Where to Start With Your Online Marketing

Marketing TipsVisibility

Sep 9

Written By brandmerry

BY MICHELLE KNIGHT

Sometimes you just have to start BEFORE you're ready and with your marketing it's always going to feel like ripping off a bandaid. In today's blog, I hope to remove some of the confusion around what you need to get started with your marketing effo…

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A top question I get asked inside of my free online community is how to get started with your marketing before you feel ready!

I get the need for things to feel “right,” or “ready” but so many entrepreneurs wait and wait and wait, and wait to start marketing because they don't feel like they've got it all together or it doesn't feel ready and this waiting can stunt their overall growth and timeline to the results they desire.

In episode 12, on The Brandmerry Podcast, we talked about getting visible and how to boost your confidence around showing up online.

Then in episode 14, I shared my top tips for finding your voice in personal branding and how to get started with that.

Now today, I want to share more about marketing your business. What does marketing mean? How do we gauge what needs to be done and when? How do we know when it’s time to focus our energy on marketing the sh*t out of our business?!

Rather than waiting and sitting in confusion and inaction, I want to give you a clear plan of what to have in place, bare minimum, to get started. I think this one's going to surprise you a little bit.

I also want to talk through some of the mindset pieces around showing up and being seen, just continuing our conversation around showing up and what goes into that.

WHEN TO START MARKETING YOUR BUSINESS

At Brandmerry, we believe in two core pillars to running a business.

There's the branding pillar, which is all about:

Who you are and the problem you solve.
Who you serve.
What your core offer will be.
Identifying your authentic voice.
How you share that with the world.
And of course, what does your brand aesthetic feel and look like.

Branding is the foundational piece of scaling your business. You have to have those pieces in place to do any of your marketing.

However, I find so many entrepreneurs who skip the steps and jump straight into marketing. When you do this you’ll find that your marketing efforts are a constant struggle and barely taking off despite your hard work. These foundational pieces are essential.

After you've created those foundational pieces, it is about marketing.

The marketing phase is all about spreading that brand awareness, attracting your ideal customer through lead generation, connecting with them, and leading them to the sale.

This phase is ongoing, as it’s ultimately what brings in consistent sales.

Yet, this crucial element is often delayed as entrepreneurs are waiting for the magical moment when everything feels ready.

WHEN ARE YOU READY TO START MARKETING?

So, how do we know when we're ready to market?

I've got to tell you it’s a trick question, no one can define that for you. No one can say, "You will be ready at this specific stage."

And I know that’s hard, but it's important to know that it’s going to look different for every business.

It's completely different based on what you're offering.
It's different based on your lifestyle and your personality.
So no one can define when you're ultimately going to be ready.

But what happens quite often is that we are ready before we think we're ready.

Sometimes we're looking for someone else to give us that permission slip to push go.

We need someone to validate and say, "You're ready!" And then suddenly it's like, cool, I got it.

You're essentially always at a place where you can show up and build a community and build that know, like, and trust factor.

So you're always ready. But the question is, when is it most effective?

With marketing, it can be tricky because you can market at any time. And I know a lot of entrepreneurs who will market right out of the gate because that works well for them while they're building their brand.

But is that marketing the most effective? Most likely not.

The reason for this is that the brand foundations are not in place. These foundational pieces can be found inside of our branding program You! Branded.

For our clients, we find that once the brand is complete, then your marketing will be the most effective.

Now, let’s assume you’ve done the branding work either on your own or through You! Branded, where do we go from here.

These are three things that you want to have to make your marketing efforts the most effective.

3 MARKETING STRATEGIES: TEMPLATE FOR MARKETING

GATHER AUDIENCE INFORMATION

Number one is to make sure you have a way to gather their information.

You can be showing up and building a community on social media.
You can be showing up and doing live videos every single day.
You can be posting every single day.
You can have followers joining you.
You could be so excited, thinking to yourself, “I don't even know where these people are coming from. I don't even know who they are.”

But how do you plan on getting them off of the platform?

How do you plan on keeping them engaged?

And another level to this, how do you plan to confirm that they are ideal customers?

Social media can skew our numbers quite a bit. And I know quite a few people who have giant followings and don't make money in their business. So it's not an indicator of a successful business.

If you're getting started with your marketing, a good rule of thumb is, while you're already getting started showing up and creating this content and building this trust, have a way to get them off said platform and into your community.

