Tuesday 9th of January 2018
The success of start-ups and small businesses can often rely almost entirely on its marketing and advertising – which is tricky, when you consider just how little money and resource is usually available to dedicate to it. There’s no need to panic, though; marketing within small businesses can be a great excuse to get creative and use marketing to really make a statement, even without splashing the cash or using traditional channels in the same way everyone else does.
Whilst communicating the benefits of a small organisation’s brand/product/service does not need to be done using traditional advertising techniques, it’s still advisable to work with marketing experts to utilise their creative work-arounds and communication skills to best get the message out there. Any decent marketing agency should be able to offer you solutions and options to work with on smaller budgets – so don’t be fooled into the common misconception that you need a multi-million-pound fund set aside for television ads and billboards! The marketing campaigns and product launches for start-ups and SMEs hold a much more interesting challenge for marketers; getting creative, being innovative and throwing the rulebook out of the window!
There’s lots that can be done to spread the word on your fantastic new business without having to throw money and people at the effort; it’s just knowing how best to speak to and with your desired audience, and putting that into place. The following tips and tricks should help you start mapping out your marketing efforts, and if you have any questions, just get in touch.
In a world where every other post on social media seems to be an advert and a whole generation are experiencing ‘ad blindness’, it can be extremely difficult for your online communications to not become dwarfed by everything else happening digitally and go unnoticed amongst the noise. On the flip-side, it’s all too easy to quickly put some money behind Google AdWords and re-writing your content ‘for SEO purposes’ without taking into account the longevity of such a move.
‘SEO’, a real buzz-word as of the last few years, is an ever-developing practice and search engines such as Google change their algorithms and techniques on a monthly (if not daily!) basis. Therefore, investment into SEO needs to evolve with it and be agile, constantly changing and shifting to sit behind whatever the current most effective tool is, whilst ensuring that you’re getting all the basics right and not losing out to trends and fads that don’t last. Only an SEO professional can best advise you on this, and it’s important to work with someone who updates themselves on the latest market movements daily. The PromoMEDIA SEO team can manage your content optimisation for you and ensure you’re always ‘top of the table’ – even using some techniques you may not have considered.
Social media makes it increasingly easy to monetise your company’s posts to present them to more people – but unless you have the right message, graphics, placement and audience selected, these comms too can easily fade into the background. There are lots of ways to engage with an online audience through social channels that doesn’t involve a great deal of investment or the need to ‘boost’ every post you make. Unless your investment is consistent, it could even reduce the chances of your post being seen by those you want it to! The PromoMEDIA Social Media team will be able to advise you on a number of work-arounds and other techniques to try to turn the tide on social media and ensure you’re seen even without the money spent where you’d expect. Find out more here - http://www.promo-media.co.uk/type-of-ads/social-media if you're interested in social marketing.
Even if consumers see your messages offline, it’s likely that they’ll look you up online and if they can’t find you, they’re unlikely to progress with purchasing from you or taking another desired action, so it is key that you get this right!
When budgets, human resources and time is limited, it’s important that your marketing is delivered as efficiently as possible. You cannot afford to invest time or money into communicating with those who do not fit into your target market segment, and so you need to be as precise as possible in identifying your audience.
If you need help recognising your exact market persona, PromoMEDIA can help you investigate this. However, even if you do know your audience well, segmenting them from others who are not of value to you can be tricky.
Market personas should be created, and they should be as in-depth as possible, but you shouldn’t limit yourself to only one type of person (tricky, eh?). The careful balance of understanding the audience alongside remaining open-minded to new customers must be judged and managed by accurate primary market research and competitor investigation. This is no mean feat, and can take a lot of time if done in-house, so delegating this to a specialist agency brings further efficiencies to your business.
Once you know your target market inside out, you’ll know what and where your desired consumers are up to. If there’s somewhere – be it a geographic destination or an event – that they’re likely to be at, it’s worth considering sponsorship and marketing options linked to it. Many such packages are very expensive, but fear not; you’re a start-up! Go guerrilla and (legally) ‘crash’ the event by working around it. Install billboards or posters outside of the venue, have staff on-the-ground at the entrances or exits or attend the event with heavily branded outfits on. There’s lots of regulations to respect and it’s important not to over-step the mark, but there’s plenty you can do to get your name out there; it just takes some ‘out of the box’ thinking.
You may not even need to be there, but if you’re using temporary staff for an event or campaign, it’s imperative that they all remain on-brand and consistently represent your organisation in the way you would expect. PromoMEDIA can help here by providing and training event management staff with vast marketing experience to deliver you the best possible guerrilla marketing campaign. Give the team a call today to discuss ideas - we look forward to hearing from you http://www.promo-media.co.uk/
