By not knowing what’s going on you are leaving money on the table so to speak. And with a few hours we can have your plan in place and know what you’ll be promoting this month.
Get in touch today for a conversation
It’s grown so much since Amazon introduced the concept back in 2011 and now consumers expect a deal not just on the day itself but Amazon started their Black Friday offers this year in October.
Why marketing your business around Black Friday is a must.
So what are you doing, are you getting involved in the event or are you staying well away and hoping your customers will see the value in your products and buy anyway.
With the changing retail landscape and various lockdown scenarios happening across the country consumers this year have been shopping online since March and have become used to this new way of shopping for everything and this year Christmas Shopping will be no different.
According to PWC report looking at 2019, 77% of all Black Friday Shopping is carried out online.
With that you need to make sure that your online presence is clear and up to date with your branding, messaging and products which will make it easier for your customers to find and shop with you during the festive shopping season.
Use online channels to communicate your offer and message with your customers through your website, email, social media and paid online advertising. Don’t wait until the end of the November to do this, do it now so you are ready to launch your Black Friday offer.
Even those customers who are not actively looking for an offer can be persuaded to purchase with the right message on the right channel, especially if these customers already have a relationship with you.
Make sure that the offer is attractive and not just pay lip service to the idea of Black Friday, and more importantly ensure you return to full price immediately after the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend so you can maximise on the sales throughout December in the run up to Christmas.
Don’t forget about off line channels too, Christmas Gift Guides, opinion pieces, pop up shops are all places that consumers are looking for ideas for Christmas gifts. By making it easy for customers to find out about you and buy from you will make your Black Friday a success.
The extra exposure of marketing your business around Black Friday that you give to your business will bring in more awareness and build a following of consumers that will be ready to buy from you in the new year and beyond.
Find out more about creating a marketing plan for your business and working with me here.
In this blog we’ll work through your objectives, what to include in your marketing plan and creating an outline marketing plan for your business.
By the end of the blog you’ll have a plan to put into action for promoting your business this quarter or this year.
What do you want to achieve this year?
Business goals
Personal goals
Key clients you want to work with
Do you want to launch a podcast/youtube channel
Enter a key market
Setting your marketing objectives
These should help you meet your overall business goals
Make sure your marketing objectives are SMART
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Resourced
Time bound
It is truly the only way to keep on track.
Will your marketing objectives help you achieve your busines objectives? Your marketing objectives need to assist on delivering your overall business objectives
How will you measure them and how often?
What will you use to measure your objectives?
Google analytics
Email reporting
Sales data
ROI
ROAS
When will you review them and action that review of your marketing plan.
By measuring monthly you’ll know your plan is on track and delivering for you.
Keep your metrics easy to measure otherwise measuring won’t happen.
How will your marketing get you to meet your objectives?
Your marketing plan needs to be planned out for 12 months and have a budget to ensure that you can deliver on it. Work on key dates throughout the year and product launches or new services you have coming on board.
Keep your plan flexible too and just flesh out the detail on a quarterly basis.
A quick win to your marketing plan is to keep in touch with existing and previous customers as it is easier to market and sell to these as they are already your warm sales leads within your business. To keep in touch with your customers by emailing them regularly you don’t always have to be in sales mode.
You’ll also not miss out on key dates such as Black Friday and Christmas, Valentines Day etc..
It will also allow you to react to the current situation around Covid-19 and also with Brexit.
It keeps us in control as much as possible as we wait for each government announcement.
What to include in your plan
What products/service you’re selling? What’s in development
How much are you selling for have you reached a ceiling for them
Where are you selling?
How are you promoting them?
When I work on a clients marketing plan I always start at the beginning and work from there. Marketing takes your business on a journey.
Create your plan
Map out each quarter what products your launching, key dates that you can promote around Valentines, Easter, Black Friday, Christmas
Ask your customer what they want from you for NPD ideas
I then take a piece of paper and split this into quarters to plan out product launches throughout the year, key dates which I’ve mentioned like holiday periods, Mother’s Day, the budget anything that has an impact on your business that you can use to talk about your business and bring people into to buy.
I use a content planning diary to help me with this too. I use Janet Murray’s diary to plan out mine.
What events are you attending – this could be networking events to trade shows and conferences as these are all good topics to talk about your business around.
Then plan out each quarter in more detail expanding on campaigns you’ll run, content you’ll use on your website and social media. You’ll need to consider branding, graphics, video content around each campaign.
Also make sure you put a marketing budget behind this too.
This is where the fun in marketing comes in as you’ve worked out who your ideal client is, you have your plan and budget and now you can go out there and talk to customers about your products and services.