No matter what platform it is: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Instagram reels, Pinterest, blogging, all of it. It doesn't matter. You want a way to get them into your community.

That's how you’re getting those quality leads. The people who are saying, "Yeah, I'm interested in what you're saying. I'm interested in what you're offering. Please tell me more.” It’s where you can build a better connection with your audience.

So if you're going to show up and do your marketing and you want it to be effective, then you want to make sure that you have a way to capture their information in place.

That's typically through your lead generation. Having a way to get their name and their email address in exchange for a lead magnet, which could be a PDF, audio, a video, a training, a mini-course, a quiz, a discount code, a free knitting pattern, etc...

This is one of the fundamental elements of a strong marketing strategy and one of the first elements of the marketing work we teach inside of Brandmerry Academy.

HAVE A SIGNATURE OFFER OR FRAMEWORK

Another thing that I recommend having is an offer or at the very least a framework.

This is one of the things that I teach inside of my program You! Branded because I truly believe that to market effectively, you need to know what the end result is.
What are we ultimately selling?
What are we leading people to with our marketing?

It's why I don't believe in “just showing up” and creating content just to have something to post. That's not doing anybody any good. You want to make sure that the content you're creating is very effective as we're talking about and leading to something.

Now, maybe you're just starting out and you don't know what you want to sell just yet, or you haven't finalized your offer. That's okay.

At the very least understand your framework or I often like to refer to it as your pillars. Those core things that you're going to be talking about and touching on because that's going to allow you to show up and market the result and build an audience interested in solving that specific problem.

So let's say one of my pillars is branding. Because I know that, I'm able to create content specifically to support my prospective clients with branding, and it's going to easily connect to my offer when I promote it.

I'm not creating all this content and marketing and promoting, and then there's no clear connection to what I ultimately want them to pay for.

That's going to hurt. If you’re not clear on the result, what you want people to pay for, you’re going to create marketing that is ineffective to your bottom line.

KNOW YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMER

You truly cannot market effectively if you don't know who you want to attract with your marketing. That's the point of marketing, right?

Inside of Brandmerry Academy, we focus on four pillars of marketing.

Brand Awareness - This is when you’re marketing so that new people know about your brand. They're gaining awareness of your brand and the work you do. You've taken this time to establish it. Let people know that it exists.
Brand Attraction - The second part of marketing is the community attraction piece. So getting people who are now aware of your brand attracted to the community aspect, attracted to subscribing to your email lists, getting notifications when you go live, your Instagram posts, those different things. The community attraction piece is where the lead generation happens.
Brand Connection - And then the third part of marketing is the client connection. Building that know, like, and trust factor to fully connect with someone and moving them to the sale.

This three-step process is the ultimate goal of marketing.

How can you effectively market if you don't know who is going to be going through that process?

How can you effectively market if you don't know who you want to spread brand awareness too, who you want to attract to your community, who you want to build a connection with to ultimately invest in your offer?

As I’ve mentioned most of this process, especially the ideal customer research and signature offer should be happening at the branding phase and will play an integral role in your marketing efforts.

3 WAYS TO START MARKETING YOUR BUSINESS TODAY

With these three foundational pieces and your brand in mind, I now was to give you a few of my favorite ways to start marketing your business today.

You've got these pieces: You understand your offer, at least a framework. You have a way to gather their info. You understand your ideal customer.

TIP #1: SHARE YOUR STORY

This is a fantastic way to get started marketing, especially before you have an offer that's completely fleshed out before you're asking them to do anything. It's a great way to start building a connection from the beginning as you're bringing in prospective clients.

There's a lot of different ways that you can share your story. Here are a few:

Share your mission. If you don't know how to figure out your brand mission, go listen to episode one of the Brandmerry podcast.
Share your brand value. Start creating content specifically around each of your values. While posting your values on your website can be beneficial, what I’m suggesting is sharing stories about your values and why they are important to you.

If you don't know about brand values, go listen to episode three of the Brandmerry podcast.
Share your brand story, your founder story. What led you to create your business in the first place? Why are you passionate about this work? Why do you want to serve the client that you want to serve?

Start sharing your story behind the brand. There is an entire episode on the Brandmerry podcast where I talk about writing your About Me page and how to craft your brand story for that page to help you get started.

