How to grow your small business with marketing

Starting your own business can be fun and exhilarating but most immediately, you suddenly discover that you need two things if you want your business to grow in a digital world.

These two things basically are:

• You need to attract customers to your business
• You need to make them happy.

Our concern today will be how to get more people to your business.

We all know that the best way to grow a successful business is to have a good product or service and that 90% of small business will fail within their first year?

So how about the remaining 10 per cent that survives the first year. Why does 50 per cent of them still fail within the first five years?

There could be a lot of reasons but one common reason is failing to get customers to their business.

Luckily if you are running a business in this new age, you are lucky. This is because you have a very good option to attract more people to your business without spending more than you need to.

This new kid on the block is called digital marketing.

As good as it could be, most people get it wrong. They approach digital marketing like a meteor- that is, they keep burning and running at the same speed until they suddenly fall to the ground.

The purpose of this piece is to explain what digital marketing, examine various channels and their options, look at how to get started so you do not burn down quickly and then discuss pitfalls most small businesses face when they are considering marketing their business in a Digital Ecosystem.

But first, what exactly is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is the process of promoting or marketing your business services or product using an electronic medium. These include advertising or promoting your businesses of a site like Tribune, a leading publisher in Nigeria. These also refer to electronic and online mediums that most of us are familiar.

Therefore digital marketing could not be confused with what most of us are thinking about today. When you use mediums like social media platforms ie Facebook and the rest alone, you are simply doing what is called online marketing.

While these can be great, it simply means you are leaving a lot of the meat on the table as you are not fully exploring all the available options that you have.

Now that we know what that is, how can you start marketing your business using these available channel?

Marketing Your Business Online

The major challenge most people fail is not really is they should consider digital marketing but how to do it successfully.

So let’s look at the first component of the digital ecosystem – your website.

The first point of failure for most people as they start to worry about this advertising option is to:

1. Get their website wrong: To an average customer, the cost of design of your website does not matter to them. What they care about is simply how well they can use your website. Therefore as a small business, if you are waiting till you can build a website of 100’s of Naira or dollars, then you are shooting your business success in the foot.
2. Using outdated technique: Most small business owners know they need a website and that is as far as they know. So they engage a developer who designs a website using a technology no one knows or care about. If you are considering getting a website for your business, then simply get your developer to use WordPress.

If you follow the two steps above, you will have at least surmounted the two major hindrances to creating a good online presence for your business.

Now that you have a workable website, let me introduce you to some methods of attracting people to your website.

1. Social media Marketing – Social media marketing is the marketing of your business products using various social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Youtube
2. Email marketing – Email marketing is the promotion of your product through electronic emails called newsletter to customers who might have indicated interest in your business. If you are running an e-commerce website, this channel should be the one you focus on the most
3. Content marketing – I separated content marketing from blogging because they are technically different even though they share a lot of similarities. Content marketing is all the activities of writing and promoting contents on your site.
4. Blogging – Blogging involves writing articles on your blog and for other publications.
5. SEO – Getting your website found in Google through a process known as search engine optimization.
6. Paid marketing – All the paid digital marketing methods and channels like advertising on electronic media and online mediums
7. Affiliate marketing – Getting other people to promote your website ND product for you. These people are usually called affiliate marketers.

In total, we have about 19 marketing channels you can use to promote your business for growth. These few mentioned ones are the most popular and easy to scale.

Now that you know the methods you can use to market your business online, how do you get started so that you do not become like the story of the meteor which we discussed earlier.

1. Understand your audience: The first part of every marketing strategy is an understanding of who you are selling to. Most people make the mistake of thinking that everyone is their market. Unfortunately, this leads them to not actually marketing to anyone and thereby failing fast.  That is why it is crucial to understand who precisely your target audience is and then focus on marketing to this.
2. Let Analytic be Your Friend: We live in an extremely fast paced word but with one distinct advantage. There are lots and loads of data that you can apply to your marketing. For example, you should seek to know who your best customers are, where they hang out online, how they purchase etc. All these feedback are going to be translated as feedback into your marketing information and you can use them to make more informed decision. If you are a small business and have a website, there is nothing that stops you from having the free Google Analytics on your site
3. Remember it is not a dash: Digital marketing is not a dash unlike what most people think. Digital marketing consists of getting a lot of things right beginning with your objective, your goals and a lot of measurement and feedback to improving. Usually, results from digital marketing takes as long as 6months to mature so if you are getting into it, be prepared to play longer than most people
4. Digital Marketing is not the only option: Okay, so digital marketing is the new kid on the block but considering it as the only path to growing your business in Nigeria is like setting your business up for failure. This is still because internet penetration in Nigeria is still in its infancy and a lot of your target audience is still not online. So the way out is what is called integrated marketing which is the combination of digital marketing with traditional marketing to complement each other.

Starting a business is tough. In subsequent editorials, we will look at how you can use all the above-mentioned channels to market your business. One easy way to grow your small business with marketing if you take time to know your customer and talk to them in the language they understand.