Marketing Tactics
Your marketing plan will include the tactics that the campaigns use to get in front of your customers:
Website, PPC, SEO so that you area easily found on search engines
Email marketing and funnels to keep in touch with current customers and prospects
Social media content to keep brand loyalty and conversations going with customers and also ask for the sale in your posts
PR is a great way to build your authority in your industry and promote stories about you and your business
Events – trade shows, festivals, speaking, networking to be in front of your customers and ideal clients more often
Content marketing – blogs, video, podcasts
Offline channels – leaflets, newspaper, radio, signage, packaging
Now sketch out which channels you’ll use. I tend to mind map this stage per campaign.
Now you have your plan it’s time to get your marketing delivered and your products in front of customer in 2021.
With this in mind once you have your objectives the next step is to develop your marketing strategy and plan in line with the business objectives that you are going to aim for.
As part of my planning I’m attending an annual content planning event #2021 Sorted on the 3rd and 4thNovember hosted by Janet Murray.
I’ve attended this even for the past 3 years and find that focusing on my business for two days gives me clarity on what I’m going to achieve in the year ahead.
You too could be joining me for this clarity. There’s still time to join the event today!
The programme is full of inspirational speakers who are doing content on their chosen platform which is increasing their audience and getting engagement.
There are workshop sessions so I’ll come away with my content planned and that of my clients ready to hit 2021 running.
As with all training/CPD I set myself my own objectives:
To be in the virtual room so email will be switched off and taking calls on breaks
To speak to at least 10 new people each day
Re-connect with existing contacts online
Try out new the content that’s suggested
Reflect on the event by writing another blog
Share with my clients new ideas for their content
Now all that’s left to do is to clear my desk and make sure the kettle is filled and I’ve bought lunch in.
You too can join the content planning event here.
And if you want to talk about your plans for 2021 arrange a call with me today.
Knowing who your target market is and being clear on what you offer will make the messaging and promoting on the right channels so much easier which is why I always start at the beginning with the planning.
You can then take advantage of many channels to get your message out there and maximise on sales in the final quarter of the year.
Some of the ways you can promote your business…
Finally, you’ve got this and the time to make this quarter work for you and your business is now.
Get your products and services right and nail down your marketing plan with monthly, weekly and daily actions to keep you accountable.
If you need more accountability book a marketing power hour and we can go through your plan and the action points you need to do to make your marketing plan deliver for your business.
In the past it would be tv, press, radio and direct mail as the key channels and today where would you be without a website for customers to visit.
Social media is a fast changing landscape and having this as part of your marketing mix is important. Please don’t just do this as the only channel though.
Your website is the ultimate place you want to drive people to, depending on your business this will be to sell direct or to generate leads for your services. Having a space that you own to direct your customer through so you are in control of your messages and branding.
Social media is a perfect place to have the conversation with your customers, build brand loyalty and is now starting to build sales for businesses. However you don’t own these platforms, so you need to be driving people to your website and building an email list to continue to sell to your customers everyday.
Ultimately all channels should tie back to what your business is trying to achieve this year and choosing the right channels to meet these objectives.
Social media channels will form part of the mix but the content on your website and email marketing will be in there too. Although with paid online ads. We need to be generating wow factors for our customers and receiving something through the post could be the perfect way to achieve this.
Where you promote your business is down to you and where your customers will find your business. Promoting your business will take into consideration your budget and inhouse skills too.
To find out more. about working with me on your marketing plan visit here.
Customers, content and communication, these three areas are key to your marketing day in day out. Making sure that your delivering for your customers and solving their problems will keep you in front of the right people.
I shared my 3 C’s earlier in the year on a webinar and wanted to write this up to share with you further.
⦁ Communication keep talking to your audience and ensure that this is two way
⦁ Engage in conversations both on your channels and in online communities
⦁ Keep in touch with your customers, let them know you are there
First, you’ll need to know who your customers are and what problems your business will solve for them. Look at
⦁ who they are
⦁ where they are
⦁ what their interests are
⦁ what are their pain points
Once you know these you’ll be able to build a picture of your ideal customer and know who to promote your business to.
As an example who is my ideal customer is and what my customer’s pain points are?
They are spending long hours working in their business.
⦁ The development of their business is suffering as they spend too long on the day to day operations.
⦁ They know that marketing is important to the growth of their business, but they don’t have any time to plan and implement marketing campaigns
⦁ They are spending time adhoc on social media and it’s not producing any results.
What problems do I solve?
⦁ I will solve their marketing problems for them by being able deliver a marketing strategy and plan for them.
⦁ I will implement their marketing for them so they are always in front of their customer and working in their business.
⦁ I will deliver results and more customers through marketing.
Get in touch to set up a quick call here.
Now think about what would your ideal customer look like? This will allow you to create the language style that you need to attract them.
Give your customer a name so you can visualize them as it makes it easier to pitch your content to a person.
Also ask your current customers about themselves, so you can find out more about who they are, how you’re helping them, what other problems do they have, and be sure to listen to them.
