What is marketing?

After all the hard work you’ve done creating your product and brand, it’s now time to get creative and think how you’ll promote it.

It doesn’t have to be a big viral campaign and you definitely don’t need a big budget; but it does have to target your potential customers, so knowing who they are and where they are before you start is a must.

You can also use the 7 P’s of marketing to help plan your marketing journey. 

How does PR work?

Public relations is all about creating - and maintaining - a positive image of your brand and getting it in front of the right audience.

This can be on a big scale - think TV features - or slightly smaller like press releases and editorial, but the main difference between marketing and PR is that PR is usually free and has more credibility because the platform promoting your business is doing so because they want to, not because you’ve paid them to.

Social media 

In our digital world, your online presence is just as important as what you’re doing offline.

Choose the platforms that are the best fit for your product and target audience and make sure both your online and offline content are aligned by creating tone of voice guidelines.

To make social media really work for you, explore paid advertising opportunities and influencer marketing, neither of which have to cost the earth if you’re savvy about it.

If your budget allows, you could also enlist the support of a digital agency to help you find the best creators, influencers and ways to get your product out there.

Data

Once your marketing strategy is in place, it’s time to focus on the data.

Plan out the metrics you want to track, how you’ll do this and how often you’ll return to analyse the results.

An effective way of gathering useful data is to A/B test (or split test) an element of your campaign, such as an email subject line or a promotion, but only change one variable at a time.

Keep track of the data from each campaign you run, as well as daily activities, and use it as a valuable foundation on which to build your brand even further.