My focus for the second half of 2017 has been on finding people with really great marketing ideas, and learning from them. Some ‘do marketing’ while others run a business and do their own marketing. Yesterday (Wednesday 1 November 2017) I went along to the Startup Summit run by We Are the Future, and hosted at the Assembly Rooms. It was a packed day full of great speakers and gave me the chance to continue meeting marketers and business owners who are great at what they do.
But that’s enough about me. Here are the three key things I learned from yesterday’s event.
Getting your startup or small business noticed
This first nugget came from the panel discussion between Sarah Stenhouse, founder of Pixey, and Ekaterina Matveeva, founder of Amolingua. Both had advice to offer people at the very start of their marketing journey.
When you’re brand new and have no budget, it’s more important to get noticed by individuals and influencers than it is to reach a broad audience. Reach out to people you don’t know and ask for their help, or reach out and offer them your help – and then do everything you can to meet their needs. You have an advantage as a smaller business that you can be honest and transparent and personal in a way that your established competitors can’t be – that’s how you can find your way in to disrupt the market.
Why and how we should use video and re-targeting on Facebook to grow our businesses
Gavin Bell, foudner of Blue Cliff Media, had a lot of great insights on Facebook marketing, and video in particular. He’s been vlogging regularly since April 2016, and has found a winning formula to attract a big audience to his business.
Video gives people an insight into who you are as a person. It’s important to get stuck in and get started – “Embrace the messy” – because no one is perfect to begin with. You learn by trying and iterating until you find what works best with your audience. Boost the videos which perform best with your existing audience, and then retarget people who watched your video with an add inviting them to Like your Page, or sign up for your service.
5 key kinds of information people ask for when considering what to buy
I was really looking forward to hearing Chris Marr, founder of the Content Marketing Academy, talk about communicating with digital consumers, and how to approach the future of sales and marketing.
My favourite part of his presentation I’ll call a Content Marketing Cheat Sheet. In a single slide, he summarised the topics that people most often search for when researching what to buy. These can be split down into five categories:
- Price/Cost
- Problems
- Vs/Comparison
- Reviews
- Best
Answering these types of questions should be the basis of your combined content marketing and search engine optimisation efforts. If your potential customers can find out the answers to their questions from your business, they’re likely to buy from you. On the other hand, if you don’t spend time answering these questions online, then someone else will. OK, you may be top of the search results when someone types in the name of your business, but what about people who haven’t heard of you? If you’re not creating content which shows up in their search results, they’ll never find you.
More Marketing Ideas
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