Nerds and Words

How to market your new business

Congrats! You’ve made your first steps into the business world, you’ve created your own business model, found your niche, you’ve got your brand’s name, and perhaps even its visual identity. Now it’s time to think about how to put the word out and attract customers towards your newly-created business. Marketing and promoting your business is no easy job, especially when you are just starting out. There’s a lot to be done and results won’t start showing right away, which makes the whole process even more painstaking, frustrating, even confusing.

 

We’ve been thinking about you and the challenges you’re met with and we decided to put together this little guide to help you market your small, newly-founded business. Let’s see what this is all about:

 

 

1. Find and assert your identity 

 

The business in itself is merely a skeleton, a mannequin you’re supposed to drape with values and principles. Next step: find the best personality that suits it and choose the tone of voice carefully. These two elements must be representative of your mission and vision and will be used consistently throughout all of your future communication efforts.

 

Why do you need to think this through? Because there’s a huge emotional component in every sales process. When you’re trying to sell something, mere information is not all it takes. You also have to be persuasive and in order to do this, you’ll have to bond with your potential customers, to create and nurture trust. This applies to all the messages and media you will use, from product descriptions on your website to posting and advertising on social media. And how will you do it in the absence of an approachable personality and a compelling tone of voice? 

 

Let’s see an example. It’s a common and boring one but it’s the easiest one to analyze: liquid soap. We have two types of description- one from L’Occitane and the other from Method. Yes, the one from L’Occitane is vapid and not so persuasive, yet it works perfectly for them. Why? Because people come on their website for the products they know and love, not to read cute little stories about what they use in their formula. They have a reputation, the price tells its own story and that’s more than enough. 

 

Unless you’re a brand of the same caliber, you’ll have to do better than that. If you’re a new brand trying to make a name for yourself you’ll need to get creative. More than that, you’ll have to find and emphasize the most salient attributes of your product or service and to craft a compelling story. A story that you’ll be able to adapt and use in many different ways, depending on the channels you’ll rely on. 

 

L'Occitane Product Description

 

Method Soap Product Description

 

 

I found an enlightening idea in the direct-to-consumer marketing course from Yotpo: you can’t buy emotional connection on Amazon. So this is your opportunity. The size of your advertising budget doesn’t necessarily determine your strength on the market. There are a thousand creative ways to get ahead of your competitors. But having the possibility to tell a story that will help you connect with your prospects at a deeper, more intimate level- that’s a liability. Let’s face it: people aren’t those rational economic actors described by the traditional theories. They don’t buy a certain product just because they need it. They buy it because they like how it looks or because they have to be seen using it. They choose it over anything else because they have a certain set of values and the product’s story helps them reinforce their own narrative.

 

 

2. Your website is your business card. Make it look professional!

 

One of the first things you’re doing once you’re getting started is to create a website for your business. What does it have to look like? Well, it has to have:

 

  • a friendly, intuitive design
  • the shortest loading time possible
  • well-structured information, so that users can find it easily (the 3-click rule, you know…)
  • rich and relevant content

 

For starters, you’ll only need a home page, an “about us” section (featuring your history, mission, and vision), the pages for the main product categories, and a blog. These will be your top priorities in the early phases of building your business.

 

Make sure that the design of your website is consistent with your brand’s visual identity (i.e. the logo and the colors). Don’t hesitate to turn to professional graphic and web designers. Many entrepreneurs ask themselves if it’s really worth the investment. Yes, 100 times yes. It’s worth taking care of this aspect from the very beginning. Otherwise, when you get to the point when you realize it’s time for drastic changes and bold updates, you may be faced with the uncomfortable need to start everything over again. 

 

Let me give you a personal example. We have a lot of people requesting our services because they’ve understood that content marketing is profitable and a strategy for the future, which is extremely encouraging to us. Many of them offer pretty cool products or services making it really easy to write about them. 

 

The problem is that once I get on their website, I am taken aback by their old, dusty, crowded, and counterintuitive design. This makes it really hard for me to structure my ideas and come up with a working plan. As good as the writing may be, people won’t stay long on a website that looks like it has been made 15 years ago. And this is how you waste a precious opportunity for branded storytelling.

 

 

 

Uber Landing Page

Uber is doing it right: this is a landing page with huge potential for conversions

 

Landing Page Done Wrong

If you ever stumble upon such a landing page, run for your life!

 

ProTip:

Google has recently launched mobile-first indexing, which is now applied by default to new websites. So make sure that your website is optimized for mobile devices. As a matter of fact, mobile search accounts for more than half of the global search volume and it will only keep on growing. Hence, the only sensible conclusion would be: dive in, mobile-first!

 

 

3. The go-to communication channels

 

Before discussing them, there’s another technical step that you should be aware of. We don’t have too much expertise when it comes to this issue but we’ll leave it here because we acknowledge its importance. It’s about registering your website on Google Search Console and signing up for a Google Analytics account. Talk to your web developers, they know better how to guide you through.

