Starting A Business – Tips From A Marketing Agency

With the cost-of-living crunch affecting us all, many are turning to side hustles, freelancing, and starting businesses. To help you start on the right foot, here are some top tips from a Marketing Agency Account Manager on the best marketing to implement from the get-go.

Read on to explore the basics of marketing your small business and how you can make reasonable adjustments for the best return on investment…

Once you’ve worked out what kind of side hustle you’re going to start getting involved with, there are a few essentials you need in place. The technical bits can include choosing your prices, finding the right platforms (like Etsy), setting up your email address, and preparing any relevant profiles.

The First Marketing Step:

How do you know what to produce if you’re unsure who or what your target audience is? If your side hustle is making products to sell, conduct research around similar businesses to see how they present their content and products, and take notes for the future. With service-based side hustles, check out competitors in your area, review their prices, assess their content, and look at the kind of people engaging with them.

Next, find any research into your industry and your customers online. For example, are you targeting millennials? How do they like to consume content? What are their preferred platforms? Are you offering design services? Where do your local SMEs and agencies convene?

With all this research, you’ll be able to build audience profiles to help you tailor your later marketing activity.

The Second Marketing Step:

The next step in your marketing journey is choosing a name and branding. If you look at well-known brands, one thing they have in common is the perceived simplicity of their names, logos, and branding. Think FedEx, Amazon, Facebook and Etsy – all simple single words and easily transferable logos or icons.

Choose an appropriate name and logo that suits your business and is easy to pronounce, simple, and transferable. Sometimes your name is enough with an icon like Facebook’s ‘F’ or Dolce & Gabbana’s D&G entwined.

From there, you can develop other branding elements, such as colour, fonts, tone of voice, ethos, and more. Just make sure it all reflects your industry and service. For example, there’s no point in including food imagery if you’re not in hospitality or using vibrant and bold colours if you’re hoping to be a chic, corporate designer.

The Third Marketing Step:

Once your brand and visual guidelines are sorted, and your customer research with their preferences, concerns, and beliefs is ready, it’s time to roll this out across your public-facing properties. This means your website, social accounts, business profiles and selling sites.

Ensuring everything is coherent, consistent, and complete is a major step towards customer trust.

The Fourth Marketing Step:

Content is still key in making your brand known online, and SEO goes hand in hand with it. It’s good to make sure you’re adhering to Search Engine Optimisation best practices with your website and public profiles, and there are some basics you should have in place to begin:

• Keyword Research.

Tools like Keyword Planners, Google Trends, AlsoAsked and more can all help you work out the best terms to include in your content. It’s a balancing act between clicks, competitor content and quality with keywords, so ensure it feels relevant, natural and unforced.

• H1 and H2 Tags.

These are essentially headlines and sub-headers which tell search engine bots what your page is about. They are one of the first things to be crawled, so it’s essential to have these on every web page and ensure they include relevant keywords and need-to-know information.

• Locations.

If you’re offering your service in a particular place, make sure to include this in your H1 or H2 tags and your body content to help the search engines know when and where to share your content.

• Images.

Try to keep your images good quality without large file sizes to increase page loading speed. It’s also better to avoid using copy in images as text in image form cannot be crawled. Finally, remember to add Alt Text for accessibility.

• Internal Linking.

Search engines like connected content - it helps them assess user flow and more easily crawl a website. So, try to link all your pages with in-content links, menus, and similar content blocks.

• Site Maps

Just as with internal linking, Search Engine bots will more easily crawl your site if you have a site map showing all your pages in one place. This is usually just a webpage shared in the website footer that lists all your pages in menu order and helps them find all your content.

• Meta Tags.

These are the snippets of text you see in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) that help users find the right content for them. Most Content Management Systems (CMS) have SEO plugins with meta tag capabilities to help you optimise and provide these.

• External Linking.

Each time a site links to your webpage, it acts as a kind of point for your website – another site trusted your content enough to share it, so Search Engines consider you slightly more trustworthy and authoritative. Natural links are favourable as paid links can be considered ‘Black Hat’ and fraudulent by Search Engines. You can start by linking all your social accounts and online storefronts together, then expand with directories, guest blogs and more.

The Fifth Marketing Step:

Once your online presence is all up to scratch, more hands-on marketing can begin.

With new businesses where you are selling a product, organic social media posting, paid social media ads, Pay-Per-Click campaigns and sponsored ads on your chosen selling platforms are the best places to start.

With new businesses where you are selling a service such as copywriting, you may want to investigate email marketing, local directories or contact businesses directly, as well.

This step depends a lot on your market research as that will help you determine the best places to advertise and market yourself based on your ideal customer’s behaviour.

The Sixth Marketing Step:

Following through with your branding is essential when starting up – you need to reinforce that brand at every touchpoint. With every email, social post and download, use your brand. That includes any physical marketing with leafleting, print advertising or your product packaging and labelling.

Following these six steps should set your business marketing in a scalable way as you will have all the basics in place with information available from your research and active customers to help you expand your efforts as needed.

*This article was written by guest author, Debbie Woodliffe, of Affinity Agency.