The fundamentals to marketing your business and driving qualified leads

I’ve spent a large portion of my life working in the foodservice industry. I started out bussing tables, and after a cross-country move and jumping from restaurant to restaurant, I ended up as a general manager of a healthy-food establishment. Through those ten years, I learned a lot about the restaurant industry, including how to run a successful food-focused business. As a college graduate with a film production degree, I took marketing courses, but my true focus was fully dedicated to the art of filmmaking. It wasn’t until that last general management position that I learned first hand why marketing was essential in keeping our restaurant thriving.

In my humble opinion as a marketer, marketing is a fundamental step to starting and maintaining any successful business. Though essential, this task is not necessarily second nature to a new business owner. Yes, they absolutely are in tune with their key differentiation in the market, and what they’re bringing to their community specifically or even to all of society. That’s an incredible first step - but a startup business needs a strategic marketing plan. This way you ensure that you’re generating qualified leads through brand awareness, and growing your sales which is every business owners ultimate goal. That and happy customers. 

Before we even talk about growing your new or existing brands awareness, we need to identify the values, mission statement, competition, key messages, target audience, sustainable business goals, philanthropic ideologies—anything and everything that sets you apart, and what exactly should be pushed to draw your ideal customers attention in. Once identified, it makes it much easier to come up with a marketing strategy. 

creating objectives for your campaigns 

Have you ever heard of the SMART marketing objectives? This has been the fundamental base of much of what we at Reverie Creative do with our clients when promoting a new business, or re-launching an existing brand. It stands for:

Specific

Measurable

Attainable

Relevant

Time-Bound

To summarize this incredible acronym, all marketers goals are to target a specific audience with messaging that directly relates to them with a measurable goal in mind. Think about what you want the campaign to do for your brand—bring in qualified leads? Grow sales? (Well, always.) Is your goal reasonable? Have you identified what messaging fits your target audience? It’s important to always give your goal a deadline in order to hold yourself and your marketers accountable for the results. 

the power of the personal message

Now that you understand the importance of having specific objectives, let’s talk about what works and what doesn’t. Remember that some popular promotional trends will work for some audiences and not others. It’s extremely important to truly understand your current or target customer, based off of data, not an assumption. Whether it’s through a competitive analysis and research, or from customer data you’ve gathered from previous campaigns, or transactional data, pay attention to the trends you’re seeing. For example, let’s say you’re an existing beauty salon, and you manage an email list of 500 clients. You send them about one email per week and typically you send a 15% off your next service campaign around the holidays as a special promotion. Let’s say this email generates interest/opens/clicks from about 10% of the email list. Great! Segment that list, and try sending those clients more discount specific promotions. For the rest of them, try different types of campaigns. Maybe try writing about a new product, or trendy new haircuts of the current month. See what sticks with those clients, and segment that list out. What I’m getting at is that targeted, personalized messaging is always the most effective when it comes to marketing and advertising. You don’t HAVE to give away dollars to generate business, because not all customers, clients, and audience members are the same—even if what they have in common is that they spend money at your business! 

but how much does it cost?

We get it, starting a business or maintaining one is expensive. Your bottom line is important, it’s what keeps your brand alive. But what’s even more important than your bottom line? Sales. Sales come from consumers or businesses, who are really just people, and they need some persuasion. You need to be relevant to them, recognizable, and you need to look good. This is where marketing and design become extremely important, because without this expertise and strategy, you could consistently struggle to grow. The U.S. Small Business Administration recommends that small businesses spend 7-8% of their gross revenue on marketing and advertising if their revenue is over $5 million per year. For those under, 10-12% is recommended. If you factor this into your overall budget from the beginning, these figures aren’t difficult to swallow, and you truly will reap the benefits over and over.

Ranking in Google, driving traffic to your website via social advertising, traditional advertising and much, much more will help your business succeed. It’s important to partner with a marketer that believes in your brand mission, and has the fundamental strategic marketing and design knowledge to help businesses succeed. These things might feel overwhelming, and that’s okay! We at Reverie Creative are a bunch of marketing nerds that would love to help take your business to the next level. And what’s even better is that if interested, we’ll teach you along the way. Click here to start the conversation.