1 April 2024 by Angela Knox
Growing a business is challenging, make no mistake.
It's not for the faint-hearted, but the rewards can be exceptional.
Marketing, as I am always advising my clients, is as essential to business growth as photosynthesis is to plants.
Having your business idea is only the first step. You have to promote it - consistently - to your chosen audience.
Sounds simple, but you'd be amazed how many businesses I come across who think that their prospective customers learn about their products and services via osmosis.
'If we build it they will come' said the misguided business owner.
Even if you're an established business in a sector with hardly any competition, you still need to promote yourself otherwise your customer base will not be aware of what you are selling.
And if you're in a competitive space, you need to plan, plan, and plan - then execute. And keep planning and executing as you learn.
The challenge of the UVP
It can be an easy trap to fall into when you run a business, to think that everyone outside of your office knows exactly what you do.
But as a business owner, you need to think of your Unique Value Proposition you provide to your customers and clients.
What value are you offering them?
How are you helping to solve their problems?
Does your website explain how you are addressing pain points, or does it just list product features?
This is something that takes time and some finesse to get right. You have to almost think in reverse.
So if you start with what your product or service does, you then have to think about how that helps your target audience and how you can explain that in the fewest words possible.
Once you have that worked out, keep editing.
Then edit some more, until you end up with very short sentences that a small child can understand.
Communication and messaging are key to your success. They are the most influential factors in explaining to your prospects how your products and services are going to help them and provide value.
Having a growth mindset
This is another big one.
Unless you really want to grow your business and have worked out a realistic strategy to do so, it will be difficult - left to chance you will most likely fail.
Growing a business is not easy, and you have to be deliberate with your actions, otherwise you will go off track.
Aligning your marketing strategy with your business strategy is another essential step, as that way you will be able to start out with a plan that follows through into everything you do, and your marketing activity will seamlessly integrate with your business plan.
Having a growth mindset from the outset, while you are constructing your business plan and the marketing actions that come from this, will dictate your objectives and how you are going to meet them.
It will also provide you with business targets, sales targets, marketing budgets, and the operational considerations you need to plan for in order to achieve the growth levels you have predicted.
Aligning your cash needs and planning your cashflow and P & L will also be part of this process, as this enables you to make sure you can manage the cash requirements of the business in order to meet your growth objectives.
The bottomless pit that is marketing
When it comes to deciding how you are going to split up your marketing budget that you have allocated in the above process, plan wisely, execute efficiently, and analyse like an accountant.
Everything in your marketing plan has an ROI (return on investment), and sometimes this is based on multiple factors.
Consumers respond to brands more, the more marketing channels are utilised. So if, for example, you run a PR campaign alongside e-mail marketing (as long as it is targeted, segmented and positioned correctly) you are going to achieve better levels of awareness and response than if you run single-channel campaigns.
But each channel has its own attributes and characteristics, and the ones you choose to use will vary depending on whether you are a B2C, B2B, B2B2C, D2C, or SaaS business.
Then there is media planning - if you are running ads in digital and/or physical publications. Best to use a specialist media planner/buyer, as they can advise you on value for money, reach, and relevance to your target audience and marketing objectives in a way that is virtually impossible to do on your own.
Whatever combination of methods, channels and messaging you ultimately choose, make sure that you review and refine regularly, and that you know exactly what is and isn't working the best.
Then make adjustments and keep monitoring, so your results are linked to your business expansion and brand amplification.
If you need help with any of this, I am here to help so get in touch via the website. I will review your marketing, make sure it never stops being impactful, and help your business to grow.