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Marketing Essentials for Start-up Businesses

Okay, so you decided to go to it alone and set up your own company and finally be your own boss. There is plenty of work that needs to happen before you are ready to launch your business. You need to look at accounting, registering your business and lots of different elements of admin. You might need to set up your premises, or a home office and you may even need to recruit employees. So basically you are going to have a lot on your plate.

One thing that you cannot afford to leave off your radar is your marketing plan. Even the best business ideas fail if you don’t put your efforts into your marketing strategy. And unfortunately a lot of start-up businesses fail.  In fact, a massive  8/10 businesses fail according to Forbes.

So to make sure that you are not part of the negative statistics, you will need to put great efforts into your marketing. If you are completely new to marketing then this might be a bit daunting. But you can quickly get up to speed with the latest marketing trends and the best types of marketing tools and strategies to use.

Once you get used to it, your marketing will just start to come naturally. The hardest part is getting started, so to make it easier for you we are giving you some helpful tips for anybody starting off for the first time with their marketing plan.

Set up a website

The first place that consumers will search for a product or service is going to be on the Internet. So if you do not have a website, people are not going to be able to find you and you are not going to get business. Many people avoid setting up a website because they think it’s going to cost a lot of money but that isn’t necessarily true.

You can actually set up a website completely for free, which a lot of start-up  businesses do to keep costs down. What you need to know about the free websites is that they tend to come with a lot of limitations, such as limited amounts of storage and bandwidth.

Free hosting companies make their money through people upgrading to a paid service or through people paying them to display ads on the free websites that they provide.  Before you sign up with a free web host make sure that you are aware of all of the limitations. You can alternatively get a shared hosting plan that cost as little as 5 pounds a month and give you a lot more options and features. There are lots of cheap hosting options out there, so take a look.

Email marketing

Email marketing is another very effective way of generating leads for your business. Obviously you will need to have an email list of people to send your email campaigns to but if you have this information you can stop sending high quality email campaigns to attract new customers.

Paid ads

Paid traffic for your website is another good way of generating customers and this is becoming increasingly popular as a marketing method. For example, Facebook ads and Google ads are helping businesses to generate more leads. Again, there is a misconception that this is going to cost a lot of money but you can actually place ads relatively cheaply.

SEO

Understanding and applying search engine optimisation is another good marketing technique. SEO doesn’t cost anything, you simply apply a set of principles to make your content and your website more search engine friendly. So marketers use principles such as including keywords in content to make it perform better in regards to search engine results. There’s a lot of different areas that contribute towards making websites more SEO friendly, including the performance of the website and making sure content such as images are optimised.

Social media

You can set up social media accounts for your business completely for free. You can set up a Facebook business page for example, or for B2B marketing LinkedIn is a really good option. Create regular, useful content to build up followers and hopefully get people to share your content with other users to increase your marketing reach.

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