3 tips to get started with marketing

Amid managing all business functions such admin, accounting, finance, purchase, R&D; pro-actively managing marketing and sales is crucial to your business success. At the end of the day, if you don't  have customers, you don't have a business.

Once that has been acknowledge, the next questions usually are:
- How do I get started?
- How much should I spend?
- Which channels should I use? 

While Marketing is not an exact science and no definite answers exist for these questions, I will try to give you some insight on how to go about thinking about these points.

1 - HOW DO I GET STARTED?

​First of all, define your target market. Marketing is like writing a letter to someone, if you know them well, you can be relevant and personable. Think on these lines: are you trying to sell to anyone going past your coffee shop or are you targeting parents who drop-off and pick-up their kids from that large state school around the corner?

If you are targeting everyone, you will need a large marketing budget, as a more mass approach to promotion and advertising will be required. However, in real life, that is not usually the case. It makes a lot more sense to target the parents after drop-off with special mid-morning offers. Alternatively, you could focus on late lunch specials before pick-up. These are just simplistic examples but hopefully you get the idea.

Defining your target market is crucial to not only streamline all your marketing activities but to also better define your product/service offering. You can either a have a product that you want to test with different customer segments to see which segment it may be more suitable for or you can run focus-groups to narrow down product ideas, with insights from a specific demographic.

2 - HOW MUCH SHOULD I SPEND?

Once you know who you need to talk to and what you want to tell them, you will need funds to do so. The vast majority of business have a set budget that they need to work with, so define how much you can dedicate to marketing and then go from there. 

At this stage, it's important to keep your expectations - in terms of what marketing can deliver - aligned to your budget. That's not to say that the bigger the budget, the bigger the return. However, there is a sweet spot where if you can use multiple integrated channels, better returns can be expected.

While budget varied among different industries, there seems to be a consensus that marketing budget for small-medium business vary between 1-10% of their revenue. Even though this is a broad range, if you are starting out, it will be a matter of experimentation. For more stablished business, it's either a matter of increasing the budget and measure the results or trying different tactics with your current budget, and see what the outcome is.

3 - WHICH CHANNELS SHOULD I USE?

Hopefully by this stage, with a good grasp of who you are talking to, what you want to say to them and how much you have aside to do so; defining the channels becomes a little bit easier.

Below is a list of channels to choose from:
- Website
- Phone/Call Centre
- Customer Service/ Sales Staff 
- Social Media Channels
- Customer Database Sign-Up Form
- Online (desktop, tablet, mobile/ banner, video) Advertising
- TV, Radio, Outdoor and Print Advertising
- Flyers/Business Cards/Posters
- EDM (Electronic Direct Mail)
- Direct Marketing/Events

Again, which channels to choose directly correlates to the whom your target market is, how much you can spend and the nature of your business. If you are targeting the parents of kids at the nearby school to visit your coffee shop, then you should have at least a website, customer service staff, a Facebook page and some flyers & posters to start with. Slowly, you can then start building a customer database, so your already customers can now be sent messages about upcoming specials and/or be invited to take part in competitions, promotions, special events, etc. This is when you start to address the customer retention side of things.

This is a high level view of the marketing space and not meant to be an exhaustive review of the topic. If you need a hand to get started, please get in touch!