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a to z of marketing
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message from the author
Speaking to many small business owners who have set up their business in their own specific niche, marketing is something they know they need to do but often haven’t got the first idea of how to start. This is written for them. If you’re an established marketer, you’re probably going to know most of it, but it will be a good refresher for you.
So if you’re not sure what direction to take with marketing your business, the A-Z will give you lots of ideas. It will give you a format and a structure to apply that will ultimately give you better direction and help save you time in the long run. It will help you get closer to achieving your goals.
Sound good?
Marketing A to Z
Scattered throughout my blog you will find lots of useful articles relating to marketing your business. In THIS blog, I have decided to provide easy access and a logical way to read them! Follow the hyperlinks to success! With a marketing career that spans two decades, I am passionate about marketing, branding and design and I want to share that with you to empower and guide you as you work in your own business. Hope you enjoy my content. How to write a marketing plan Sounds obvious, but the...
How to use LinkedIn to build your brand
What is LinkedIn LinkedIn is a powerful online networking tool with about 562 million users. Using it to promote yourself and your business is not only about who you know, but about who your connections know! It’s the new age ‘word of mouth’ which is one of the most successful forms of marketing there ever has been and ever will be. LinkedIn is a thriving network of people sharing stuff about what they know to people that hopefully care about it. There are some basic things that you need to...
How to choose a photographer for your marketing project
Stock imagery certainly has a huge place in the world, it serves a purpose, but you can’t beat authentic killer imagery that not only looks good but conveys the right message. Killer imagery can take your brand to the next level. Simple as that. Your imagery should be high on your list of considerations when you are designing your marketing collateral. Images are often the first thing your customers see when they visit your website. They are the centrepiece of your advertising...
How to use Instagram for your business.
Instagram is a big deal. It’s huge. There is so much to do, where do you start!! Let’s keep this simple to start with and then build up to the complex. Is Instagram right for your business? First and foremost, you need to have a think about your marketing strategy, because using something like Instagram really requires a bit of thinking up front. Mainly around who it is that you’re targeting, what you are going to say and how you are going to say it. Instagram typically gets a younger...
A Quick Guide to Facebook
What is Facebook? Think of Facebook as a perfect place to spread word of mouth. For businesses that have always relied on this method of winning business, having a business page is a fantastic idea. Most of us understand Facebook from a personal profile point of view. It connects you to all your friends and allows you to share information at will. But a business page often leaves people feeling a bit baffled. It’s easy to start a business page, simply go to the top of your Facebook homepage...
A quick guide to Google Analytics
Google Analytics used to scare the living day lights out of me, I won’t lie. For new business owners, picking up a website is quick and easy, but figuring out the fundamentals of Google, Search Engine Marketing and Google Analytics is a whole other ball game. Some people make a living out of interpreting analytics for others and helping them use it to make business decisions with. There are lots of insights that you can take from a basic understanding of the tool itself, so this...
What is search engine marketing?
Search engines, they’re like a completely different planet. We can’t blame you for not really getting it, it’s a world of “bots” and “algorithms” and words that are fairly new to new business owners and to people who don’t do marketing. So let’s figure out what you need to know about search engines, how to get Google to like you (because let’s face it, it’s the only search engine that really matters) and how you can market your business on the World Wide Web! First the basics of...
What is the RACE digital marketing framework?
In this blog we are going to go through the RACE digital marketing framework in more depth and discuss how to use it. I am so glad that people come up with these fancy frameworks to make marketing our businesses easier to do. Let’s imagine our prospective customers. There are those who don’t know us, there are those who know us but who have yet to interact with us, there are those who are currently interacting with us and there are those who have interacted with us in the past. Each...
How to launch a new product
As with anything, to launch a product you need a plan. A good framework to go by is one defined by the acronym - SOSTAC, which this blog aims to summarise below. S. Situational Awareness - where are you now? You can do a SWOT analysis on your new product/service, what are its strengths and weaknesses, what are the opportunities? What are the threats from external sources? Trends that might affect it, competitors that might. O. What are your objectives with regards to launching...
What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing is essentially providing your target audience with information that satisfies their needs. It should be of value to THEM. It is not a sales pitch, but it is intended to stimulate interest in your products or services indirectly. It could be a written blog, a video, a podcast, an email, a social media post, generally any sort of communication that is geared towards answering a question that someone may one day ask Google. If there is content online with the...
The Pro’s and Con’s of Direct Mail versus Email Marketing
In this blog we look at the pro's and con's of email marketing versus direct mail as part of your ongoing customer communication and marketing strategy and we will take a look at some things to be aware of if you start using one or both of these tactics. What is Direct Mail? Direct mail is part of the marketing communications mix, it involves sending a physical promotional thing, whether it’s a letter, a flyer, a postcard or a packet of biscuits to a customer. It’s direct... to the...
How to build a brand
At one stage or another, all businesses will find themselves lost. Thats ok, it's probably because you've hit a good spell and you've been so busy working in your business that you havent had time to work on it! But hitting a difficult spell, like we all do from time to time, can suddenly throw you into a sense of feeling lost and directionless. In times like these, I try and follow my own advice but as a business owner myself, I find it hard to look inward, to ask the difficult questions of...
What is User Experience?
There is a lot of hype around user experience or UX at the moment. It is a role that has become more prominent within organisations these days because they know that it is the key to providing customers with an experience that makes the difference between them buying and not buying. User Experience is usually considered within product design and is concerned with how a person feels when they are using a company’s product or interacting with a company, on something like a website or an app....
Employee engagement = marketing
There are multiple ways a business can focus its marketing strategy. For example, a product or service focused business will give all it has to developing the best products or services that it possibly can. The difficulty here is that there may be no demand for them. They may have made their product’s so fabulous that they have to charge a premium for them and no one can afford to buy them! Where have they gone wrong? The missing element here is the customer – had they spoken to their...
Advertising your business
It can be off putting thinking about advertising options when you maybe don’t have the budget to invest very much into it, but done right, advertising is the quickest way to get in front of your prospects. There are so many options when it comes to advertising, it makes an advertising A-Z a viable option in itself to be honest. We will try and touch on some basic nuggets of information here. Google my business It’s absolutely free to have a Google My Business account, it allows you to manage...