A Marketing 101 Series

Over the last couple weeks we’ve spent time on building a good foundation for marketing with a website, social media and an email list, and then building on that foundation with producing content, personifying your brand, and becoming a master as SEO. 

As you might see by now, each week we are adding new things each week that can help you, as a business owner, build better habits and processes around your digital presence and online strategy, with the final goal of having an entire set of processes in place that you can follow and use to build your online brand. 

This week, in our third installment, we will be focusing on creating value for your audience, developing relationships, and analyzing results. These steps are important so that you can further engage your audience with better content to improve results. Let’s go through each of these, and then we will wrap up with what’s coming in week four. If you’d like to review any of the previous posts, you can find the first post here, and the second post here.

1 // Create Value

Creating Value for your audience is all about sharing information that THEY will find valuable. This can be an area of difficulty for many new business owners, and will always be a work in progress. To your audience, value might look like product education or sharing the results of your product usage. This can be done in multiple ways using the tools you have. Maybe it’s adding information or client feedback to your website, or adding a new section to an email newsletter. Regardless of you choice, this is your opportunity to connect with your audience and show them you’re an expert in the field, and someone who can get the job done.

Value will often come in multiple forms, and you won’t know what that is for your audience.. For some, creating value might mean helping them save money and for others it might mean time. We will talk a more on analyzing results later in this post, but the analysis is a crucial step in building your brand on social media. The best way to promote your business is to be able to put yourself in the shoes of your audience and provide them with information and resources that make THEIR job better and increasing overall sales. If you’re struggling to figure out what will add value for your audience, do a poll on your social feed and ask!

2 // Develop Relationships

Businesses do not function in a vacuum. A business might sell vacuums, but they will not survive in one. A business needs people to buy it’s product or service, otherwise it won’t be around, and as a business owner, it is imperative to continuously keep finding opportunities to grow your business. Join local networking groups, mastermind groups, meet people at coffee shops, or join sites that offer leads. 

One of the other great things about developing new relationships is meeting other business owners. Other business owners will often be able to relate to challenges you might be facing, and may be willing to share their experiences with you. Even if a business owner you meet isn’t your customer, they might become your friend, which can be invaluable along your journey.

3 // Analyze Results

In our last post, we talked about creating content for your website and social media. How do you know what you are creating is working? Is it engaging your audience or are they passing over it? This step is all about building some parameters to gauge your success over time. A simple set of analysis tools might be looking at how many impressions you received, how many site visits resulted from that, and then finding out how many inquiries came from your website. This is the really the start of building a sales/marketing funnel. Once you have a way to measure and analyze your results, you can make changes to improve your process, close more opportunities, and continue to increase your engagement.

This is a step that many business owners fail to implement right away, and it can hurt in the long run. Many new business owners will try a number of different tactics to bring in customers, but they don’t track the results over time to really understand the results they’re getting. It’s often done by feel instead of results. Learn from their mistake and start tracking this data as early as you can. You’ll see trends and insights come up that you wouldn’t see otherwise, and although your gut may tell you you’re not doing well and that you’re not moving fast enough, the data may tell a different story. 

These are crucial steps to developing your business and increasing the success of your efforts. It’s ok if you’ve never analyzed your results or put effort into developing new relationships. The beauty of owning your own business is that you can change these things right now, you just have to take the step and do it. Start slow and get comfortable with the process, and within a few months, it won’t be as scary and you’ll be amazed at the progress you’ve made.

Next week, in our final article in the series, we will talk about finding new forums and places to market to, experimenting with online advertising, and influencer marketing.

If you have a question about any of these steps or are curious how to do any of them for your business, reach out to us at hello@goldbear.media with your questions. If you’d like to get more info on how GoldBear Media can help market your business, you can get a free digital audit from us here, and we will contact you for more info.