What is the right marketing mix for my business?

In this blog post, we are exploring marketing mix recommendations for small businesses and providing you with some valuable tips, tricks and tools of the trade

Photo by: Anastasia Shuraeva

Long gone are the days when people would ask if they need to have a website or a social media presence for their business. Very quickly after the WWW got widely adopted in the mid-90s, business websites became a norm. Then, the ‘00s and ‘10s ushered in the new era of social media, online business directories and business profiles like Google My Business (nowadays known as Google Business Profile) and this quickly became a standard, too.

So, unless you are a one-of-a-kind, very niche, exclusive and wildly lucrative business that’s been around for decades and takes on only equally exclusive, VIP clientele by means of word-of-mouth referrals – the answer is:

Yes, as a new business, you do need a website, social media presence and a Google Business Profile page set up, at a bare minimum.

Where to start and what to include in your marketing mix?

A good way to start devising your marketing strategy and defining your marketing mix is “the four Ps of marketing": Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Following the 4 Ps, you will:

1. Clearly define the product or service you offer to your customers – so they can quickly grasp its main characteristics.

2. Decide on a price for your product, or a fee for your service.

3. Identify the places where your target audience usually shops for such products or services, and establish your presence in those places.

4. Analyse how your product or service meets the needs of your customers (and adjust accordingly).

This should, ideally, all be finalised before your introductory stage, which is a stage when a product is launched, i.e., introduced to the marketplace. This is the phase when you start building your product or service’s brand awareness and targeting potential customers.

We often hear questions about the marketing mix and complaints from our clients such as: “What is essential to have? Do I really need to maintain both the website and social media channels? I don’t have the time to do all that – there are SO many social media networks and it feels like you constantly need to be working on them… And, blog posts and SEO – it takes so much work!”

We understand their frustrations because creating content for the web and socials can be time-consuming, especially good quality content, and small businesses often have a person that can only manage their online presence sporadically. There is usually one person who wears many hats in a small business, including that of a marketer, and FOMO (i.e. the fear of missing out) can be overwhelming.

If you have the chance to outsource your social media management and marketing to an experienced freelance marketer or an agency, that is always preferable – even if only for a few months.

They will design an optimal social media strategy for your business and create social media editorial calendar with relevant dates for your industry, which will guide you on what type of content to post, when and how frequently to post it, as well as monitor performance and analyse what kind of posts get the most engagement.

If you later have more time to manage your socials yourself, you will have examples of their work for reference, and be equipped with knowledge of best practices.

How to harness the power of social media

The good news is that you don’t have to be omnipresent - be everywhere, all the time. For a good marketing mix, choose a couple of social media outlets where you think you can find most of your ideal customers and then create content that you can share on all of those outlets, with small tweaks and modifications (e.g., when it comes to sizes of posts and formality of tone).

For example, your business might have FB and LinkedIn presence if you sell your products or services B2C (business-to-customer) and B2B (business-to-business).

You can post 3 types of content on your socials:

· curated, or third-party content which you can repost and share with your own commentary,

· original, branded content that you created yourself (containing your brand name, logo, colour scheme etc.) and

· cross-promotional content, i.e. you can share news and blog posts from your website, as means of driving traffic to your website.

How to create content for your social media channels

For curated, third-party content, you can follow other accounts, or news aggregators and news platforms and repost some of their content relevant to your business and your industry (but, most of all – to your customers) on your accounts. You can add your own comments if you like – to show your customers you are keeping abreast with the latest trends in your domain.

For your own, original content, you will have to write copy (i.e., post text or captions for your photos and videos) yourself, and you can use one of the popular social media graphic tools to create social media graphics or animations from their templates, which you can then quickly duplicate and resize to fit different sizes on each platform.

Using proofreading and editing tools like Grammarly or Hemingway apps you can check your spelling, punctuation, and grammar and improve your writing style, and using free stock photography platforms like Pixabay or Unsplash can help you source great images and videos for your social media graphics at no, or a nominal charge.

Social media graphic design apps like Canva usually have templates for different social media channels and different sizes depending on the types of posts (whether it’s a question of profile pic, cover, post or video), so you do not have to create and memorise social media cheat sheets.

Another good news is, apart from social media graphic tools that offer you a quick way to design polished-looking graphics, there are also third-party social media scheduling platforms and features on major social media networks like FB, Instagram etc. which allow you to create and schedule content in advance.

This means that in the quiet periods in your business, you can set aside a few hours and create enough content for weeks ahead, as well as automate the content publishing process and schedule these posts to go live, right there and then. Whether you can incorporate this routine into every week, or do it once a month – whatever you opt for, practice makes the master.

Web content management, blog articles, SEO...

The same goes for your website. You can do content batching and create several blog articles and then space them out and publish them every week or every fortnight.

Because, the fresher the content on your website, the more impact it will have on your website’s ranking on search engines. For example, Google uses a complex algorithm evaluating over 200 factors to determine how websites should rank on their search results pages. The algorithm takes into consideration a number of different factors, including the use of keywords, recency and the overall quality of your content.

So, when you create a new blog post, you’re basically giving Google new information about your site every time.

The frequency of your blog posts will depend on your industry but strive to update your website with blog posts at least once or twice a month, at a minimum.

You can optimise your blog content for search engines by incorporating keywords and phrases relevant to your industry, writing about a topic that is widely searched, optimise your images etc.

If you incorporate links to other websites or have others share links to your content – you have backlinks that elevate your ranking, as well.

Listing your website in reputable online directories also increases the chances of your web content being discovered by potential customers. Directories like Yellow Pages or Local Search are some good places to start.

Nowadays, online business directories offer a two-tiered type of membership, based on a freemium business model, where creating an account is free and only some features require an upgrade and subscription payment.

Benefits of having a Google Business Profile and Apple Business Connect

If you are still not certain what Google Business Profile and Apple Business Connect are, think of the last time you searched a local business on Google Chrome and the information you saw in the format of a business ad, alongside the location of the business on Google Maps.

Apple Business Connect is a very similar tool, introduced at the beginning of this year in response to Google, which offers the same kind of services (free listing of your business, ability to post business updates and news, display of your geographic location on maps etc.), but utilises Apple Maps.

They are both free tools that help people find your business when they are looking for products and services like yours in their local area.

Google Business Profile is a key SEO ranking factor for Google local searches. Apple Business Connect is also predicted to become a key factor in the decision-making process of over a billion customers who use Apple devices, as it integrates with its key services such as Apple Maps, Messages, Wallet, Siri and other apps.

The only difference between the two is that Apple Maps are only available on Apple devices, while Google Maps is a cross-platform service, available on Android, iOS and a variety of web browsers.

Hence our recommendation at the beginning of this blog post to - apart from your website and social media presence- also incorporate Google Business Profile in your marketing mix.

So, we hope we managed to clarify some common misconceptions surrounding your online presence and how to successfully manage your time while managing your website, socials and business directories listings.

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And don't forget, you are not in this alone! If you are a local business or a non-profit in the Newcastle area and need help with your web content development or social media management, feel free to contact us at hello@e-clectica.com.au or call us on 0478 771 111. We'd be happy to discuss how we could help promote your business or organisation!