Getting your company out there is probably the most common problem faced by startups and small businesses. Even after years of working in the market, I continue to ask myself that question and look for smart options.
Getting people to know your company is a cyclical process. This consists of the steps of analyzing the market, setting marketing objectives, planning and defining the marketing mix, implementing initiatives, and monitoring success.
The success of an initiative depends above all on the ability to learn from results and design marketing tools.
Therefore, you don’t need to be an expert to be successful. We need to continually improve. In the next article, we will discuss what to watch out for and what to avoid in this marketing process.
Marketing vs Sales
The main difference between marketing and sales is how you approach your customers. Marketing targets many (mostly unknown) potential customers. Meanwhile, the salesperson contacts her one known prospect directly.
Of course, there are deeper definitions and distinctions, but for this article, it’s the important distinction we need.
In that sense, I’m just talking about “promoting the company” from a marketing perspective. Of course, the goal is ultimately to sell to private customers. But this is purely about the marketing part.
Imagine selling a product or service as a chain of several process steps. First comes “become known,” then “qualify the lead,” and finally “sell.” All are independent stages based on the marketing funnel.
First principle: “Success depends on time and money”
This brings us to the first fundamental principle of successful marketing. It can also be seen as the basic rule of all success.
There is an internal connection between speed, cost, and success.
This relationship looks like this:
You must choose two properties and live with the third property.
So you can choose between:
- If you want to be successful quickly, you have to be prepared for high costs.
- Even if it is successful and cheap, it will take a very long time.or
- Fast and cheap alone will not bring lasting success.
Now you can believe what you want. These do not change the fact that there are three choices and their consequences. 🤓😩 Therefore, we can say:
Purpose: “Get to know the company”
Essentially, it is always an operational problem to “make it more widely known.” Because it’s something you have to do every day. Therefore, the best way to measure it is with goals and metrics that meet the SMART rules.
The two most well-known and common purposes for this section are:
- Increase brand awareness by the “desired percentage” by the “desired date”
- Generate “desired number” of sales leads by “desired date”.
My personal favorite is the second goal. Because the first goal “can’t buy anything” is to capture the entire marketing idea and follow it through to the end. Then the world of sales begins.
After all, you need to pay attention to both. In my experience so far, many people (unfortunately myself included) get so focused on “raising awareness” that they forget that they need to sell.
In most cases, the initial expectation of increased sales is then translated into “successful branding.”
Indicators to measure
Regardless of the channel or medium, there are two important key people in marketing.
Reach is the total number of people you reached during your campaign. For example, for local Facebook ads, your reach could be 30,000. More precisely, this means that “at least he reached 30,000 people with one ad.”
Frequency measures the (average) number of ads shown to users. Therefore, if the same Facebook ad has a frequency of 2, it means that the target group saw the ad twice on average.
The problem is that these two important indicators are interrelated, namely through the budget.
Usually you can’t increase both. Otherwise, you will go over budget.
Quick tip: If you want to evaluate your campaigns more accurately, you can compare them by dividing frequency by reach. Most likely they will be very small numbers. However, the campaigns with the highest value are most likely to be successful.
Other characteristic indicators are often determined, and of course they have their validity. In the field of social media,
etc. (😁 See what I did there?). These can help you develop a sense of whether your target group is moving through the funnel from initial contact to interest. However, there is no rule or law of nature that says likes on the platform will lead to purchases.
First principle: “Frequency determines sales”
Most marketers who are new to marketing (and believe me, I know this from personal experience) follow the logic: “The higher your reach, the greater your chances of success in sales.” Masu.
That’s not how it works!
As a basic rule, it can be stated as follows:
Now, if you are self-employed with 0-3 employees and an annual turnover of less than 500,000 euros, there is no need to ignore the idea of raising awareness, unless (in my opinion) money is tight.
Therefore, your focus and budget should be on communication frequency. Otherwise, even if you become super famous, your budget will run out before you can even think about selling it.
You can find a great article (not written by me) on this very idea at Branding Strategy Insider.
Tools to promote your company
One last thought about the tools you need to be successful.
Now, you can write it like this:
“In the online realm, blogging/SEO, social media are available. There is also traditional print media, flyers, posters, sponsorships…”
But what I see as a real tool and kind of universal is something like this:
list of ideas
Create a list of ideas for things you’d like to try or that would convey meaning and value to your target audience. Take ideas regularly and use them to your advantage.
I spend a few hours once a month coming up with new ideas for a topic. He then picks one of these up a week and creates content that way.
marketing process
Build your own marketing process. In my experience, that should be your top priority.
The big advantage of such a process is that it leads to sales in a repeatable and predictable way.
I explained the idea in detail. In my article “Acquiring new customers – you don’t need tips, you need a system”, I will explain how to set up such a system.
experiment
The final tool is a small experiment list. Don’t just read online what someone else believes or doesn’t believe will work in marketing. Try it!
Have you ever tried handing out 5,000 flyers and see if anything happens? I’ve tried this many times. My first trade was not successful at all. The second project actually led to solid sales.
The same goes for all social media platforms, websites, advertising in all media, and anything else.
Don’t do everything at once. I do experiments once a year, sometimes every six months.
These are my thoughts on “how to promote your company”. There is one small special case that I would like to mention here. It’s, “What do you do if your customers don’t come?” Below the link are my thoughts on this very specific case. Here we detail the experiments I mentioned earlier and 15 areas where they can be implemented.