The English language is so powerful. The Oxford English Dictionary had ‘Climate Emergency’ as one of THE words of 2020, however I think ‘self-isolation’, ‘social distancing’ and ‘lockdown’ could beat this one today.
Is the language you’re using reflecting you, your brand and attracting the right customers to you. We call it tone of voice but ideally you want to be writing as you talk as this is how your customers want to hear from you.
Depending on your industry and target customers will also affect what language you use. If you’re a solicitor there may be an expectation to use one tone compared to if you’re running a bar or restaurant.
I’ve been asking recently the questions you’d like answered around developing marketing in your business? Is it planning? How to decide your priorities? What to say to customers? What channels to use to promote your business to customers? Time, you never have enough of it? Budget? It always falls to the bottom of your to do list.
And two key points kept coming up time and budget. So, I’ve created my top 5 ways to work on marketing your business when you are short on both. However, you do need to know who your ideal client is before you even start. This way you’ll know the tone of voice to use and where and when you should be marketing your business and developing the products and services to meet their needs.
Your next steps are to set aside a couple of hours to create your plan and then you’ll need time to create and schedule your content.
If you’re still short on time get in touch and we can discuss my introductory package
Managing marketing when you’re running a business can be a challenge, however there are a variety of tools out there to make this easier.
I’ve created a round up of my favourite tools that I use to promote my business and manage my client’s marketing. They are all really intuitive and make promoting and speaking to your customers easy and interactive.
It also helps when planning your content and re-purposing your content to be able to schedule and use a variety of channels through which to talk to your customers and keep the conversation going..
This app is perfect for your mobile devices and means you can easily interact with your Facebook pages. It holds all the business pages you manage in one place so that you can respond to notifications and messages on the go.
It’ll send you notifications so that’ll you’ll never miss a message or a comment again. I like that I can easily switch between the different pages I manage.
I love this website, as it’s super easy to create images for social media and your website and it has a free version too. It has pre-uploaded templates for creating your header images on Facebook and Twitter and you can upload your own logos and images as well as using their image libarary.
I’ve used Canva to create infographics and flyers for myself and for clients. It is really easy if you’re not design savvy but on a low budget as there are plenty of templates for you to choose from.
I’ve also created templates so that it is quick to create images that I’m using all the time, like blog images, quote cards and images for social media channels.
One tool that saves me a lot of time with scheduling to social media is Meet Edgar. I discovered this about 12 months ago. This tool allows me to create a posting schedule across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, I can re-purpose my content within Meet Edgar and it also makes suggestions for posts.
Using this tool means I can maximise on all the content that I’m creating for my business and ensure that it gets infront of more people in my audience.
Having MeetEdgar means that I’m always talking to customers and it’s easy to manage my client’s channels through too.
Check out the referral link and you’ll get a discount on your first month too.
ed.gr/9ghufu
Get a $10 monthly “bonus” when you sign up for Edgar through my affiliate link! Edgar is an easy-to-use social media scheduler that automatically recycles your best evergreen content, so you can say “goodbye” forever to social media babysitting!
Email marketing is key in any business and with Active Campaign, this is really easy to set up and start talking to customers. You can keep in touch, create sign up forms and email funnels to keep in touch with you customers.
I’m experimenting with different lead magnets at the moment for clients from how to’s, to recipes and discounts to find out which one is most effective in different industries. I’ll write another blog on this in the coming months!
Active Campaign has lots of great video tutorials and help blogs so you’ll not be stuck or there are plenty of VA’s out there specialising in Active Campaign who will take of this for you too.
This is the perfect platform for building a site your self and starting blogging. If you don’t fancy trying yourself a lot of website designers are now using this platform to build websites on. This is because it’s open source coding so can be amended and there are a lot of companies now building plugins for it and it is great for SEO and being found on Google.
Wordpress can be adapted and updated for your brand and linked into an ecommerce function too.
Just speak to a Wordpress website designer about the benefits and I can help put you in touch with one too.
There are so many tools out there now that the list is endless. Another couple that I use are:
allows you to share Instagram posts on your own feed
this is another social media scheduling tool
for adding subtitles to you videos
Let me know what tools you’re using to manage your marketing.
I love planning! I know that with planned, consistent marketing you can drive more customers to your business. Having a marketing plan ensures that you don’t miss launch dates within your business or key dates throughout the year that you can promote your product or services around. A plan means that you can budget and include this in your sales forecast for the year too.
But where do you start?
With a blank sheet of paper and your business objectives for the year ahead.
Your business is now ready for a marketing strategy and plan that will deliver your business objectives next year.
If you have any questions just drop me an email on jennifer@strathcomms.co.uk or call 07738 966588. Always happy to have an initial chat about marketing and go over any questions you have about the best way forward for your business.
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