A strong brand communicates who you are and the problems you solve, while marketing conveys your brand message and engages your target audience, helping you acquire new clients. Without a clearly defined and visible brand, you risk missing out on potential opportunities.
Branding is more important in today’s business world than ever before. If you don’t develop a clear and distinct brand, you may get lost in a sea of competitors. Branding will set you apart, help you communicate who you truly are, and can become the cornerstone of how you and your independent business communicate to customers.
So, take the time to build your brand and be authentic in how you communicate it. Then you’ll be well on your way to demonstrating your leadership and expertise in your field.
Here are five ways to build your brand successfully:
A brand is a customer experience represented by a collection of images and ideas; often, it refers to a symbol such as a name, logo, slogan, and design scheme. Brand recognition and other reactions are created by the accumulation of experiences with the specific product or service, both directly relating to its use, and through the influence of advertising, design, and media commentary. – American Marketing Association
Identifying your target audience will help you to focus your marketing and messaging efforts. Once you define your market, you can then determine where this group spends their time and how they prefer to communicate.
For example, knowing where your audience is represented on social media, what type of trade publications they read, and whether they are likely to attend industry conventions can help you create a more targeted message.
Narrow your scope
Before launching your marketing effort, it’s essential to clearly define your target market and ideal client to give your marketing plan focus. With a specific audience in mind, you will be able to effectively design a marketing plan to reach them. While it may seem counterintuitive, marketing to a smaller, clearly defined group often yields better results than casting a wide net. A mass marketing approach can be costly and highly inefficient for independents. Additionally, it’s much more fulfilling to work with clients who not only want what you have to offer but also provide an environment where you can do your best work.
Create your ideal client profile
Creating a profile of your ideal client can provide a foundation for your marketing efforts. Think of this profile as a roadmap to your ideal client that enables you to recognize financial and non-financial benefits. An ideal client profile will help you identify the clients you want to target and eliminate those who are not a match. This can be beneficial as it enables you to dedicate your time and resources to the highest-value clients.
Ideal clients will align not only with your service offerings but also with your business style and goals. A great way to start developing your ideal client profile is to look at your past or existing clients. Are there clients you enjoyed working with more than others? What qualities made these partnerships so successful? What common characteristics do these clients share?
As you work through this process, you may discover that your ideal clients have similar organizational structures, company sizes, or cultures.
10 questions to answer:
You may find that you have more than one ideal client. Many experts suggest giving your profiles a persona to help you be more detailed. For example, Nancy Nonprofit is a nonprofit CEO in her 40s, married with two teenage children. Nancy is afraid the economy will have a detrimental impact on her fundraising efforts. She strives to build sustainable communities that not only donate time and money but will also spread the word about her company.
Going beyond basic demographic information and getting down to your ideal client’s fears, motivations, wants, and needs will empower you to create a targeted marketing plan.
Define your target market
Once you’ve identified your target market, consider the following questions:
Taking the time to develop an ideal client profile will allow you to maximize your opportunities and minimize your risks.
A marketing plan gives you an opportunity to take a close look at your business as a whole and align your business and marketing objectives. It also helps you to efficiently allocate your resources and provides a method to measure progress and outcomes.
Before you start drafting your marketing plan, you first need a clear marketing strategy in place. Your marketing strategy should always align with your overall business goals, whether that’s growing revenue, expanding your service offerings, or entering a new geographic area. In summary, your strategy outlines what needs to be accomplished, and your marketing plan serves as the blueprint for how you will achieve those goals.
8 questions to help you create your marketing strategy
Your marketing strategy should be broken down into multiple levels: long-term, short-term, and immediate needs for your business. Try starting with your long-term goals and work backwards from there. Often, it’s more effective to first visualize the overall goal and then outline the steps to achieve it.