 

Google Search Console will help you optimize the pages of your website and make sure that they are all correctly indexed. Google Analytics is for tracking the performance of the website and the ad campaigns you’re running (be it on social media or Google). Once you get past those intimidating first steps and you learn how to personalize your reports based on concrete objectives, everything will start making sense. 

 

You’ll be able to see exactly how well your efforts are performing, what channels are bringing the best results, what calls for further improvement, and so on. However, you should take this with a grain of salt: no analytics software will ever give you the definitive answer and those variables won’t tell you much if you don’t know how to interpret them. This is why it’s best to hire someone with expertise if you don’t have time to learn it all yourself.

 

Going back to those channels: you can do email campaigns (capturing leads with your website and inviting them to sign up to your newsletter) or you can run ads on social media or Google. You can start doing content marketing or you can reach out to relevant nano-influencers (1k-10k followers) or micro-influencers (10k-15k followers), asking them to introduce your brand to their audiences. There are a lot of options for all budgets and by no means does it imply that you have to be everywhere at the same time.

 

As Seth Godin famously said: 

 

You can’t change everything or everyone. 

 

You have to carefully define your target-public: who will benefit from what you’re offering? Where can you find these people across the web? What kind of messages do they like to receive? After answering these questions, you’ll find it easier to choose the most relevant channels for your communications. Whether you’ll prioritize Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or your own blog, the next logical step would be to develop a content strategy. 

 

Ideally, a content strategy should support your business objectives, following certain KPIs and having a well-defined structure whose performance you can analyze on a quarterly or semestrial basis. But this approach best fits larger businesses with bigger content volumes. In the beginning, the only thing you’ll need to do is to have a clear idea of the topics and subjects that you will approach.

 

Must-haves:

A blog to help you better connect with your audience. It’s the ideal place to let people know about your personality, values, and the general direction of your business.

 

A social media presence: go where your customers and prospects are. A business page/profile on Facebook and Instagram are unavoidable since they have a solid presence and a consistent base of heavy users.

 

  • Tik Tok or Snapchat if you’re after a younger audience (12-30 years). Snapchat is currently the most popular social network among teens worldwide but Tik Tok is a serious contender, with a staggering 800 million active users worldwide. There’s also a catch here: Tik Tok and Snapchat are more dynamic than any other social network and so will your content need to be if you want to get noticed.
  • Pinterest is another interesting option because it relies largely on visual content and the average lifespan of a “pin” is measured in months, while a tweet’s popularity and usefulness fade away after a couple of minutes and a Facebook post becomes less relevant in a matter of hours. Pinterest has seen a steady growth over the last few years. Its members are into arts and crafts, interior design, searching for inspiration for their houses and gardens. Plus, according to Hootsuite, promoted pins that align with life moments and holidays see a 22% lift in sales. If you’re ready to package your content offer in a way that appeals to visual platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram, Canva is a great tool where you can find customizable templates for “pins” and social posts.
  • Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that’s becoming increasingly popular in the West (less so in Romania, where only an estimated 36% of the Internet users have a Twitter account). Twitter is a great place for timely content and engaging with your audience in a more direct and meaningful way, by hopping on trends and joining conversations about your field and industry.
  • LinkedIn is the place to be if you’re addressing professionals and business people. For example, if you are a coach or if you offer online courses (about public speaking, strategy, analytics for business, and so on), there’s a high likelihood that you’ll find your target audience there. If not, then you’ll most definitely find their bosses, who are usually eager to add a little something to their business & development programs.

 

If your main criterion for choosing your communication channel is its popularity, then YouTube, Facebook, and Facebook Messenger are your pals. Yes, you can do Messenger marketing but please note that starting from March 4, 2020, their policy has changed quite a bit and you’ll need to be more careful. Here’s a comprehensive piece to guide you through these changes, analyzing its impact on businesses and providing you with some useful Messenger marketing tips.

 

ProTip:

Remember that not all social platforms are created equal. They all have their advantages and disadvantages in terms of architecture, functioning principles, engagement, or the type of content required. For example, Instagram generates the most engagement. So, depending on how well you are acquainted with your niche, you should be able to choose the most suitable platform that matches both your business objectives and the interests of your audience. Oh, and another thing: before jumping on the bandwagon, make sure you have done a bit of research to understand what types of posts perform best on each social network. This way, you’ll be able to replicate the model for yourself and generate the kind of content that people really want to see around there.

 

 

4. Content ideas for your business

 

Newsflash: content sells. According to Hubspot, 70% of marketers actively invest in content marketing, with 55% of them admitting that writing compelling posts on their organization’s blog is their number 1 inbound marketing priority. What is inbound marketing? you may ask. It’s a way of attracting prospects by offering them high-quality, helpful content, and by creating experiences that are tailored to their priorities and interests.

 

Look at it this way: you can’t meet someone and try to sell them something right away. Similarly, you can’t always be actively seeking to sell stuff- it’s too intrusive. Before anyone buys from you, they have to know you exist (i.e. you have to generate brand awareness) and that you are a viable option. Then, it takes on average 5-7 interactions with a brand in order for people to remember it and a few more before they actually decide to buy from that brand.

