Five things you should never forget when beginning your marketing activity

If you’re a marketing professional, there’s a chance you’re already well familiar with the points covered in this article. If you’re not, the next five minutes of your time spent reading are sure to prove valuable and help you start aligning your business for success.

My experience lead me to an important realization – most entrepreneurs and business owners don’t have a marketing background.

Therefore, most individuals that personally manage their business’s marketing efforts are likely not familiar enough with how online marketing works, which can lead to decisions that are detrimental to their success.

Here are some tips that you should never forget in the early stages of your company’s marketing efforts:

1. Don’t go it alone: teaming up with the pros will start you on the right path. The fact that you can drive a car doesn’t mean you’re cut out to be a professional Formula 1 racecar driver. Similarly, having a Facebook account does not mean you have what it takes to efficiently advertise on Facebook. It can be tempting to try to do it all yourself: you’re an intelligent person, plenty of free tutorials exist online to guide you through the motions, and you’ve got a ‘can-do’ attitude. Fight that urge to go DIY and allow me to offer some expert advice: consult with a marketing professional. Using the help of an experienced marketer will save you money in both the long- and short-term.

 

2. Avoid paying for social pages likes. Be wary of what you’re paying for! The world of social media offers a variety of options for increasing your following, many of which are based on organic growth and can yield excellent results. But not all services are created equal and many will not get you to where you want to go.

 

It is reasonable to assume that a page with a small amount of followers is reflective of a small or even unsuccessful company, so naturally you want to increase your following. Just don’t jump the gun and make a rash decision like paying an outsourced service to increase your page followers or likes for a pay-per-user fee. In most cases, you end up with an undesired pool of low-quality followers, consisting of fake profiles or profiles from third world countries, all of which are not relevant for your business.

 

Both users and potential investors looking at your page will quickly understand that your audience is ‘low-quality’. Once you do get real users to follow you, your page is already “contaminated” with inactive, unengaged followers, making the data you get from your Page Insights biased, inaccurate and not reflective of your audience’s true behavior. I recommend building your audience slowly and genuinely. It will help you avoid a multitude of problems with the future you are trying to build for your business.

 

3. Don’t put all your eggs in one ‘promotion’ basket. Plenty of professionals will be inclined to advise you towards using a one-time, large-scale promotion to increase awareness of your brand. The list of exorbitant marketing options is exhaustive: from direct media buying on well-known websites, to affiliate marketing, to content deals. Don’t be fooled into thinking that a single shot at an expensive promotion will get you a positive ROI right away. In very few cases does this attempt make your business blow up and go viral, and likewise it is very unlikely that this action will generate enough ROI to keep your business moving forward financially. What is more likely is that such a large expense will inhibit you from reaching your goals and you will finish the promotion without enough cash in your pocket to pay for the next one.

 

There’s a reason why so many online platforms and advertising options are out there. Because they work! Keep in mind that there is accumulated value to multi-platform advertising and working with businesses who are experts in the marketing field. Think power in numbers: promoting your campaign with several advertising platforms at once can generate additional value than if you stick with only one.

 

4. Don’t forget the potential of SEO. A big problem with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is that most people (even experienced marketers) don’t have a good understanding of its harnessing potential. Statistics show that at least 50% of results on a search engine are organic, but that number could be as high as 95%. The data are not currently available for us to be sure of an exact number, but all marketing professionals agree that getting your content into those organic results is a huge benefit to your business. Not making any SEO efforts means you are foregoing a huge amount of top-quality traffic to your website.

 

5. Don’t ignore the importance of creating your brand guidelines. Establishing your business’s identity from square one is crucial, yet often overlooked. Just as we establish our own identities as people – our personalities and beliefs, how we dress, who we affiliate ourselves with, etc. – so too do businesses require a ‘branding.’   If we don’t set our tone at an early stage, every message we attempt to send to our target audience can get lost in the whir of the many virtual voices of the online community. This step is most certainly one you can take on your own without any professional assistance, but beware that not tending to it can jeopardize your business’s success!

 

I hope you’ve found these tips helpful, this is only the tip of the iceberg! 

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