What do I need to do before I start marketing my business?

Wondering where on earth to start marketing your business? Before you start driving traffic to your website and investing serious time and money into marketing your business, these are a few things you need to have in place.

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What to do before you start marketing your business

Before you start marketing your business, there are a few little bits and pieces you need to have in place. It might sound a bit boring, but it’s totally necessary and it’ll save you a lot of work later on.

1. Good branding

The first thing you need to have in place before you start marketing your business is good branding. Before you go ahead and say “yep, I've already got a logo,” I want you to just hear me out here. Branding runs a lot deeper than just a logo. It's about your brand values and your brand personality.

How do you want people to feel when they come into contact with your brand? How do you talk to people? How do you interact with them? How does your brand look? How does it feel? What's your story? What's your unique selling point? What is your message?

There are so many different things that make up your branding – your logo is such a small part of it. Branding essentially sells your product or your service for you. It tugs on your customers' heartstrings, toys with their emotions, it builds loyalists and it builds brand advocates (these are people who resonate with your brand so much that they will go out there and promote your brand for you, without even having to ask for it).

Your brand values and your brand story should guide all of the decisions that you make in business. So, if you're ever at a point where you've got to make a tricky decision and you don't know what to do, reflect back on what your values are and think about how your decision would align with these values.

Your branding should be consistent across every single touchpoint. So, that means it needs to look the same across your website, your Instagram feed, your social media platforms – everything should look consistent, but it should also sound consistent. If you're talking to your customers on your website in a very cheeky, like, “hey babe” kind of voice, you shouldn’t then be on Instagram talking to them in a formal tone of voice.

You want it to be the same tone of voice and same feel across all your different platforms. Otherwise, people are going to see different touch points and they're going to be confused. They're going to think “Where am I? Have I just got lost somewhere on the Internet? Is this a completely different business?”

Branding is something that is 100 percent worth investing in and I'm not biased because we don't even offer branding as a service!

2. Your website

Unless you're running a physical bricks-and-mortar store, your website is going to be crucial. Even if you are running a physical store, it's probably pretty important. You can send all the traffic in the world to your website, but if it's not easy to navigate and if it's not designed with the user in mind, nobody's going to buy, sign up or enquire.

This is particularly important for e-commerce businesses because people will very easily change their minds about buying if there's just the smallest amount of friction. It could even be something as small as you not having PayPal checkout enabled, so they have to actually get off the couch, go and find their purse, get their credit card and enter their credit card details. That might be too much friction for them. They'll say “I'm going to buy later” and then they end up forgetting about it and never buying.

Just remember it's very important how your checkout flow and your website flow is, so cut the clutter. Keep it simple. Think about how people would navigate your site too. Make sure that you install Google Analytics and HotJar, and watch where people are exiting.

Analytics will tell you which pages people are interacting with and which pages they're exiting on and HotJar has a free trial, I believe, with a tool called Heatmaps. This lets you see what parts of each page are being interacted with the most, where people are clicking, how much time they're spending on certain things. There's also a recording tool where you can actually watch individual customers sessions on your page. It's kind of creepy but it's really useful and you can see if a lot of people are exiting at the same point. Maybe there's something that's broken that you don't know about.

You also want to ask people for honest feedback. Is there anything on your website that they didn't understand? Were there any points in the checkout flow that they didn't know where to go next? Things that you probably have overlooked because you're so close to your business and, in your mind, you know the answer, so you assume everyone else knows. But it might not be as obvious as you think.

Invest in a copywriter for product descriptions. This is super important because you don't want to be just describing your product as the features. So, a feature might be: “This pencil is red so red is a feature”. “It's made out of a graphite led” – that's another feature.

But, a benefit of the pencil is “it can bring your artwork to life”. If you see what I mean? So, the benefits are a bit more emotional and often, when we're close to our business, we don't take that extra step to understand what the benefits of our product are. We just know the features so well.

3. Know your audience

“But, Steph, I know who my target audience is – females aged 18 to 55, living in Australia”. No. Sorry, that's just not detailed enough. You need to dive deeper into who your ideal customer is.

Forget about trying to be everything to everyone. Yeah, in theory, it might sound like you want to sell to as many people as possible, but, if you try to be everything to everyone, you'll end up being nothing special to nobody. Tough love, but it's true. So, yes, you might sell your products to a range of people aged between 18 and 55, but maybe you'll find that the 55-year-olds spend more money with you and leave good reviews. In which case, they're more likely to be your ideal customer and you want to focus on getting more people like them.

By focusing on one ideal customer, you're not actually excluding everyone else – you're just giving your content and your marketing focus. You're getting really streamlined on who you're writing for, who you're posting your blog posts for, what you're recording. Everything you do, do it with that person in mind. 

Think about what problems they have that you could solve and even just get out there and ask them what their problems are. It's such a novel idea – talking to our target audience. But, none of us really do it. So, get out there and ask them what their struggles are. If you've got an email list, email them and ask them.

Or, if you know a few of them in your actual personal life, reach out to them. Go grab a coffee and talk to them and pay attention to what words they use, because those are the words that you can use when you’re writing product descriptions or service pages.

Knowing their problems will help you think of ways that you can provide value to them and start to build that connection and that trust.

4. Know your product or service

You really need to know what you're selling, inside out. Back to front.

You need to know exactly why someone would buy from you vs. why they would buy from a competitor.

Again, you need to think in terms of benefits rather than features. So, for example, are you selling framed family photos or are you selling memories? Are you selling a black dress or are you selling that feeling of confidence when you walk into the room looking gorgeous? There's so much clutter out there that if you don't know what makes your product or service better than everyone else’s, your potential customers are just going to buy from a competitor who does.

5. Know your vision and your strategy

Stick these on your desk where you can see them and then, every time you're making a decision in business, think about whether it's bringing you closer to your vision or taking further away.

A solid marketing strategy for your business will ensure you're on the front foot and make sure that you're consistently showing up for your audience, speaking their language, and that everything you're doing is playing a part in guiding you towards your long-term vision.

6. Self-belief

The internet is a nasty place – it's full of people just waiting to bring you down to their level. So, you need to have an unwavering self-belief. Easier said than done, right? We all feel like impostors from time to time. It's pretty much impossible to get rid of that imposter syndrome. It never goes away – the playing field just gets bigger and the stakes get higher.

You're going to face challenges and you will overcome them. You just need to know that you'll find a way. As you get used to it, your confidence will grow and, you know, the things that you're scared of now, in six months time you're going to look back and think “okay, why was I scared of that?”

Just fake it until you make it. Don't wait until you're ready because, honestly, you will never be ready, and you'll get a lot more growth happening if you just try things and don't be afraid to get out of that comfort zone.