My girlfriend had just broken up with me, a bunch of my friends moved away and a close friend was in a bad car accident. Paragraph 2 : explain how you triumphed or had the realization that led to your business — be funny, cute, emotional, whatever! One of positives that came out of that tough time was that I started reading a lot more.
Mostly, I read my Reddit feed and sports blogs… but also some real writing by the great authors. With that, I began remembering my own passion for writing as a kid. So I started writing. First on paper. But then I started a blog. Paragraph 3 : explain the labor it took to start your business. Sign up for my email list and follow my journey here. Thanks so much! Seeding or distributing your content on the internet on launch day or just before launch, is a free and easy way to spread the word about your business.
These websites are hotbeds for solid launches. For instance, real estate businesses will find many residential and commercial-focused forums and social networks like BiggerPockets. I wish I had taken advantage of crowdfunding platforms when I started BeGood.
They always seemed too kitschy and amateurish. If you decide to pursue crowdfunding and you offer rewards to people who help fund your project, make sure that they are appealing and useful to your backers. Bonus points if you can come up with a reward that also helps promote your brand.
Unfortunately, Pebble has since closed up shop. Ecommerce companies like Cotapaxi and United By Blue have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars through post-launch Kickstarter campaigns.
So even if your business has been on the internet for a few years already, crowdfunding is your friend. If you choose to launch a Kickstarter, creating a webinar to educate your audience about your new product offering is probably a good idea, too. That way, you can directly answer questions that people might have and of course, convince them to donate.
Webinars are particularly helpful if your business is tough for the average person to understand, like a B2B or SaaS business. Check out our Guide to the Top 15 Webinar Softwares to learn how you can make a webinar work for your company launch.
No one said launching and marketing your own business would be easy. Plus, getting press is way easier than it sounds.
And you can do it all yourself. No agency or consultants required. Sure, getting a New York Times article is quite difficult, but garnering some lower tier and mid tier press takes a sound strategy, not magic.
Pick only publications that are in your industry. Take a few different approaches. Often, editors include links to their social media accounts — which are also great places to warm relationships and lightly pitch.
Make your email pitch personalized. Never send a mass email and bcc editors and freelance writers. Your email should be succinct and should show thorough research of the editor and should provide value. Include images, offer product demos and quotes from you or your CEO where possible. If you have a visual product and you have a medium to distribute it your Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc. Viral marketing is the holy grail.
Plus, it can be quite expensive to make a video in the first place! You have to have some major time to ideate and some resources to shoot high quality video. If you understand the underlying science of human behavior, you can predict what people are going to pass on, and you can craft your own contagious content.
Facebook is a favorite channel for marketers because it has vast scale and is pretty easy to implement. While the efficiency of Facebook advertising has gone down in recent years — competition has driven up inventory prices — there are still ways to make it work.
At the moment of your launch, Facebook Custom Audience ads can be quite effective. You will find that conversion rates are very high during your first few days in business. High conversion rates means your ad spend will be very efficient cheap.
Plus, consumers take a company more seriously when they see you a few times. Remarketing around launch is a way to accomplish this fast. My only piece of advice is: do not rush your launch. Take the little extra time you need to get the pieces in place to make it successful. Hi Mark! These are great! Any suggested launch strategies for ecommerce sites? I was planning to put a small personal e-store within the next few months, and chanced upon this.
Any tips specific to ecommerce? Thanks Ravi! This will give you room to test and play around with different marketing channels.
Hope that helps! Should I set up a landing page now to collect emails? If yes, should I include a video teaser of the Kickstarter or a free PDF if they sign up for the pre-Kickstarter email list? Mark S, First, great name. Whichever option will give the user of your product more value, I recommend. Though, I always love a lead email magnet like a PDF — with no more information, that sounds more optimal.
Quick question on launching a site with strong email collection more in reference in a B2B sense than e-commerce, but likely still relevant. How do you recommend balancing email collection on a landing page while also not sacrificing lead quality?
