The five marketing basics to get your brand ahead

Many business owners carry this mentality into the marketplace and conflate sales tactics with marketing strategies. The CEO interprets marketing as “constantly posting on social media.” She is interested in the marketer’s “marketing.” This is sometimes taken to mean posting content consistently across all channels.

It’s an ongoing project – not an activity

The goal of marketing is to increase potential customers’ awareness of the company. It is not a test of daily posting to LinkedIn or Facebook to accomplish this on a large scale. Instead, it revolves around wise expenditure. It involves having a clear message and properly presenting it, knowing your audience, and allocating enough funding to accomplish reach.

Once you have a strategy and a budget in place, the rest is project management, not marketing. “Marketing” goes over the broadcast plan, platform, and budget. The marketer does not do the marketing he manages.

Marketing has two legs

The two legs of a great marketing plan are brand management and promotional campaigns.

Brand management is like the engine of a car, mostly invisible but the key to its popularity and performance. A great-looking car that is underpowered will struggle on the road and fail to sell.

Brand management is the job of making sure your business:

• looks professional (great logo, letterhead, email signature, office signage and website design)
• looks credible (informative blogs, quality content, well-written brochure, ongoing presence on social media, interesting newsletter).

You’ll have to get these right before you begin any promotional campaign.

Promotional campaigns are like outside of the car; highly visible, attracting interest. A vehicle with a great engine that looks terrible will also struggle to sell.

Promotional campaigns include anything that you proactively promote via advertising spend. It can be a boosted post on social media, an advert in a magazine, a banner ad on a website, Google Ads, radio, promotors inside a shop or on a street corner, or even a networking event anything that gets budget behind it.

Creativity is key

Many entrepreneurs view marketing as a creative field, but few are willing to pay for creativity. The result is a boatload of boring marketing communications that have little impact on potential customers. No pizzazz, no spark, nothing memorable.

Marketing is part art, part science, which means you need to invest in both for an effective effort. That means data and creativity. In fact, creativity not data is likely the magic bullet that underpins most successful communications campaigns.

Spending money on creative copywriting, quality photos, professional design and interesting messages is what generates a response in the market.

It is short-sighted to think posting your latest company update to LinkedIn or sending out an email newsletter equals marketing. That’s only half the job done.

Content has become an obsession when it comes to marketing and is really a double-edged sword. Bad content can hurt you.

The internet is flooded with mountains of poorly written, half-baked, uninteresting articles that go on and on simply to impress the Google algorithm.

Producing well-written, informative content whether an article, podcast, or video is not easy. To generate something that becomes a sales asset requires an intensive process of research, writing/producing, editing, re-editing, optimising and promotion. It can completely set you apart from the rest when done correctly.

You’ve entered a war

As an entrepreneur, you’re entering a hostile world a war. Your customer may be your friend, but the market wants you out! You’re going to have to use every bit of data, skill, creativity, and tenacity to gain a foothold and remain there.

Have a marketing plan

A marketing plan is more than a communications plan. It should certainly be more than a ‘social media content plan’. In its purest form, it should cover every aspect of your business that faces outwards product, price, place, and promotion.

If you don’t have a marketing plan, you don’t have a battle plan to fight your most formidable enemy

Marketing is a long-term project, comprising ongoing brand awareness and well-planned campaigns, where creativity is key and where great content can make or break you. Most importantly, it is a battle; you’re fighting a formidable enemy on ever-changing terrain and will need every resource you can muster to carve out a place for your brand.