What Do You Want To Achieve With Your Marketing? – Newsletter, June 2018

What Do You Want To Achieve With Your Marketing?

This month, we’re focusing on marketing. There are so many marketing tools available to us now, especially with digital media on the rise at an incredible rate. Social media is no longer just for personal use, but businesses can now use it as a marketing tool also – with great results.

The best way to start is to review your current marketing, using questions such as:

• What tools are you using? E.g. Online media, Print media, Networking, or Other?
• Are you getting results from each tool?
• How many people does each tool reach?

A good review tool is a table as you can see with one glance what you’re using, its success rate, cost, number of people reached, etc. An example is below:

Once you have a table of your data, you can now evaluate using questions such as:

• Which has the highest performance/highest success rate?
  (Keep using this tool);
• Which has the lowest performance/highest success rate?
  (Consider discontinuing using this tool, or if upgrading to paid advertising using this tool may get better results);
• If one tool has a high cost, but a lower success rate than a free tool, consider if it’s economical to continue using the high-cost marketing tool or if it’s better to invest in a different tool;
• How many people do you have using/following/engaging with this tool (e.g. how many people viewed your post on Facebook; how many followers in total do you have on Facebook; etc).

Once you have completed your evaluation you can then cull the tools which aren’t getting you results, and focus on upgrading current, poor performing tools, and implementing new tools.

We have 7 key ways of marketing your business. These are:

1. Networking
2. Asking for referrals
3. Social media
4. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
5. Internet
6. Advertising
7. Mail drop

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Networking

Networking is a brilliant marketing tool for any business. Networking is “an effective low-cost marketing method for developing sales opportunities and contacts, based on referrals and introductions – either face-to-face at meetings and gatherings, or by other contact methods such as phone, email, and increasingly social and business networking websites”*.

*Source: https://www.businessballs.com/building-relationships/

Networking is most commonly done through networking agencies, such as BNI. These agencies, as BNI describes, “provide a positive, supportive, and structured environment for the development and exchange of quality business referrals. It does so by helping you build personal relationships with dozens of other qualified business professionals.”

It is a good idea to look into networking agencies in your area and visit to see if it would suit you – most allow a “guest” visit so you can check it out and get to know more about it and if it would suit you and do what you need. A simple Google search of “networking agencies [your city]” should bring up a few for you to look at. The top rated networking agencies, based on feedback from friends and clients, are BNI and Venus. Please note, Venus is women-only.

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Social Media

A Sprout Social survey found 30% of millennial’s engage with social media at least once a month*. This means, to get the edge, you need to be fully invested in this tool; to use it better by engaging more often and with higher attention-grabbing content.

*Source: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/data/q1-2017/

So, how do you do this? First, ensure you’re using the right tool or tools. Ask yourself these questions:
1. Who’s my target market? (e.g. male, female, what age group, which demographic, etc)
2. What do I want to get across? Will my message be short and succinct, or will it be blog/article length?
3. What do I need out of a host platform – do I require the ability for customer’s to contact me through the platform directly in response to my messages?

By asking these questions, you’ll have a clearer idea of which tool, or tools, are best suited to the type of marketing you are wanting to conduct. Although, you will need to research the available tools before doing this, so you’re aware of what kind of people, what type of messages, and the functionality of the tools are, so that you can make the best choice based on the answers to your questions.

The table below shows some possible answers, and the marketing tool or tools that may best help, based on the statistics of each platform (e.g. main demographic of users, capability of message e.g. Twitter is only 160 characters and Instagram is usually pictures with captions and hashtags, etc):

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Other Types of Marketing

Ask yourself, am I using enough outlets for my marketing, or not enough? Outlets such as:

• Social media – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram
• Internet – Personalised Website, Blog (could be part of, or separate from, your website)
• Print Media – Newspaper/Magazine Advertisements, Flyers, Letter Box Drops
• Networking – Do you attend networking events? Do you promote yourself and your business to every new person you meet? Are you interested in what other’s do, and how they may be able to help you and vice-versa?
• Word of Mouth – Have you asked friends, family, past clients to tell their friends, family, clients, colleagues, the world!, how great you are? Do you have a review service where clients can give you a review, e.g. on Facebook, which future clients can see and use to base their decision on when they choose you?