Marketing is crucial for small business start-ups. How will people buy a product or service if they don’t even know about it? However, many eager entrepreneurs embark on a marketing campaign that is expensive and ineffective because it’s not built on a sound strategy. Here are some questions every business start-up should answer while creating a campaign.
Do you know your customer?
Don’t assume that your customer is exactly like you. For example, if you’re a young mom who wants to sell baby toys, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that every mother out there likes the same designs or colors. Do a survey, check other websites, look at what’s being sold in stores, look at color trends. Even if you want to do niche marketing, you still need to know your niche. The smaller a segment is, the more important it is to completely understand their habits and preferences.
Can the product fulfill any claims you have made in your campaign?
So you have a catchy slogan, a flashy website, and a warehouse full of products waiting to be sold to your eager customers. But unless your product can fulfill its claims, your marketing campaign will backfire. Test your product for quality and make sure it meets standards. Remember that word-of-mouth outweighs any marketing gimmick that you can conjure.
Are you spreading yourself too thin?
It’s far more effective to focus your marketing campaign at a particular segment and making maximum impact, than trying to win over the whole world. Many big brands will identify a ‘primary market’ and a ‘secondary market.’ For example, a lipstick can technically be used by any woman, but notice how makeup brands will target their ads to a particular age bracket. Cover Girl, for example, sells itself to teenagers and women in their early twenties. A lot of 40 years olds will buy it because they like the color or formula, but by knowing their primary market the brand knows what shows to advertise in, the types of models they will get, and the colors they will focus on.
You can also check the mistakes that most people make when they do content marketing
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