Our startup recently simplified our landing by only requiring email and dropping the name, company, and description fields. Your work does not end on the day the launch happens. You will want to debrief with your team so you can apply the learnings of what went well and what did not to your next launch. Marketing Marketing launches How to plan a marketing launch? How to plan a marketing launch? What is the purpose of a marketing launch? Components of a marketing launch plan Your plan will help you communicate deadlines and progress with teammates and stakeholders.
Here are the key components to include: Dates Dates provide a timeline to work towards. Tasks Tasks represent the activities or pieces of work to be done. Phases Phases are a way to group tasks together. Milestones Milestones are key points in time on your schedule. Dependencies Dependencies help you visualize which tasks must be completed before another can begin or end.
Success metrics Success metrics are the specific goals you define for your launch. How to create a marketing launch plan Now that you know the components of a marketing launch plan, you can start creating yours. Excel download. What to do after the launch Your work does not end on the day the launch happens.
Marketing overview. Introduction to marketing What is the role of a marketing manager? Which tools do marketing managers use? Who makes up a marketing team? What are some marketing job titles? What is a typical marketing manager salary? What are some interview questions for marketing managers? What skills do I need to be a product marketer?
How can I make a career switch into marketing? What is the difference between marketing and advertising? Marketing strategy. Introduction to marketing strategy What is a marketing strategy? How to set marketing goals? How to do market research? What is a creative brief? How to define buyer personas? What is competitive differentiation? What is buyer experience? Marketing plans. Introduction to marketing plans What is a marketing plan?
How to create a marketing plan? What is a content marketing plan? So make sure you invest enough into each channel to move the needle. Up until recently, only big brands invested in their brand. Small eCommerce brands could only spend their marketing dollars on advertising campaigns.
But as PPC prices are rising and the cost of acquiring new customers is getting higher due to the competition, small online brands have to increase their retention and build relationships with their audience, to be sustainable. And we have all of this in the marketing plan template for you. These are especially effective for eCommerce brands. A customer is not going to put their credit card in without making sure that your brand is reputable and that's why branding yourself on social media is so important.
You can read more about the e-commerce marketing challenge in our about the E-commerce Marketing Bubble. The first step when planning your marketing budget is to understand what are the growth channels that have worked for you so far and are part of your marketing strategy for the next year.
According to each channel's effectiveness, cost, and financial projections you can start allocating your monthly and yearly spend. Social media platforms and other marketing channels have absolutely exploded in the last decade so you have a ton of channels to choose from. Now remember to have an authentic brand presence on every channel and only expand to ones that fit your brand strategy.
Here are some of the top ones that you should consider for your marketing plan template:. Content marketing is very powerful for inbound marketing. Companies like Capterra and Quuu attribute their success to a really good content marketing strategy.
Why is content marketing so popular? Because it attracts the users that reach the "contact sales" button and aren't ready to buy yet. They want to learn, find information, get creative solutions to their problems, and if you can provide that value then they will eventually become paying customers. So content marketing isn't just about writing another blog post. It's about being customer-centric and honing in on specific content that will convert your visitors.
Now, remember, content is a long-term game, short-term wins are very rare. You should to create, design, and post content consistently and continue to optimize. No content strategy would be complete without a consideration of SEO. Organic traffic is one of the best marketing channels for companies that put out content regularly. The purpose of SEO is to optimize your site and content to improve your rankings on search results.
SEO includes not only keyword research and content optimization but also technical changes designed to meet Google's high standards of performance. These used to be things that any web designer could do but since the new search algorithm changes in the last 10 years, it's best to leave it to the experts. It provides an opportunity for you to present your brand in a visual way through images and videos. Studies show that The marketing guru Gary Vaynerchuk has always said that brands in the construction or plumbing industries should absolutely post content and interact with their audience on social media.
If you bring people value you will generate leads that will eventually convert into sales. So having a social media strategy is super important to any business' success. Email marketing has the highest ROI of any marketing distribution channel. If you are a B2C company then this is an absolute must. You should be sending out weekly or biweekly campaigns, you should set up some automatic welcome and cart abandonment flows, and you should definitely set up some email automation for the customers that convert through a popup.
