Hands up who is a busy business owner? Put your hand up if you have marketing fully under control?! Hands up if you want to simplify things a little in your business?
Here are some simple tips to help busy business owners with marketing.
Tip 1: Know your customer
A bit of up to date market research might be needed. Do you really know who your customer is? Do you know their likes and interests? Do you know their favourite social media platform?
If you’re not really sure, then ask them. Either send out a simple survey if you have email contact with them. If you have face to face contact with them that’s even better. Talk to them, build a rapport and get to know them.
If you know who your customer is, then you know how to market to them.
Tip 2: Keep it simple
Don’t over complicate things. Just keep it simple. There are so many social media platforms. It’s hard to find time to be on all of them – keep them up to date, keep track of analytics and make sure you comment or reply when necessary. So stick to just 1-3 social media platforms. This goes back to knowing your customer. What’s the point in your business spending lots of time and money on Instagram, if your customers are actually all over on Twitter?
Tip 3: Have a Marketing Plan
Do you have a marketing plan for your business? If not, it’s time to get creative and develop one! If you have no plan in place you’ll waste time getting distracted on things you didn’t intend to spend time or money on.
Tip 4: Follow the Plan
Once you have a plan, stick to it! The plan will put manners on the time and money that you invest in your marketing. Plan how many posts you’ll add to social media, as best you can. Plan how and where you will spend your marketing budget. Once you follow a plan you can track your key performance indicators (KPIs). You’ll know then what to start, stop and continue with.
Tips 5: Outsource
Know when it’s time to outsource. If you’re spending too much time on marketing and not enough on running the rest of your business, then it’s time! Start gradually. Find somebody you like and trust to write your blogs and/or newsletters and to post for your business on social media. By outsourcing, you can choose how much or little you let somebody else do for you. Weigh up the investment of outsourcing by counting up the hours you’ll save when somebody else is doing the work for you. In business, your time is money. So the time you save you can calculate and spend this time saved working on other parts of your business.
If it is time to outsource and not to take on a permanent marketing resource, then contact Lush Marketing for a meeting – www.lushmarketing.ie