This is Part Two of our Business Marketing Checklist. Read Part One.
Okay, you've opened your business and are filled with the excitement and stress of your new endeavor. Your first marketing task was to set up the infrastructure and establish your company online. This was an important first step, and will make your life a lot easier going forward, as you juggle the many priorities of owning your own business.
Those first steps were:
Identify your Target Market
Logo and Printed Materials
Set up your Professional Looking Website
Set up your Social Media Accounts
Claim your Business on Google
Set up Profiles on Review Sites
Now it is time to build your brand. These five tips will allow you to grow your audience on Facebook and other social media sites, which will drive more visitors to your website and other online locations.
1) Promote your Business on Social Media
Social media needs an audience. As a new business, you’ll need to build up your audience. For Facebook, the best way to do so is to invite your Facebook friends to like your page. You can also enlist your close friends and family to post links to your page, asking their friends to like your page as well. These are free marketing efforts for your business, so take full advantage of them.
In addition to asking friends and family to follow on Twitter and Instagram, you’ll also want to follow as many others as you can. Other local businesses, community organizations, anything that relates to your business is a great follow on those platforms.
For LinkedIN, you’ll want to connect to past business contacts and join in business groups relevant to your company. These will build the audience for your content.
2) Post Content
Every social media channel needs to have content posted to it regularly. If you don’t have time to produce engaging content (which you likely don’t!), use content curation. Different programs such as Feedly, give you the ability to set up a stream of relevant content about your industry that you can share.
You can then share that content with your audience, with other posts specific posts about your business included with the general content (such as promotions, special events etc.)
Hootsuite is a social media dashboard that will save your business time, while keeping social media marketing a priority. It allows you to schedule out posts in advance. You can plan out posts every month, and get the right mix of fun, informative and promotional posts to your audience.
It is imperative that you stay engaged on social media. You’ll want to post at least 3 times or more a week. While Hootsuite can assist in that, it is also important to respond timely to any feedback you receive online. What separates social media from other marketing is the feedback from customers, so you will want to respond timely to any customer.
3. Track your website
Google Analytics is a free feature to embed in your website. It will help you track statistics on your website traffic such as:
Unique visitors
Total page views
Duration of session
Geographic location of visitor
Source of visitor (social media, Google, link)
This is invaluable information to improve your website. You can find out which pages are most popular, where people are finding your website, and where your visitors are from. If you want to attract new customers, you'll need to track your performance and progress.
Google Analytics is easy to install on any website, and will provide the knowledge needed to make educated decisions on digital marketing strategy.
4. Save Customer Information
As you start meeting people and getting customers you’ll want to ensure you can stay in touch with them. It is important to keep customer information organized and segmented based on customer type so you can tailor your communications to them. Here are some ways to get customer info:
A landing page on your website or social media link to the page. A landing page will ask your customer to give their contact information. It can be as simple as asking them to opt-in for email updates
A Sign-up form on your Facebook Page
If you have a physical location, be sure to ask customers in person after a sale for their email or other information for marketing purposes
A “text to join”. In your location, you can have signs with your custom text code for sign-up information.
Constant Contact has all these tools integrated into their platform. Using these features will help grow your subscriber list, so you can get repeat business from customers.
If your contact list is growing, your business may be best served with using a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM). For a busy business owner, a CRM can ensure that customer follow-up and other vital tasks don’t fall through the cracks.
5. Get involved with the business community
Business owners love to support each other. They may have connections that can assist you as you grow your business, or they may want to be your customer. A great start is to meet your business neighbors and learn more about what companies around you do.
Another avenue is to look at business associations. Your local chamber of commerce, or a business group sponsored by your city can be a great start to networking, and spreading the word about your new venture.
There is a lot to consider when opening your new business. Marketing your new business is essential to its success and growth. Endorphin Advisors provides management consulting and marketing solutions to companies so they can achieve that growth.
To read more about marketing your new business:
Learn more about Endorphin Advisors
Comments