Additionally, you can talk about the purpose behind your business and your goals for your business. So you can create stories around those pieces, start showing up and start building that brand connection with your audience.

TIP #2: INTRODUCE YOUR FRAMEWORK

The second thing that you can do to get started with your marketing is introduce your framework. As I mentioned before, I recommend that you at least know the specific offer or the product, or at the very least the framework or the pillars for what you're leading your clients to.

You can start creating content and marketing around your framework. You’ll want to identify the following:

What's the problem that your audience is facing?
How can you create some content to help them through their problem?
How can you create some content to connect with them about their problem, to just let them know, "Hey, I know that you've got this. I want you to know that you are seen, heard, and understood," which is all we want as consumers.

Start creating content about how you specifically solve the problem, as opposed to somebody else in your industry. I do this a lot when it comes to brand storytelling.

There are a lot of people offering branding advice. There are a lot of people offering branding support. I have a special way of doing that and it's through the art of storytelling. So that's how I solve it specifically and I make sure to share that often with my content.

If you have your framework mapped out, I recommend you break up each individual piece and share that.

At Brandmerry, we could do weeks of content on branding.
We could do weeks of content on marketing.
We could do weeks of content on systems.

So having these pieces of your framework mapped out will give you content ideas to start sharing. I have a podcast episode coming out in October where I talk a little bit more about free versus paid content and the difference between those, so make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss it!

When you're thinking about sharing your framework in terms of content, think about why those different pieces are important and what those different pieces are. Not so much how you're going to teach them to do the individual pieces. That's in the paid offer.

TIP #3: ANSWER QUESTIONS

The third thing that you can do to start marketing and creating content is to just answer questions important to your audience.

If you have an audience, you can survey them. Even if you have 10 people, survey them. Ask them what they need support with. If you've got email subscribers, send them a form asking the following questions:

What are you struggling with right now?
What support do you need?
If we were sitting down for coffee and you could ask me one question, what would you ask me?

As the different questions come in, create content to answer them. You can also post questions using tools like Insta Stories as well.

In addition, you can also use free tools like Ubersuggest, which I've talked about multiple times on the Brandmerry Blog including this recent Youtube video where I shared my content creation process for 90 days of content, or AnswerThePublic where you can see what specific questions people are asking via Google and you can answer those in your content as well.

You’re creating content that answers some of the top questions that you're getting. It takes a lot of the mystery out of what to post and what to talk about.

Remember, the key to marketing is to start small, start very specific and intentionally, and then scale from there.

This is incredibly important when it comes to where you’re posting your content.

It’s important to be realistic about what you can handle within your schedule. Thinking you’re going to blog three days a week, show up on Pinterest, make two Youtube videos, a podcast, and show up on Instagram daily is just not going to happen unless you have a team.

This is why you want to be very intentional with where you’re showing up and harness the power of repurposing. Something I talk about in great detail in this Youtube video.

CONCLUSION

If you need me to give you a permission slip about when you're ready, it's when you at minimum, have a way to gather information, name, and email address from people who are following you, who are finding out about you from your marketing.

You have your offer, or at least a framework mapped out so you can share content that's related to the result.

And you understand your ideal customer. You've done the market research.

I wanted to share with you that one of the things that I focus on with my clients is clear, simple, and strategic marketing. It is something that I offer inside of my membership Brandmerry Academy.

But I also work one-on-one with clients to master their marketing, to streamline their marketing efforts, to understand what they're selling, to understand what they're messaging, to understand where they should be showing up, how they can show up effectively, all of those different pieces.

I typically do this in the form of an intensive. My VIP intensives are a 90-minute strategy session, followed by 30 days of implementation and support. Meaning that I'm not going to just cut you loose at the end of our intensive.

We're going to talk about the gaps that need to be filled in your marketing strategy.
We're going to map out your marketing strategy moving forward.
We're going to get those systems and those workflows in place, and then I'm going to help you bring it to life.

A lot of marketing support misses the implementation piece and it’s incredibly important. You don’t need to know another strategy, you need to utilize that strategy and understand how it applies to your business.

If you're interested in learning more about this, you can go to Brandmerry.com/intensive.

P.S. Have you tuned in to The Brandmerry podcast? I release new episodes every Thursday on topics around branding and marketing! Check out past episodes and be sure to subscribe at brandmerry.com/podcast