Marketing is a learned skill that can take many years at university to master. We can however observe how the masters do it, and adapt that to small business. When you consider how the big guys conduct their marketing, sure we might not have the budget, but the content is gold. This content can be replicated in your own way to send a similar message. Before you do that though, you need to take this very first step in marketing for small business.
What Is The First Step In Marketing For Small Business?
Hands down the most common question I am asked, is about marketing for small business. Especially when we are desperate to find new work! Tradies in particular, spend a lot of time trying to find new work and yet with a thought out marketing strategy, could actually concentrate on working while the new work rolled in.
Before we begin with marketing though, we need to come back to the very first step. This step will give you the information you need to then move forward and plan your strategy.
Marketing actually begins with finding your target market. Believe it or not, finding that target market is completely in your control. I’ll use my own example in this post, to give you a practical look at how to go about the process.
In finding your target market, the information you discover/create, should be used to make an avatar or your ideal client. You need to be specific when making this avatar, get right down to the finer details and the information you then discover becomes powerful advertising knowledge.
In our case, we wanted to be renovating Queenslanders on the high end. This decision took us to think about who was likely to use our services if that was our niche. This where our avatar was created.
We wanted to target a professional couple where the wife/partner was a stay at home Mum or working part time. We thought the couple to have a couple of children, they would be private school educated, they would have a family pure bread dog, they would drive a luxury car and holiday overseas.
To us the above paragraph created an avatar of a mid to high income family who were likely to invest in the type of renovation we wanted to do.
From that avatar we were able to workshop exactly how to target this family. We had a preferred area to work in, so started by targeting the schools, then the sports clubs. We had a heavy presence on Pinterest and Instagram as this is where the Mother in this family would prefer to use her social media time.
From there I was sure to engage with the kinds of fashion and homewares shops this budget would work with, that way when they were playing on social media, our name would appear over and over. Slowly brand recognition would develop.
There is so much power for a business in creating an avatar. From the point of avatar, you have all the information you are likely to need to find ways to target your advertising for those exact people, and it works!
Your very first step in marketing for small business is to create this avatar for who you want to work with, then we can look at where to market your business.
Do you have an ideal client? Have you created an avatar?
Nicole xx
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