your marketing goals.
To successfully market your new business, you must first understand what success looks like and what you are attempting to accomplish.
Perhaps you want to drive more traffic to your website, fill your sales pipeline as quickly as possible, or position your brand in a specific market.
Prioritize your overall new business goals and then consider how marketing can help you achieve them.
Increasing brand awareness, improving reputation, launching a product, and increasing revenue or profits are some examples.
Make sure your goals are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic (and relevant), and time-bound.
You’ve worked hard to get your company up and running; now it’s time to make sure it’s seen. Marketing a new business is one of the most difficult tasks. To increase your chances of success, conduct market research, create a marketing plan, and target your audience.
Set your marketing goals.
To successfully market your new business, you must first understand what success looks like and what you are attempting to accomplish.
Perhaps you want to drive more traffic to your website, fill your sales pipeline as quickly as possible, or position your brand in a specific market.
Prioritize your overall new business goals and then consider how marketing can help you achieve them. Increasing brand awareness, improving reputation, launching a product, and increasing revenue or profits are some examples.
Make sure your goals are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic (and relevant), and time-bound.
The significance of research
Surprisingly, many businesses skip this next step.
Its impact, when done correctly, can be significant. Market research will not only help you understand the market as it is, but it will also help you shape a USP by identifying any gaps in it. In other words, it validates the reason for your company’s existence.
“Believing in what you offer is important, and showing you are passionate about it can be very compelling,” says Chris Peach, research director at research agency Walnut Unlimited, “but success will come from convincing many others about the benefit of buying from you, so knowing what they think makes you unique and better is crucial.”
How to Carry Out Market Research
How do you conduct market research for your company? Google is one place to start. The number of Google searches for a product or service can help you understand its popularity.
Conducting surveys is another option. Find out where your target audience hangs out online and conduct polls to get instant feedback.
You can also meet in person. Conducting interviews can help shape your customer personas, such as their interests, motivations, and opinions of your company and competitors. Focus groups, on the other hand, can provide immediate feedback on how to improve your product or service.
Competitive pricing research can also reveal whether your price point and brand image are in sync.
“Research is critical to our process,” says Tom Edington, founder of market research and design firm The Yard Creative. “Research enables us to truly understand what will resonate with our clients’ target audience to ensure the creative solutions we provide stand out within their marketplace and connect to the consumer.
“Our preferred research method is to always combine primary and secondary sources. Secondary research allows us to cast a wide net while analysing our clients’ data, allowing us to truly understand the market and our clients’ existing and target consumers.
“Knowing our client’s market, sector, and consumer enables us to be very focused with our questioning when we move into qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys.”
New marketing strategy for a business
To market successfully, you must first develop a marketing strategy that aligns marketing efforts with the overall goals of your new business.
The four Ps of marketing (also known as the marketing mix) should be included in the marketing strategy: product, price, place, and promotion.
“The most important part of a marketing strategy is product and price,” The Good Marketer’s Tom Welbourne explains. “Promotion, place and people can be tweaked accordingly as time goes on, i.e., you can target a new audience through ads or run a payday sale.
“For start-ups, consider starting with three or four products to give customers variety and to generate a good average order value [AOV].
“In general, start-ups believe that lower-priced products will be more successful, but this is not always the case. We advise new businesses to aim for an AOV of £40-£50 in order to be profitable on the first order.”
Xeinadin, a business consultancy and accounting firm, was the fastest-growing business in Britain this year, according to its director Paul Whitney, and having a marketing strategy was critical to its rapid success.
“Don’t be afraid to change your strategy,” he advises. “Continuously monitor the effectiveness of your chosen media marketing mix and compare it to your budget. If something isn’t working as well as you expected, stop doing it and experiment with different messaging and media to compare the results.
“Most business owners approach marketing with the intention of simply getting their name out there. However, we believe that the message you include with your name is far more important.
“Why would they choose you if your message does not resonate with your ideal customers and is the same as the competition?”
Creating a marketing strategy for your new business
You will then require a clear and concise marketing strategy. This should include the brand proposition, which will explain why you exist, as well as a communication strategy for getting your message across.
The brand proposition describes the brand’s purpose as well as who the target customer is. Why should they be concerned? What are their top priorities when selecting a product or service? You should also explain how you differ from competitors in the market.
The communication plan will specify whether you will target through social media, email, events, or direct marketing, as well as the tone of voice you will use for each.
“As a small business, you may have seen bundled insurance packages for say ‘hairdressers’ – it recognises that business owners want to focus on their core activity and so this bundling saves them time and cognitive effort,” Peach says.
The following are some of the advantages of creating a marketing plan:
- Specifies your target market.
- What your company’s unique selling point is and who your competitors are
- Ensures that marketing budget is spent wisely.
- The brand’s tone of voice is consistent.
- Provides a strategy for reaching out to potential customers.
Finally, make sure the document is saved somewhere for everyone to see and follow. This is useful not only for ensuring that future decisions are consistent with the brand, but also for crossing off and updating goals as you go.
Identifying your customers
You must market to your target audience once you have identified them. Customer profiles are an excellent way to learn about the communities in which your target audience participates.
Following that, you must interact with them, with one obvious method being social media.
“We would first advise a small business to identify which social media platforms their target audience is using,” says Jack Shepherd, co-founder of The Social Shepherd. “Do not attempt to create content for every social media platform. Concentrate your efforts at first on one or two social media platforms.”
Short-form video performs well across all platforms, so it should be prioritised in any small business strategy, he says.
“Video content is best for reaching new users right now, as reels and TikToks have the best discoverability on social media right now, and then use Instagram stories and static posts [single images and carousels] to nurture your audience,” says the author.
“Once a small business has tested different pieces of content and has begun to understand what resonates with its audience, it’s time to use paid social to distribute those top-performing pieces of content further. Because organic reach can only take you so far, we always recommend incorporating an ad strategy to reach your ideal customers.
“You should consider showing prospecting audiences something more educational about your product or service, whereas retargeting audiences who already know your brand should receive content that builds social proof and trust in order for them to convert.”