 

Your audience is doing its fair share of online research, comparing brands and prices, and carefully analyzing every single touchpoint before taking the final decision. What’s more- we’ve entered the age of the attention economy. As Matthew Crawford wrote in one of his articles for the New York Times: attention is treated as a commodity, but it is, in fact, a non-renewable resource. Every one of us has a limited attention span and tries to protect it at all costs against external intrusions.

 

You want to be relevant, not intrusive. You want them to let down their guard and welcome you in. In order to accomplish that, you will have to allow them to get to know you and invest in awareness campaigns. During this stage, you will be delivering quality content for free, with no strings attached, earning the trust of your prospects, and strengthening the bond with them before trying to make them an offer. Later, you will be able to offer them even more valuable resources (such as webinars, ebooks, white papers, promotions, and so on), in exchange for their email address. Finally, when you have these contact details, you will have the opportunity to target them with relevant and personalized offers that they will be more inclined to take into consideration.

 

Every interaction counts, so here are our content ideas:

 

Video content on your landing/home page

Greet your prospects with a brand video on your home page. This simple trick can boost your conversion rate by as much as 80%. It can be a product or a service demo, a step-by-step guide, or an interactive presentation. It can be something funny or something serious, depending on the tone of voice you’ve chosen. You can include elements that reinforce your authority or something entertaining, to strengthen the emotional bond with your prospects. It’s up to you and it largely depends on the kind of business you’re running.

 

Answer questions

No matter what queries your prospects might have that are related to your products or services, they should find the answers right away, right there. You can design a FAQ page and offer short, relevant answers, then you can develop each issue in a blog post. Keep the question in your title- this will increase the likelihood of people opening and reading your article. Plus, if you’ve optimized the body of the article well enough, it will perform better on Google, attracting even more readers from across the web that are asking the same general question.

 

Discuss trends and evolutions from your industry

Whether you’re in the fashion, beauty, technology, healthcare, marketing, or interior design industry- people who are interested in these topics will always try to stay up to date with the trends and evolutions. You’re a player within that very industry, a professional and a specialist, and you also have that vision “from the inside”, which can prove extremely valuable. Leverage this opportunity to increase your thought leadership. Make comparisons, compile lists and guides, give advice, and relevant recommendations- anything your audience craves.

 

Tips & tricks and lifehacks

A single product can have many different uses. Show people exactly how the products you’re offering can fit into their lifestyle. Think of all the ways one can use your products and put the ideas together into useful, compelling guides. Support your arguments with numbers and statistics from your industry to boost the credibility of your content.

 

Success stories

 

It can be your own story, the story of your company, or the one of your employees and customers. People love to learn about how their lives can improve. This kind of content helps prospects identify with your brand and your offer, allowing you to create and deepen the emotional connection. This connection is extremely valuable and can later be leveraged during your campaigns.

 

Testimonials

These, too, can be turned into blog posts or valuable content for your social media pages. Even though they seem to look best when they’re running on a loop in the lower section of your website, they perform even better when you craft them into catchy short stories. Sit down and talk with your most valuable customers or with those who have left you the loveliest reviews and make them the stars of your new articles. Not to mention how popular storytelling is becoming online.

 

Things that your staff likes

Humanize your brand and don’t be afraid to look for content opportunities within your team. Everybody has something interesting to share- they just need to be given the chance to shine. Let them come forth and write about what they’re passionate about: music, movies, books, or any other hobbies they might have. Each of these elements can be easily and successfully integrated into your content strategy, while also allowing your audience to see another side of your business. 

 

Keep an eye on your competitors so you won’t be left behind

Carry out keyword research and analysis for the terms and expressions that you’re competing on. This way, you’ll get to see the evolution in terms of search volume and positioning of your competitors. You’ll be able to see what kind of content performs best and you’ll have the opportunity to create the same kind of content for your blog or website.

 

Take advantage of the holidays and come up with your own guides and ideas for the occasion

This type of content has the greatest potential of becoming evergreen (a kind of content that you’ll be able to use and repurpose over and over again and that will continue to attract readers long after the fuss is over). Plus, you can always update these articles by adding new ideas, trends, and items to the list.

 

Final words

Every piece of content you’re writing is an opportunity to connect with your audience. You can offer them food for thought, suggestions, or topics for social conversations, and this is not something you should take for granted. As you’re building your audience, it’s important to keep it connected and active. You never know how far your content can go and how many people would be willing to join the conversation. Everything you write and share has the potential to reinforce your position and to increase your brand’s share of mind.

 

We’d like to know what problems you’re currently dealing with or what communication roadblocks you’ve encountered back when you were just getting started. We want to develop helpful content that answers your specific needs (as we’ve already talked about in this blog post). You can leave a comment here or drop us a line on Facebook (where you can also gently nudge us when you notice that it’s been too long since our last post).

 

Until then, if you found anything interesting here and you feel like you want to take your communication or content strategy to the next level, you can find more about our communication packages here. Tell us a bit about yourself and the business and let’s break the ice!