Kate Butcher 
So welcome to today’s episode, Today I want to talk about how to get your business out there. Today I want to cover the basics of marketing. And you might think, I don’t really know anything about marketing. I don’t know how to market do I really need to market what I have? I’ve got an amazing product. But you may have a great product. You may have a great service that you offer, but who will know about it, who will buy it? If you don’t get it out there and tell people about it and get it in front of the people who need to see it. Being a great product, being a great service in itself is not enough to sell what you have to offer. So I have a really good personal example of this in a previous business that I had we didn’t research our target markets effectively before we got started. Didn’t find out if the kind of market that we were aiming towards actually needed our services actually wanted our services could afford our services. We didn’t find out where they hung out in terms of where we could actually get our messages to them, you know, which social media platforms were they on? Where could we meet these people? And we didn’t know how to reach out to the places where they would see us. We didn’t really understand the platforms that we were working with, that we were communicating through. And we didn’t really know who we were talking to. We didn’t know the specifics of who they were, or how to talk to them.

So to market effectively, you need to get your product and your service in front of the people who would be interested or who might be interested in what you have to offer. And once you have it in front of those people, you then need to grab their attention. You need to stand out and you need to be different from everyone else who is selling things that are similar to you. And depending on what you do, you might be in a market where there is absolutely tonnes of stuff out there. That is similar to what you do. Or you might be really, really unique. In which case it’s really important to figure out why you’re unique. Why there aren’t other people doing what you’re doing. And is there the market for what you’re doing.

So a term in marketing that you may have heard about is touch points. So what are touch points? Touch points are effectively, the different ways that people can come across you, a touch point is every time that you make contact, communication with a person. So for example, you may put your services out on social media, and every time somebody sees one of your posts, one of your ads, that is a touch point, every time that it’s put in front of them every time they see something of yours. That is a touch point. It might be that you do radio adverts, and when they hear that every time they hear that it’s a touch point. It might be that you go to networking meetings and you’re getting your message out there locally if you’re a local business person in particular. So in that case, every time you meet somebody and engage with them, that’s a touch point. And when I first heard about and learned about touch points, the statistics suggested that you needed around seven touch points before somebody felt that they knew and trusted you and your brand enough to consider buying from you, not to buy from you necessarily but to consider buying from you. However, that was a few years ago. Times have changed. Social media has exploded in the last few years and things have changed massively. We are now absolutely overloaded with content.

Our social media feeds are absolutely crammed with content with people selling their stuff, telling us about what they do. So more recent statistics, that I’ve heard, suggest that it’s now closer to 27. Although I mean who knows the realities of averages, aren’t they and who knows exactly how many times somebody is likely to see you, but the suggestions are that it’s around 20 something, 27 Or so touch points, on average before somebody will consider purchasing from you. And that’s because as I say there is just so much information out there. It’s so much harder to make decisions when we are just completely overloaded with information.

So this is why marketing is very much a long game. Marketing isn’t something that happens overnight. This is why it’s absolutely necessary to be creative, to think outside the box to get noticed. Marketing is something that you really need to work on. It’s not a case of putting a post out there and people come and buy from you. It does take more than that. It’s about giving value as well. Just putting your product putting your service out there and telling people about it. That’s not enough anymore. People expect you to give them something back. People expect you to give them value. They want to learn something from you or they want to be entertained by you, whatever it may be. So just putting posts out or advertising are constantly about what you do what you do. What you do is not going to engage people at all people. Need to get value from what they see from you. So that could mean sharing really funny memes all the time. And people find it really you know, they go to your feed and they go to your posts or they see your posts and engage with them regularly because they get amusement from what you do and entertainment and it keeps them keeps them occupied it could be that giving some really valuable information that really engages them and educates them in what they want to do is going to really help to build that trust factor. And building trust is absolutely key.

People don’t buy anymore unless they trust you because there will there will be other people out there that they can buy from there are so many options that people have now they need to trust that they are going to get the quality of product or the level of service that they would expect that they would hope for. I don’t know whether you’ve heard the phrase “people buy from people” it’s one that I’ve heard many times over the years. And I’ve come to realise that it is so true, people do buy for people, people don’t necessarily, I mean obviously you’ve got to have a good product or a good service as well, but actually the people factor is massively important. A lot of the time people will buy from you because they get to know you they get to know your personality. They get to build trust in you and that’s massively massively important.

Have a little look on social media, on websites. And just have a look at a few businesses. If you’ve got a spare couple of minutes at some point. Maybe you know, a couple of businesses maybe that you follow  on social media, have a quick look through their feed or have a quick click on their website and just have a look through and see whether you can see the person behind the business, on their page on their social media content, on their about page on their website, anywhere, can you see the people or the person behind the business? And then compare that against some businesses where you can’t see the people or the person behind the business. And I’m not talking you know, massive trusted brands, you know, people already know the big names like Coca Cola and Nike and things like that. Those are the businesses that we know like and trust because they do what they say on the tin. What I’m talking about is smaller businesses where you maybe don’t have that trust factor already, but you don’t know the people behind those businesses. And just have a look and see how you feel about those different types of businesses do you engage more do you feel more related more connected to businesses that have a person behind them a face that you can relate to? I certainly do. And there is a reason why about pages, on websites are the most popular on most websites. If you have a website and you have Google Analytics on there, have a look and see how popular your “about me” page is if you’ve got information about you on that, or even if you don’t, because people go to that page looking for information about you, they might not find it if you don’t have your information on there, but people go to the About page a lot of the time, people want to know who the person is behind the business and who they’re buying from.

