Marketing your Business as an Entrepreneur

Listen in! Pick up some expert advice to a reader's question that we selected from CyberSchmooz.

According to popular platform HubSpot, one of the main top marketing challenges for companies is marketing their business the right way. When you find the right product or service to market, that’s just half of the task. The other half consists of finding the right audience and telling that audience about it. Before technology and the internet came around, businesses did it the traditional way, by hiring a PR agency or advertising agency. But this has changed.

There are various new marketing practices you can now use to promote your business and take it from some of the world’s leading businessmen, for example, the entrepreneur Tej Kohli whose team has harnessed the power of various marketing opportunities to let the world know about his many ventures, resulting in him being a successful businessman.

The following steps will help you to understand what to do and how to do it if you are looking to promote your business as an entrepreneur.

First Things First – Background Research

Research is one of the best ways to get onto the right footing when you have a service or product to promote as a start-up or small business. Market research should play an integral part in your strategy and this will involve collecting the right information that will give you insight into what your customers are thinking as well as what they are looking for.

Look for aspects such as their location, their buying patterns, and where they are shopping (online or in stores) and create a sales forecast. Don’t forget to keep an eye on your competitors as well.

Once you have the right information you can build a profile and segment the information into 4 categories:

Lifestyle –personality, social class, personal values
Demographics – education level, occupation age, gender, income
Geography – location
Behaviour - attitude, loyalty, usage rates, readiness to buy

Set Your Budget and Goals

As a general rule of thumb in marketing your business, you should spend at least 5% of your expected or actual turnover on marketing practices. For new businesses, you may need to spend more initially when building your profile.

To help you with your goals, the best way is to define what you want to achieve. Your goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based. This, plus your budget should be allocated towards a few things:

employing staff to undertake marketing activities.
search engine optimization strategy
donations and sponsorships
design of branding
website development and maintenance
printing of promotional material (business cards, brochures, signage, etc)
advertising

Create Valuable Content

Potential and existing customers like a bit of good and easy-to-read content, and so by the way does Google. You can share information through various means, for example by creating videos, blog posts, social media posts, adding infographics to your pages, adding authority sites to your articles, using specific keywords by using good SEO (search engine optimization) practices, and more.

You can get free traffic to your website, and you don’t even need to produce the content yourself. There are many options; for example, hire a freelancer or a personal assistant who can do this for you so you free up time which otherwise may slow you down. Repurposing old content is also a beneficial practice.

With the above ways to start off marketing your business as an entrepreneur, you should be on the way to promoting your company in no time.

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