Foundations: Nail these and watch your business fly
If you haven’t got these foundations in place for your business then you are wasting time and money when it comes to marketing. On the flipside get these right and everything else you do will benefit – compound that and it becomes exponential.
TRANSCRIPT – BRANDING BEFORE BREAKFAST EP55
Hi everyone. I’m Jodie, one of the founders of Tiny Hunter. Today, I want to talk to you about foundations. I think often we start thinking we need marketing. We need to do a new campaign. We want to get more sales. You know, we think about a lot of the activity that we can be undertaking without first making sure that the foundations that we have in place are optimal and I’ll give you an example.
So you might think you want to increase sales. Well, you probably think that because you probably do want to increase sales because most people want to increase sales. So you might think well, let’s do a campaign, you know, maybe we’ll do something in Google Ads or on social, and see if we can get a bit of an uplift. What this means is that you’re going to be paying more money to get people to your website. But if you haven’t really optimised the experience of your website, then you are definitely wasting money. Because you’re going to have to spend more and more money to get the amount of conversions that you’re looking for. So what I really want you to think about is, have you ticked off all of these foundations i’m going to list? Have you ticked all of these off, so you’re ready to go and think about the marketing and those sorts of things.
The first bit is your brand. And yes, we talk about brand a lot. But hey, that’s why this is called Branding Before Breakfast. So you need to understand your audience. You need to understand what makes you different to your competitors, but in a way that your audience actually cares about. So, how are you meaningfully different? You need to articulate this before you worry about any other activity. That is foundation number one.
Foundation number two is bringing that articulation to life. So how does your identity look? If you’re selling a premium product, but your brand hasn’t been updated in 10 years then you’re missing out on an opportunity to communicate to people how good your product actually is. Because until they purchase it, your brand and how you look in the impression that you give is how they discern whether it’s a quality product or not. So think about your brand. How do you sound? How do you look? How do you behave? Does this all reflect who you fundamentally are? Which was point one. So point one: Who you fundamentally are.
Point two: Making sure that how you look and behave and sound reflects that. Great. Once you’ve ticked those off the list, I want you to think about your website. Doesn’t matter what business you’re in, B2B, B2C. Whether you’re selling a $5 scrunchie or $100,000 IT deal. All roads lead back to your website. People are looking at it all the time. It’s geared towards conversion. Now, what the conversion is will vary for different businesses, like the examples I just gave. But what matters is that you have thoughtfully considered your entire site and geared it towards conversions. So that when you do actually get people to your site, they’re more likely to take the action that you want them to. That’s point three.
And then the fourth one that I’m going to leave you with is marketing automation. So we all want to make money while we sleep, right? That’s the dream. Well, one step in that direction is making sure that you have got marketing automation. And again, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in you can still benefit from this. So what email nurturing and processes can you have in place that are going to help nurture your leads, create conversions, keep customers happy. It’s not just about getting customers. It’s about retaining them. How can you leverage automation so you don’t have to work quite as hard as you are now. Once you’ve got those four things in place then any marketing that you do or any other activity, you’re going to make the most out of it, and that’s what we want. That’s it for me. It’s time for brekkie.
Written by: Jodie de Vries
Published: September 16, 2020