So on social media, it’s about building relationships. Again, it’s that know, like and trust. It’s that people factor. It’s about building relationships. It’s about engaging with the other people who are on social media. If you go onto social media, and you put your posts up and you tell people about what you’re doing, and then you disappear off again, you’re not building any relationships, you’re not building any trust factor. Engaging is so important. Go on and engage with the people following you or go on and find people that you follow who would be interested in what you do and engage with them, comment on their posts, and not just a thumbs up or a smiley face or a that looks great but, actually engage actually talk about something relevant.

Engaging is how you build relationships and it’s how people learn to trust you. Another really good way to get some marketing, some free marketing effectively is by giving your customers an amazing experience. What will get other people sharing what you do, talking about you, recommending you. If you can make the whole experience that a customer has of working with you really, really special. Your customers are going to do your marketing for you. They’re going to recommend you, they’re going to shout about you, they’re going to talk about you. They’re going to tell people how great you were. Ask for reviews as well because they all help having all of that information makes a huge difference. If you know a customer has been really happy with the service that you’ve offered, or the product that you’ve sold them, ask them to leave a review. There’s no harm in asking, if you don’t ask you don’t get and some people will pop on and leave a review of their own accord. But in the vast majority of cases, you do need to prompt people to do that. And your customers can do your marketing or certainly some of it for you, if you can encourage them to share, to like, to recommend you.

So another really great way to promote your business is by collaborating with other associated businesses. And when I say associated businesses, I don’t mean businesses that sell the same product or service that you do because that would be your competition. What I mean is businesses that maybe offer a service or a product that would be perfect for your clients or your business would be perfect for their clients. The target market is very similar. And it can be a really good way to collaborate, to support each other, to promote each other. I’ve seen a lot of giveaways, for example, where two businesses will club together and put together a package product and do a giveaway from their package and promote each other. And that way is a really good way to engage each other’s clients and each other’s followers.

I’ve seen a perfect example of this firsthand in a networking group that I’m in. A lot of the businesses, in the networking groups, serve mums of babies in particular and some of those businesses, have giveaway bags or goodie bags that they give away, or leaflets that they offer. When a customer comes to use their service. And they have in their little goodie bags that they give away samples, or leaflets from the other businesses that serve a similar market. Something I’ve already talked about is how people buy from people. And I think also the authenticity is really, really important. A lot of people are getting very bored of seeing perfection everywhere because actually perfection is not realistic. And it’s not necessarily relatable. So it’s really, really important to be relatable to show your customers, the reality’s not the perfection that they’re not realistically going to get.

Another element of marketing that can be really really useful as well is content marketing, and content marketing is effectively delivering amazing value. And I’ve already mentioned about giving value. But content marketing is about putting content out there that people can consume that will really help to educate them. That will really help them to understand a lot more about what it is that you’re talking about. And there’s an absolutely amazing book called “They ask, you answer” and that’s by somebody called Marcus Sheridan. And in this book, he goes into a lot of detail about all the different things that you can do in content marketing, which will really really help to grow the trust factor. People are reading your content, or consuming your content, or listening to your content, or watching your content in whatever format it might be. And they’re building their trust in you. And by building that trust, they will know to come back to you when they need what you offer. One really important factor that he talks about in this book as well is how he recommends other people, which I always think is fantastic, its fascinating by saying to somebody, “look, we’re not the right provider for you. We’re not the person that you need. You need my competitor over there.” That’s a really big trust builder, which I find really interesting. And I’m certainly not suggesting that you turn away any business that comes your way. If you don’t think it’s absolutely perfect for you, there’s a lot of business that won’t be absolutely perfect. But it’s really important that you’re transparent and honest with your customers. And if you know that you can’t provide the best service and somebody else can, that shows your credibility, if you can be honest about that.

There’s so much more detailed that I could go into about marketing and marketing is an absolutely huge area. I mean, we could talk for days about it. But what we will do is focus on some different areas of marketing in the upcoming episodes. But just to go over some of the things that you could consider and think about doing within your business, which will all help your marketing and things that that we haven’t really gone over in any great detail today. Some other areas that you could explore, for example would be your SEO, that’s the search engine optimization. And that is effectively how Google gets your information and processes it and decides where you fall in the Google rankings, whether it puts you on page one, and whether it puts you at the top of page one. The other thing is talking about social networks. There’s, again, a lot of information that we could go into about the different social networks, the algorithms, how they work, how to engage with them. Again, there’s a number of different subjects we can talk about there, and we will at some point. Websites, having a great website that customers can engage in is really really key and particularly if you’re selling via yore website and customer experience with mentioned already, but again, there’s so much to that. Writing blogs can be a fantastic way of sharing your information, of getting your message out there. And really helps with things like SEO. Sharing value, we’ve mentioned briefly, but again, there’s so many ways that you could do that. Paid advertising is another way that you can get your message out there and again, an entire subject will have its own. Hopefully this has given you a few things to think about, in terms of getting your message out there, in terms of getting your product or your service out there. And hopefully you will come back and listen to some of the other podcast episodes that we have that will cover some similar topics.