Marketing Principles

When you are marketing online (or offline) you should always be following a plan on what you are doing and why, or as i like to call it your marketing principles.

This includes:

• How should we decide what to post?
• What type of content is effective?
• Who should we be targeting on social media and how do we position our business in the market?
• When should we be posting?
• We only have a few brief points but hopefully they help you out with your own content and curation.

0.1 - (Newly added) - Know who you are talking to

1. Authenticity

2. Engage Clients Thoughts

3. The Strength of Your Message

4. Get others to say about you what you can’t say

5. Measure – keep statistics on what marketing is working.

6. The power of your attraction is directly proportional to the strength of your reputation.

7. Know the math

So let’s take a look into each of these a bit more in detail.

0.1) I can’t believe we missed this out the first time of writing because pretty much every website, marketing plan or blog starts with the same thing.

Your customer, who are they, what do they do, where do they go, what do they like, etc. The more you understand your customer the easier it becomes to write for them.

So before marketing whether thats by hiring a company or doing it yourself you need to spend a good few hours working out who your target audience is. I know a lot of people find this easier to actually make this in to a person and give them a name.

1) Authenticity

Being who you are is good enough, trying to be someone else will just tire you out. People like and appreciate your story and authenticity, they want to know your story, how you have grown, the challenges that you have or the story behind why you started your company. So who are you? How are you special? A lot of people struggle to answer that whether it is a lack of self love or being scared to come across as a show off. But if you know absolutely everything about steel beams then you should show people, document your journey, become the worlds biggest expert in steel. What you think is boring someone loves, there is markets for everyone to stand out in!

2) Anticipate the thoughts that are already going on in your potential clients mind.

If you have been around for a few years you will likely already know what your prospects and visitors to your site are looking for and the questions you get asked on a regular basis.

This could be what they think when they first see your Facebook advert or the person that looks at your leaflet, they will instantly have thoughts about your business such as how you look, how you come across, what is your price, etc.

When creating any marketing material it is vitally important to consider exactly what thoughts you are provoking and if you are answering these thoughts because not everyone will call you to find out the answers (in face most probably won’t).

Then equally importantly will the content engage the customer enough to take action.

3) The strength of your message is more important than how you say it.

It is like the famous saying “Done Is Better Than Perfect”, getting your message out there is the most important first step, you can edit your message overtime, you can change text, imagery and the type of marketing that you spend your time/money on.

However the most important thing is to create a strong message and start getting it out there.

I think this one is huge, I have seen it time and time again when helping people with their marketing, websites and adverts.

They are stuck in perfection paralysis and are unable to actually finish their website content, Facebook adverts etc because they are not sure which word to use. In the meantime their competitors are putting out message after message to your audience and stalling a load of the jobs you could have won. Especially with the likes of Facebook & Google ads where you can run multiple variations and test them, use the data and then improve them. Starting is the most important thing!

4) Get others to say about you what you can’t say

Anyone can claim they are the best website developers in the world, the best personal trainer in the UK or whatever you do. However only your customers can make that point so that people start to believe it.

Do great work for your customers and get great testimonials and then let them tell your story, your work ethic and show off your results.

• Reviews are great.
• Testimonials are great.
• What's better?
• Long-form interviews with your clients.
• Have them give you their story, what made them make the plunge to work with you, where they're at now etc...
• This is invaluable content that helps people on the fence.

5) Measure

While setting up different marketing campaigns is it important to keep statistics on what marketing is working (and what is not working).

If you don’t measure your results you could be throwing away the majority of your money into plans that don’t work for you.

And equally as importantly you could be missing out on opportunities to expand because you are looking in the wrong place. Record where your enquiries and sales are coming from, there are plenty of free tools out there such as Google analytics that can help you with this. What is your website conversion rate? How could you improve this? How much would another 1% add yo your bottom line?

Is there anything you would like us to write about in the future, can we help you with your website or digital marketing? Get in touch today [email protected].

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