If you’re a brand new business looking for the first steps you need to take to market your business, you’ve found the right post.
Today, we’re going to share 3 steps you can take today to get your business off the ground with marketing that’ll actually make a difference.
3 Steps To Take When Marketing A New Business
Even if you don’t plan on social media being your main marketing strategy, you need to set up business accounts to at least have a presence there.
People scope out businesses on social media before purchasing, especially if it’s a newer business they’ve never heard of before.
55% of consumers learn about new brands on social because consumers want to ensure 3 things:
a. Consumers want to know that you’re a real company and not a scam.
If they’re going to enter their payment information on your website, they need to feel confident about it and know you’re a real business.
b. They want to know if other people love and use your product or service.
They want to see social proof and feel validated in their desire to purchase what you’re selling.
c. Consumers have a question.
One of the biggest perks of social media to consumers is their ability to have direct access to a company.
This is where engagement becomes more than a vanity number.
Comments and DMs become important in encouraging a follower down the sales funnel to a customer.
78% of consumers are willing to buy from a company after having a positive experience with them on social.
So you want to make sure your presence on social media is active and current, but you don’t want to stretch yourself thin across every social media platform there is.
You’ll want to research the platforms to see which one your target audience spends most of their time on, pick 1 or 2, and invest your efforts there to start.
If you need help in that research and deciding which social media platforms make sense for your business, check out this post next.
Once you’ve selected the right social media platforms and created accounts there, you’ll want to get started with an organic social media content strategy.
We say this because it’s free, it’s user-friendly and can be as minimal or as labor-intensive of an effort as you can handle.
If you want an easy 5-step social media marketing strategy to base yours around, here’s a post walking you through one.
Because of the statistics we looked at earlier, even if social media is not your main bread and butter when it comes to marketing-
-it’s important to at least be available to your consumers on the platforms they spend the most time on.
This will make your brand more modern and accessible and therefore, trustworthy.
And if you’ve read our posts for any amount of time, you know that trust is the key to what? Sales.
Step #2: Determine your advertising budget
Organic content like posting on social media is free and great, but you don’t get as much reach as you do when you pay a platform to promote your content.
So you’ll need to determine how much you can dedicate to ad spend.
And if you need help calculating your marketing budget, this post will show you how to do that.
From there, you’ll need to determine which channel you want to advertise on: social media or Google.
If the nature of your product or service is one where people Google it when they need it, you need to be on Google.
If it’s something that people don’t really search for or look up on Google or maybe it’s not a necessity, then social media ads are probably the better route.
On Google, ads are shown to people based on the keywords they’re searching.
You enter the words you want your ads to appear for when someone types it in the Google search bar.
On social media, ads are shown to people based on the target audience you select that you want the ad shown to.
So think about the nature of your offerings and which route would make more sense for you.
The last thing we want to mention in this step before we move on is influencer marketing for businesses.
You can spend your ad budget on influencers as an alternative to ad platforms like Google or Facebook ads.
Influencers, who are social media personalities with followers who explicitly trust their purchase recommendations-
-will promote your product to their thousands and thousands of followers in exchange for compensation.
Choose an influencer that’s affordable and has a follower base that aligns with your target demographic, but it can be a very fruitful partnership when done right.
So you’ve got a social media presence set up, and you’re starting to drive some traffic to your website via
- Google ads,
- Facebook ads,
- influencers, or
- a combination of the three.
Step #3: Set up retargeting
Around 97% of visitors that leave never return to a website. This means you’re losing out on 97% of your website traffic UNLESS you retarget them.
Retargeting, also sometimes called remarketing, just means that you’re putting content or ads in front of people who have already heard of your business before.
They’ve had a touch point with your brand in some way-
-be it website traffic, social media video views like Reels views or TikTok views, social media engagement, or add-to carts.
It can also include conversions and people who’ve bought from you before if the nature of your business warrants repeat buyers.
The point is you don’t want to spend all this time and effort marketing your brand, only to lose out on 97% of traffic at the bottom of the funnel.
Capitalize on your efforts and retarget them with social media or Google ads.
Now this means whatever budget you set aside in step 2, you’ll want to cut out about 10% of it to allocate towards retargeting ads, but we promise it’ll be worth it.
So those are the steps in marketing a new business.
If you need help with any of the marketing strategies mentioned above, work with our reliable digital marketing agency can help you.
Get in touch with our team today to get started.
