Marketing As An Investment

A small anecdote for you to consider:

You are an inspired and prolific painter who spends the day mixing colours, defining lines and blending your thoughts and feelings into a tangible avenue on paper. By your own accounts, not only do you think your art is good, but it can enrich and help people. The only thing is, your art is locked in a room with no windows, no doors, no light.

This is the reality of slaving away at your business without any real strategy or even understanding of marketing and the crucial elements that either hurt or help you.

Essentially, marketing lets the world know you exist and you matter. It allows the connection with potential customers, and inform them of who you are and why they should care. Marketing builds brand recognition and facilitates healthy business competition, which results in better services and better products for the consumer.

The real beauty of effective marketing is creating a sound client base and leaving your mark on the world. But if it is non-existent or even bad marketing your using, the pains your business might feel could be longlasting.

Even if someone stumbles upon your business by pure chance and you have no marketing presence in this digital age, how would referring you to a friend play out?

Let us find out.

Friend 1: “I have this great new business you’d love!”

Friend 2: Oh cool! What’s their website?

Friend 1: “I’m not sure, and I can’t find it on Google.”

Friend 2: Oh, well let’s check their socials.”

Friend 1: “Wow, nothing. But this one that came up looks pretty good too, let’s check it out.”

Disaster…

Or best case scenario they assume you are digitally illiterate or just plain indifferent to how you are perceived by the public. Inversely, when you are firing on all cylinders in your marketing matters things get much more fruitful. People will celebrate your product and your brand if it helps them. They will refer you to friends who are also your target market, for free!

Think about how that works. Who refers others to those cool things that pop up in your every day online?

Everyone.

Fathers and mothers share with each other parenting hacks and products. Colleagues share with each other their thoughts on a new tv series on their break and even tagging your mates in a meme is referring them to a shared interest. People rarely keep the things they love to themselves. The trick is to be that love that joins them, in a manner of speaking.

This is your small business vibe.

However, it isn’t all smiles and rainbows when you need to market your venture. There must be a sacrifice, but thankfully it is not in blood. You need to invest in your marketing with either time or money. Invest more time internally or invest more money externally to someone more experienced and more efficient. Either way, consider that an investment must be made to shine light into your painter’s room and turn it into an art gallery. The former means you have to learn first and use the skills to then start marketing your business, growing pains and all.

This is a great long term as you can become more knowledgable and professional as a business owner, although it is worth mentioning that the time needed to learn is substantial and costly. You need to weigh up if you have the time to sacrifice and the money to invest here. The latter option is by far the most convenient and powerful of the two.

Investing in a relationship with an external marketing provider gets rid of the guesswork and will not cut into your time anywhere near as much as the burden of learning, growing pains and all.

In an all-inclusive package with a marketer, you could have your brand, content, copywriting, and presence consistently and congruently presented for your specific target market to connect with your business. Utilising external marketing can help customers find you and build on your referral base mentioned previously in an exponential sense. If you are constantly in touch with potential customers by being effectively on their radar, think of all the opportunities you now have for free marketing by word of mouth?

The potential for an emotional connection to your brand here is magnified many-fold and facilitates your ability to stand out from competitors. The process of external marketing will also drive leads, increase sales, even out the peaks and troughs of business seasons and in time will actually save you money. By using marketing experts to assess your brand and prospective customers, they can create customer personas and avatars to market to.

This means the efforts of your brand can be focussed to a particular goal or path and not just in the sales sense, but by creating greater customer service and experiences, designing more particular future products and navigating business opportunities and risks.

No matter which way you cut it, marketing your business is a must and will require an initial sacrifice of time and/or money, but the rewards are too prevalent and too worthwhile to ignore.

Branding 101: Your Unique Persona

BRANDING 101: Your Unique Persona

Everything that moves in or out of your business is a form of communication with the world.

You email prospects, you send a product to a customer, you liaise with suppliers and you have a perceived business persona.

Whether this persona is a receptive one or not, is another story altogether.

Your business persona can be congruent and consistent or it can be a fumbling spaghetti storm.

Take two seconds to picture your business if it was a living breathing person.

Is it a quaffed and refined David Beckham type?

A rugged yet engaging Idris Elba?

Or is it a frazzled one-sock wearing mess with shirt buttons misaligned.

No offence to the people out there wearing one sock to halve their laundry, but you could probably do with a rethink of how you are projecting your persona.

In the world of business, the way you are perceived can be the difference between you developing an understanding with your target market or simply being another web page.

Granted, this is not as simple as a new logo, but it’s a great start.

The simple foundation of having a strong brand persona is understanding who you are and why you’re doing it rather than manipulating your potential buyers.

You might not want to be a prestigious handsome type, as that doesn’t suit your business.

If you run an online costume-for-hire service, you might want your persona to be a lovable and endearing source of reliable warm-hearted fun like a Danny DeVito.

The point is, be true to who and what you want to be.

Again, picture your business as a person.

How do they act?

Are they approaching their prospective customers and public preaching the value of their products and services or is your persona confident and self-aware in how they appear to others?

The truth is, people gravitate towards stability, whether it be stability of character in our loved ones or stability of income or stability in the brands of soap we buy.

Why?

Because we know what to expect when it comes to the things that matter most.

And let me tell you, there’s not much more powerful for your brand persona than being staunch and confident on a consistent basis.

An example?

Nike is routinely lauded as one of the premier brands and for good reason, they understand what continuity of their persona offer their customers.

Nike cuts the fat and offers a brand persona synonymous with performance, resilience, endurance and does so through their many motifs to enhance this persona.

From the “Just Do it” moniker to their advertisement artwork in black and grey, and their use of the most decorated basketballer of all time in Michael Jordan, Nike has made a foundation for their persona and gone so far as to actually become it.

Michael Jordan was a very logical choice for Nike as he embodies their persona, and delivers the core values of their character to such a degree all their marketing requires is Jordan in a neutral pose wearing their patented Nike tick.

Nike has successfully taken their hypothetical avatar and embodied it within their star athlete to elevate themselves into a pop culture phenomenon, beyond their simple beginnings as a sports apparel brand.

Need proof of this?

You’ll see a Nike tick on the shirts, shoes and shorts of people who haven’t kicked a ball or run a 100m in their lives because they want to be perceived as Nike’s business persona.

Your persona is what you stand for, how you do it, and how you can keep your word to create a stable and

So, some take away keys you can implement right now.

Find out who you are and why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Find out who you want to be and how you want your business to be perceived.

Take a real person and use them a muse that you want to be your brands persona.

Emulate this in your business’ immediate interactions with the world through branding (logo, website, copywriting,). This will set a precedent of character within your business that can trickle into the consciousness of employees, customers and partners. Pretty much anyone who directly interacts with your business.

This is especially important online, as first impressions may be the only one you have with someone and browsers always judge a book by its cover.  

Have an idea of your unique brand persona or have one that works for you?
Let us know in comments.