This is, without a doubt, one of the most frustrating, head-scratching, thought-provoking questions most small to medium-sized businesses ask of themselves.
What are the main challenges you face when marketing your business?
If you are solopreneur or a company with upwards of 15-20 personnel you have the same frustrations as the micro business down the road.
How do you get your business noticed?
There is a myriad of ways to market your business.
Google My Business, SEO content writing, social media channels, direct mail, word of mouth and more.
What are the challenges?
1. Do I need to create a brand for my organisation?
This involves a lot of thought, you can read more here.
It requires creating and writing a unified message that showcases the mission, values, your company message and its image across all the channels you use to promote yourself and your company.
With time constraints, limited financial resources and deciding what platform(s) best meet the needs of your business.
It is hard work spinning all the plates.
The ‘write’ message needs to be centric across all platforms if your business is informal and playful then posting media that is the polar opposite sends a conflicting message.
2. Who is your ideal audience?
The perennial problem especially if you are starting out.
Be clear who your audience is and then put yourself in their shoes.
Work out the demographic that reflects who you want to sell to.
My audience is senior male/female professionals working in medium to large businesses, business owners and SMEs in their late 30s to 40s.
They don’t have the time to plan and write website content or craft sales messages preferring a content writer who has gumption and initiative.
They may have a limited marketing function but outsourcing some of the extra work is where I come in.
From my own experience, this is not about quantity but more about the quality of the audience.
Your pool might contain 5,000 potential buyers and so the content needs to be written in a way that helps them.
3. What is the right content?
I aim to write for my reader in plain English which I admit is hard because I love big words.
Readers who rock up here don’t have loads of time to read.
I mean, come on, there is so much stuff on the internet, finding time to read is nigh on impossible.
Whatever you do, write what you think is important and relevant to your audience and throw in a bit of fun to show you’re approachable.
Your website needs to reflect the persona and brand of your business if it is flippant and whimsical people might be put off.
If it is too intense and serious with a lot of jargon readers will shrug their shoulders and move on.
Too many case studies, white papers and never-ending testimonials will read as if it’s too good to be true.
A mix of well-written content, videos and social media posts will make the mix interesting and engaging.
4. Is your content-generating leads?
This is the only question you need to ask, is your website, social media posts or direct mail creating leads?
If the answer is NO then you need to establish if the content is relevant for the reader, does it offer real value?
Is there a hook, have you asked them to take some kind of action?
Your analytics will show how popular your posts are and the content with the most eyeballs but it won’t necessarily tell you the quality of your audience.
Proving your ROI is important obviously and on a platform like Facebook you can work out the cost you spend on ads versus the leads generated.
Your investment in marketing is a marriage between your content management system and analytics.
If used properly it can really help you work out what works and what needs tweaking.