Creating a marketing budget
Plan a budget so that you know what you are spending and how that money will be allocated. One way to determine your budget is to look at your competitors and what they are spending. These competitors should be roughly the same size and offer the same product or services so that you can get an accurate analysis of what your company should be spending.
Many businesses allocate a percentage of their annual revenue to marketing. As a general rule, the Small Business Administration (SBA) advises that if your revenues are less than $5 million, then you should allocate 7% to 8% of your revenues to marketing. This assumes that after you have covered all your business expenses, including marketing, your profit margins are in the range of 10% to 12%.
Tools for measuring results
Once you’ve established your budget for marketing, you want to allocate it appropriately and track your return on investment (ROI). This process involves prioritizing your marketing efforts and spending on strategies where you will get the highest return.
To ensure that your budget is being used correctly, set benchmarks to measure your success. How you quantify your marketing goals will largely depend on what you choose to measure. For example, if your goal is to drive more traffic to your website, you can use Google Analytics to measure progress and outcomes. If your goal is to increase sales by 30%, you will want to measure that number so you can track your progress.
Your marketing plan should include measurable goals and a system for tracking progress. The following are a few tools can help you measure the effectiveness of your campaigns:
1. Manage a database
Collect information from a database to help track and measure campaigns. For example, if you use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, you can track leads against a specific campaign (online or offline), sign-ups, and sales. You can also subscribe to databases specific to the kinds of campaigns you are running. If PR is a large part of your marketing mix, a media database will allow you to monitor media mentions and pick-ups of press releases. Meanwhile, social media databases can help you measure your social media marketing.
2. Use campaign-specific tools
Today, big data is accessible to businesses of any size. If you run an ad on a social platform, you can measure the effectiveness of your message, image, and targeting using the tools the platform provides or a third party yet cost-effective analytics program like Google Analytics.
3. Ask customers
Don’t be afraid to ask prospective customers how they found you. This should be a routine part of your business and can help you fine-tune your marketing efforts. For instance, a customer may call you after opting in to your online sign-up form, but they may have first learned of you from a word-of-mouth referral.
Depending on your objective, you can measure the ROI of your marketing investment using one of three methods:
Once you decide which result you want to measure and you have the costs incurred for your campaign, calculating these methods is fairly simple.
Your marketing strategy should always align with your overall business goals, whether that’s growing revenue, expanding your service offerings, or entering a new geographic area.
At this point, you’ve done much of the research and planning that will help you complete your marketing plan. It doesn’t need to be lengthy; it should be a practical tool that you can use, review, and refine to stay on track toward achieving your goals. Use the following outline to help you draft your plan.
MARKETING PLAN OUTLINE
The following are a few tools that you can use to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns:
There are many ways to market your business today, including:
Your target market is the best way to determine how you will spend your marketing dollars along with the marketing channels you’ll use. The key is to consider who you are trying to reach and what media they are most likely to use.
For example, if your target audience reads print trade journals, consider pitching articles to target publications. This is a lower cost option than advertising and a much more effective way to demonstrate your business expertise. If your audience is active on Facebook, create a page for your business and utilize ads to grow your audience.
Here are nine simple ways to market your business. Each of these methods has their own benefits, so consider using several or all of them.
In all your marketing efforts, remember that marketing is about building relationships, not just closing a deal. Encourage your prospective clients to make a small commitment, such as opting in to your mailing list or liking your Facebook page. This will enable you to build the relationship and lead them to the next step—perhaps a phone consultation or product demo. The key is to build trust as you guide them towards your company to solve their problem.
The SWOT Analysis framework is used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of a venture or project.
STRENGTHS: Characteristics of the business or project team that give it an advantage over others
WEAKNESSES (or Limitations): Characteristics that place the team at a disadvantage relative to others.
OPPORTUNITIES: External chances to improve performance (e.g. make greater profits) in the environment.
THREATS: External elements in the environment that could cause trouble for the business or project.
A SWOT analysis is a versatile tool that can be used to evaluate many things, including: