A Startup Guide to Basic Marketing

Marketing, in this one word contains so much hope and so much confusion. For some it’s the silver bullet that will catapult their business from the everyday to the out-of-this-world, while for others it’s a tangled mess of jargon and confusing concepts.

When you’re starting out on your own, you’ll no doubt hear time and time again how important it is to get the right marketing strategy. But what do you do when your budget is too tight to engage a consultant and you’re not sure where to start?

In this blog, we talk you through a basic marketing concept to help you take the first steps towards the path of great marketing.

Who Are You?

First though, in order to identify what it is you want to achieve through any marketing activities, you’re going to need to decide who you are as a company. More importantly, you’re going to need to decide who your customer is.

Do this by sitting down and creating an avatar of the type of person you believe buys your products or services. Base this on your own anecdotal evidence or any analytics you’ve got from your website or IT support from ClearFuze Networks.

Who is your customer? Figure out their gender, age, profession, interests and so on until you’ve built a clear and rounded out picture. As part of that process you might also be able to work out which social media platforms they prefer as well.

Social Media Marketing

This takes us to social media marketing. While there are plenty of complex algorithms you could delve into and techniques that a marketing professional might look at, for the small business owner some regular, well planned activities are a great start.

But don’t make the mistake of targeting your activities across the full spectrum of social media. Instead think carefully about where it is that your customers spend the majority of their time. Your die-hard Instagrammers won’t set foot near Facebook, so spending time and possibly money creating a Facebook presence is a huge waste of your precious resources.

Instead look at the platforms where your customers live and start building a profile for yourself, slowly and steadily with regular posting and engagement. Think about taking out some paid advertising and focus your efforts wisely.

When you’re trying your best to find your place in the world of startups then anything you can do to help yourself is going to go a long way. The best thing you can do is to start with the basics of social media marketing and build on the foundations. Find out who your ideal customer is and figure out how to engage with them on social media. Follow your competitors and see how they do it and mimic their process.

Over time, you may well be able to bring in your marketing experts to help you but right now it’s just you, working to the best of your abilities to connect with your customer base.