Launching your own business can be exciting, eye-opening, and overwhelming, all at once. Of course, the process is also full of learning curves, from figuring out how to create a “new company on the market” buzz to structuring a blueprint for long-term success. Now, the latter includes a crucial step many new business owners might overlook on their way to the top.
What is it? A strong marketing foundation.
Just like everything else, a brand’s initial marketing plan sets the course for how successfully a brand takes off (and remains in the audience’s minds). Without it, even the most innovative products/services can go unnoticed.
So, how can new business owners craft effective marketing strategies during the brand’s initial days to foster continual growth? Keep reading to find out!
1. Outline a Strong Brand Identity
When we say “identity,” you’re likely to visualize boring-looking documents consisting of a business’s name and other logistics. However, brand identity actually consists of carefully selected color palettes, typographical combinations, and resonating imagery featured across various brand materials (logo, social media posts, flyers, newsletters – you get the gist). Essentially, your brand identity makes your business recognizable and emotionally relevant to the audience.
From the start, creating a brand identity that evokes specific reactions/appeals to certain senses ensures consistency by conditioning a response (emotional or aesthetic-driven). Even in the early stages of launching a brand, ensuring that you reflect your product/services through components like tone (bold, stated, etc.) alongside color and fonts helps curate a collection of thoughts and feelings around your brand, significantly helping increase and sustain brand visibility as time passes.
2. Know Your Audience
Marketing doesn’t just involve creating and uploading content – regardless of how engaging graphics are, they won’t ever be truly effective unless displayed to an aligned audience. This is where determining the right consumer base for a product or service becomes important. Brands that pursue long-term success know that researching and outlining a distinct consumer base early in their run will help shape how well the brand performs. How so? Simple: pinpointing audiences who relate to their product/service enables brands to personalize and tailor their content for maximum consumer resonance and impact.
In a way, finding the right audience for your brand is like finding the Rachel to your Ross. Just as Ross kept chasing one relationship after the other, only to be truly understood and acknowledged when he got with Rachel, finding the right audience allows a brand to feel valued, accepted, and cherished. And yes, Ross and Rachel didn’t exactly stay together, but there’s no doubt that they understood each other the most. Just like that, finding the right audience from the beginning enables businesses to focus on people who will recognize and appreciate the brand’s values, nurturing long-term brand loyalty and consumption.
3. Choose The Right Promotional Channels
You know how everyone says, “The more the merrier?” Well, this is not always the case. For new businesses that have just started putting a marketing strategy together, doing too much at once can actually be detrimental. For instance, brands might feel the need to establish a presence on every media platform, believing it will boost reach. However, brand owners should realize that effective marketing involves identifying channels that align with a brand’s message and capability. If you’re targeting younger audiences, for instance, it’s unlikely that you’ll receive much attention through emails; instead, Instagram or TikTok would likely work more in your favor. More so, the initial phase of launching a brand is key to setting audience expectations. If brand owners take on multiple platforms at once, they send a subliminal message that they can be active on each. Of course, as time passes, simultaneously juggling so many channels can cause burnout, leading to decreased interaction with consumers and inconsistency across platforms – both can quickly make audiences disinterested in the brand and stunt overall growth.
Beginning with two to three predominant marketing channels and curating a consistent, engaging presence is much more impactful than being on every platform at once. Starting slowly (yet steadily) can help businesses grow more sustainably by reducing information overload for both brands and audiences. It’s okay not to be everywhere at all times – too much exposure will only foster more disinterest in the long run, causing consumers to get tired of a brand quickly.
4. Keep It Simple
Priming a business for growth in its early stages means learning to walk before you run. While plans for large-scale collabs or promotional partnerships are good, implementing these early on can pile more work and pressure than necessary. Instead, spending your energy (and money) on basic things like crafting a content calendar, automation platforms, and planning emails can be more beneficial. How? It sets the foundation for consistency and organization, allowing new business owners to adopt a residual marketing routine. More so, opting for straightforward marketing strategies and components (like offering a lead magnet) can help track performance more easily. With fewer things in play, business owners can more carefully gauge post/campaign effectiveness and impact without feeling overwhelmed or overworked.
Don’t get us wrong – we love influencer and B2B collabs as much as any marketer, but brands should ideally work up to these. By starting small, it can be easier to tackle the quickly changing marketing landscape. More so, implementing small habits paves the way for marketing stability as essential components (like planning a content schedule) form an easy-to-accomplish pattern – this can then be easily expanded to feature bigger and more complex strategies.
Conclusion
Contrary to what many might think, brand growth doesn’t just begin after a business takes off – the seeds must be planted when the brand first starts. An undeniably crucial part is adopting foundational marketing strategies that can spotlight a business and allow it to scale up promotional activity as revenue increases. If you’re new to the entrepreneurship scene and would like some pointers on setting up your marketing to enable growth, this is the blog post for you!
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