Don't overdo it and send too many emails because you will end up upsetting your customer base, but find your happy medium. If you are primarily B2B you might think that email marketing is not as powerful for you but that is absolutely not the case.
Another great way to use this channel is for branding. For example, a lot of companies leveraged the global COVID pandemic to engage in new ways with their customers. This is our specialty here at Mayple. We have over 1, talented ads experts that we match with the brands that we work with.
Advertising is an important aspect of your marketing strategy that you should absolutely have on your digital marketing plan template. There are several ways you could utilize advertising as a marketing channel. First, there is social advertising. Google ads go hand in hand with your SEO efforts as they amplify each other to get you more real estate on a search result. You could also retarget your site visitors using ads on any of these networks.
This type of advertising is particularly effective and we recommend it to all the brands that we work with. After you figured out what are the channels that you're going to invest in, the marketing plan should show all the activities you're going to run under each growth channel. To plan and design your paid campaigns correctly you should know what are the most effective channels you are going to start using, and to build a marketing funnel that shows you when are you going to advertise to "first-touch" prospects people that don't know you yet and what will remarketing prospects will want to see in order to be persuaded to take the next move.
Now, plan the marketing activities for each of your marketing funnel and buyer journey stages from the setup stage to the live campaign stage. You can also add special events and design seasonal promotions in your paid campaigns such as sales season and other special occasions. Don't plan your social media if you won't have the resources to be consistent with your posting. It's better to focus on fewer things and do them well.
Content can include any valuable engagement you have with your target audience, whether it's on your Facebook, on your blog, or in your email marketing.
Some of your content efforts will be ongoing for example, SEO and some will be building assets for future use for example, Video. Many businesses are so focused on their online acquisition funnel that they forget the opportunities that good old marketing can have.
Sometimes advertising locally and using offline marketing like brochures can go a long way in such a digital world. If it's the right fit for your business, I recommend trying it out at least once and see how it goes.
Just remember to measure these activities as you would with your online marketing. And, I can't labor this point enough - You should always make sure your marketing activities will deliver on your goals and KPIs.
We organize all of this for you in a really simple sheet on the marketing plan template we provide. It makes it really easy to track and report. As we all know, marketing management can be lonely at every size of businesses by the way , so a crucial factor in your marketing success is building a good team to execute your marketing plan. It can be an in-house team, a team of experts you hire, or as in most cases, a hybrid of in-house employees combined with marketing service providers agencies or freelancers.
I'll start by saying a good marketing team depends first and foremost on its leader Yeah, that's you! When you choose the right people and knows how to manage them right, your success rates are already good. At the end of the day, good marketing starts with a good strategy, continues with a reasonable plan, and depends on great execution.
Your strategy and plan require specific human capabilities so they will be executed well. If you're planning on running paid media campaigns, you better start your year with an expert on your team that knows the job and that you can count on to deliver on your expectations.
To decide whether to hire an in-house employee or a service provider, you should consider two things:. We're back talking about your KPIs, and so should you in every marketing decision you make. After you made sure you have all the needed resources in terms of human talent to get your plan running, you'll need to keep tracking, measuring, and motivating them to be focused on achieving your goals and KPIs. Not an easy task, especially when you need to measure both in-house employees and service providers.
And you might be asking yourself, how do I write this marketing plan? There is so much research that goes into it, do I have to do it all manually? The answer is no way! There are numerous tools to use to obtain all the market research and business analytics for your marketing plan. Alexa is a great tool to get insights into your market and your competitors.
It has some really great advanced features that can show you your site demographics, where your traffic comes from, and the traffic sources of your competitors. Similarweb is another great tool for market research. Imagine if your Google Analytics dashboard could show you the data on your competitors.
This is exactly what SimilarWeb does. Ahrefs is one of the top SEO tools out there. It can give you some of the most sophisticated information about the types of backlinks you or your competitors have, search engine rankings, and much more.
0コメント