Let’s talk about marketing. This is something that we’re all intimately familiar with, as it talks to us daily almost everywhere we go. You’ll need to start your mission by thinking long and hard about your market. Is it local, national, or international? Is it Internet only? You’ll also need to do your best to focus on three essential parts of marketing
1. Branding – How do you want your brand to be seen? Are you down home or sophisticated and classy? Be sure that your marketing material stays true to your brand at all times. This is beyond important.
2. Viral – can you creatively market your idea in a fun, or interesting way? Can you get people to spread word of mouth for you? Think of creative ways to get people to think about or ask about your idea, and they’ll do your marketing for you.
3. SEO – for those of you who don’t know, this stands for Search Engine Optimization. A largely dead art, there are still some ways to make inroads into appearing at the top of search results lists on Google and Yahoo. The best way to make sure that you are at the top is to be a trusted and valuable source of information. If you fill your site with great content and information, people will naturally spend more time on your site, link to it more often, and click on it when your results show up in their search results. This option takes hard work, but will eventually pay off, especially in a niche market. The other things you should consider are deciding on some keywords that you’d like to be popular on, and including those keywords often in your writing, making sure that you have meta-tags configured, and making sure that your site is handicapped accessible. These are only some basic ideas, and everyone does them, but it will help to ensure that you’re at least on the same level as everyone else. The MOST important thing for SEO is great content that is relevant to your market and your desired keywords. For more information on SEO, check out the help pages on major search engines that will tell you how you can put your best foot forward on their rankings.Â
Once you’ve got your marketing plan working for you, you need to make sure that you track everything. Web stats are easy through packages like Google Analytics, but many firms will offer tracking for any kind of marketing campaign. If you’re tracking, you obviously should analyze the results and most importantly make adjustments based on those results!
There is a lot to learn about marketing, but if you follow the principles above, you won’t make any early mistakes!
Check us out next time when we talk about structuring your accounting and paperwork workflows!
