A simple plan to get you started with online marketing

Are you curious about how to start online marketing successfully?

In this blog, Geoff Sutton gives you tips & tricks to help you start your marketing tomorrow and begin recruiting new customers.

Why Online Marketing?

As an entrepreneur you want to grow your business. You can do this by bringing in new customers or by increasing your turnover with existing customers.

The problem is that generating enough business purely through your own network is tough as it is likely to be too small.

You will have to reach the people outside your own networks. That means you have to begin marketing.

But where do you start?

By making a plan, of course, but one whose essence fits on the back of a beer mat.

In this blog, I will tell you exactly which steps you should and shouldn’t take to successfully get started.

B2B marketing, where is it going wrong?

Before I tell you where to start, let’s take a look at where not to start.

Many entrepreneurs find marketing is complicated, so go and do something on gut feeling. They get started with SEO or randomly optimising their website.

Don’t do that! You don’t know at all whether that will really help you and it’s usually wasted energy.

Start with a simple marketing plan

My advice is to not make it too difficult for yourself.

Start with a simple plan of one, at most two, A4 pages. And quantify that plan.

Record three things: what is your revenue target, how is that target divided between existing and new customers and what does your funnel look like?

By quantifying I do not mean you should state a growth percentage. Twenty per cent growth may seem like a quantified goal, but based on a percentage alone, nobody in your organisation knows what is expected of them.

You need to crystallise your plan. It starts with a monetary target. How much money do you want to realise in the next three years and what is the difference to where you are now?

Then record how you are going to fill that gap between now and then: what is, per product category, the share of cross-selling with existing customers and what is the share of new customers?

You calculate this based on your average order value. If you don’t know that because the order values differ too much, then take the average order value of your last three customers. Then you are usually heading in the right direction.

If you are curious about a detailed marketing plan to ensure that your company grows in seven steps, download this white paper now in which we tell you all the ins and outs.

Think in cups of coffee

Then work back. If you know what turnover you want to realise and how it is structured, you also know how many customers you need to achieve that.

For that X number of customers, Y number of cups of coffee must be drunk, so that you can make Z number of offers.

And if you know that, you also know how many marketing-qualified leads you need.

Now it really becomes clearer, because by quantifying your goals in this way, you know at the end of each month whether you have had enough cups of coffee and what to do if you are not on schedule.

Get on the radar with your customers

Good. You have a quantified goal and you know how many cups of coffee you need to drink to reach your goal.

Now you just need to get your potential customers to your website. First, describe who you are targeting. Who is your ideal customer, what does your buyer persona look like?

If you know that, you will create content that hits the spot. Content that is not about you, but content that your buyer persona recognises, with which you touch him or her.

To ensure that you actually reach your target group with that content, it is important to find your target group. Whether through LinkedIn, Facebook or TikTok, publish content where their attention is.

Not the entire content, of course, but teasers and triggers that invite them to click so they land on your website, where you want them.

Optimise your online marketing

Now that you know how to attract the right people to your website, it’s time to start measuring and optimising.

Check every month whether the conversions as you envisioned them actually hold up. If they don’t, take action.

For example, make sure that your content is more in line with your target group or check whether your calls-to-action are sufficiently visible and in strategic places.

7 tips for new customers and more sales through online marketing

Finally, I would like to give you some concrete tips.

1. Start communicating. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Yes, you are proud of your company and yes, you can always do better, we know that better than anyone. But your success stands or falls with visibility. Get started.
2. Choose your target audience and share knowledge that shows you are solving their challenges.
3. Then create content that your target audience wants to read and not what you want to read. So not inside-out but outside-in.
4. Be realistic. It doesn’t matter if you decide to post once a month or twice a week, just pick a rhythm that’s feasible for you. Your content is probably going to be done on top of the day job, so be realistic.
5. Hang in there. We see that many entrepreneurs stop blogging after two months. They haven’t achieved as much as they would like to achieve, so ‘it doesn’t work’. Marketing is a slow KPI. To really become visible and to be seen as an authority in your industry, it takes a lot of patience.
6. Don’t forget to connect with your target audience on social media. Social selling doesn’t happen by itself. You have to connect with people and start the conversation.
7. Start the conversation. If you create a discussion under your post, LinkedIn will rank your message higher. You can also do this by placing the first comment under your post, to tag people or to clarify something.

Our advice? Start at the beginning with a marketing plan whose essence fits on a beer mat.

For more information on how Make Marketing Magic can help you grow your business, contact us here.