If you are a new business owner looking to get your company off the ground, or to the next level, then marketing is on your mind. In this area, it might seem like the difference between 0 to 1 is huge. And while that's often the case, when it comes to marketing, you can spin your wheels for a good while and go nowhere if you aren't executing properly. Effort gone to waste at the beginning of your journey as a new business owner is demoralizing, and we don't want that for you. So here is a quick breakdown of marketing for new business owners, and where to focus your energy at the beginning of your journey.
This comes with a caveat. Some new business owners are branching out on their own because they have worked in a specific industry for years and feel they can build a company that has a competitive advantage. Those kinds of entrepreneurs will likely have a larger contact list upon which to build a foundation when it comes to email marketing for new business owners. These new entrepreneurs with years of experience will also likely have a wealth of industry knowledge at the ready that they can utilize in an email marketing campaign. Since it has such potential for ROI, if you check those two boxes, then email marketing is the best place for you to start investing time and energy at the beginning of your journey.
If you aren't the most experienced new business owner, then email marketing can still be useful, but you'll need to put more effort into where you are getting the contacts you'll be sending newsletters or offers to.
Inbound marketing is all about drawing your customers in. Content plays three main parts in that process. First, the search engines are constantly analyzing your website to see what it's all about, for what searches it should display one of your pages as a result, and in which position. Websites that have been around for a while, have many different pages, are properly optimized (we'll get to that), and have built up a steady stream of traffic will rank higher in the search engine results. We call this domain and page authority. The higher your authority, the more traffic you'll get for searches relevant to your content.
New websites have no authority, so building that up can take a long time, especially if you're in a saturated or highly competitive field. It can be done, but it's a slow build. But, we like to say that content is compounding in nature, so the more you have, and the longer your site is around, the faster you'll climb the rankings of search engine results (as long as you have quality SEO, which, again--we'll get to).
If you, as the new business owner, have built up a network in your industry, then leveraging your influence and reach is some seriously low-hanging fruit. We all call it social media now, but if we think back to when it was first getting going, it was called a social network. If you already have a large online following/number of connections, then putting effort into a LinkedIn page for your business can be a great way to drive traffic to your website, and generate leads.
If you're in the Direct-to-Consumer market, then Instagram is probably the way to go at this point. If you sell physical products, then consider an influencer marketing campaign and paid ads. Influencer marketing started in the fashion and beauty markets but has since expanded to nearly every niche. It has one of the highest ROIs out of any form of marketing when done correctly.
OK, we've arrived. Most people at this point have heard of search engine optimization and can grasp the concept pretty easily. At the end of the day, we all experience it constantly, and anyone who has used Google before has wondered about the algorithms.
But here is where some people start driving before their GPS has loaded the route. For example, if you want to start a wine company, it's easy to assume that you should start writing content about wine. You wouldn't be wrong. But if you aren't using analytics tools to target specific keywords, then you might accidentally just be using the word "wine" a lot, assuming that Google is going to start popping your website up in searches related to wine.
Coming back to the problem of authority. Websites with the highest authority in their industry will be able to show up on the first page of Google for broader searches. Websites with very low authority have to go for more obscure keywords and include those in various pieces of new content at the beginning. Sometimes being able to naturally work those keywords into an article or page can be difficult.
These are four of the main categories of marketing for new business owners. We didn't order or number them because for each business, depending on the owner and industry, the priority order is going to be different.
It can be a lot of work. Hiring people to do one or all of those things can be expensive. But that's why marketing agencies like THAT Agency exist. Having people who are experts in each of these categories, who are doing it every day, successfully--that's how you make sure you are building a solid foundation that will set your business up for success in the future.
If you'd like to have a conversation about all the other tactics and strategies that we've seen be successful when it comes to marketing for new business owners, then give us a call, or leave us a note. We're always happy to help fellow entrepreneurs.