Good morning. And welcome to the Monday Morning Marketing Podcast. I'm Esther
and I'm Melanie.
And today we're here to talk about things that all marketing newbies need to know. Where do we begin? This is long.
It's big and long and messy at times, but we wanted to just get you started, get you ready, get even the right mindset to actually get these things in place so that you're not feeling confused and lost straight from the beginning like we did when we started.
Yeah. I mean, doesn't matter if you have a degree in business, you still don't know the first thing about marketing when you start out. Because marketing evolves daily. As we've seen recently with the Facebook group changing its name to Meta, things can just change overnight. And how many years in business, Melanie? I'm only eight, nine?
Yeah. Eight and a half for me
Yeah and almost seven for me. So that's a lot of years of changes that we have seen. So don't beat yourself up. If you are new to marketing and you don't know where to start because we find it sometimes difficult to know what way it's going, right? So don't run away just yet. Hold onto it. You will get there.
There's two first areas, isn't there? There's customers and there's goals.
Yes.
So you tell them about customers.
Well, first, find out. Like, who do you want as a customer who will benefit from your services or your goods? Are you advertising? We're coming up to Big dates in the calendar. Are you advertising to the husbands or the boyfriends to buy for their wives or girlfriends? Are you advertising to the new mothers and fathers? Are you advertising to the grandparents? Who is your ideal customer? So build your basic. Don't get too deep into it just yet because it will change over time. Who is your basic customer persona? We've done podcasts on this already, so go back and listen to those to build it out. You can have more than one customer persona. You can change it during the course of the year, depending on what you're selling, then start from basic. Give them a name, give them a face if you want to give them basic information, age, sex, location, what they like, what they dislike and talk to them. Start a conversation with that person based on who you want to be talking to.
And then you've got the goals and to incorporate as an element of the goals. I think you should look at what your mission and your vision statement is, because if you don't know where you're heading, you can't possibly take the steps to go there and your goals. I mean, as much as we've got these big grand goals, if we want to, like Delboy, he wants to become a millionaire next year and that sort of thing, we all want to do that. But we will have to take the little baby steps to get there. So how many people do you want to find to join your page or to visit your website in the next month or first quarter or something like that and just pick goals like that. And your goals could also be not just the kind of people thing it could be. My goal is to have a website by the end of X. My goal could be to set up my LinkedIn profile by the end of next week, so it can be really small goals as well as the really big ones as well. But you need to know who your customers are first to create your goals.
Yeah, and I would even say set the big goals first and then break them down into the smaller goals. How do you eat an elephant one bite at a time?
Exactly.
So to get started on some of your goals, like Melanie said, if your goal is to set up your website, you will need photographs. You will need information. You will possibly the thing that people detest the most about their website is they're about me page because they don't like talking about themselves. Get other people to describe you. Get other people to write that part for you. Just ask them. Ask your customers if you already have a few what their feedback is and from that you'll be able to do it better. There is nowhere that says that you need to have a website before you sell your first product. You can start selling to the neighbour and then build up a bit of feedback from that. And it could be what a year. Some people take longer than that to set up their website. I wouldn't recommend leaving it too long because things happen. Social media crashes.
Well, you miss out on SEO as well, don't you?
I do. Definitely. The sooner you can get onto a website, the better. But it's not the first thing that you need to do.
It doesn't need to be all bells and whistles either. You know, you don't have to spend thousands on your first website. You don't, don't spend ten grand on your first website, you just need a website and then you can update it every couple of years as you bring more money in the bank as well. So you don't have to have gold flashing signed website from the very beginning. It would be silly as well, to be honest, because you don't know how well your business is going to go.
No, and your business will evolve as you go anyway. So your website will automatically evolve with that one thing though, that I would recommend from the start is having all your social media handles your names and everything. Have those you don't have to be on every social media platform. We have said this before your marketing can take place online or offline. Remember, there's still newspapers, radio, TV, but make sure that your name is what people will remember.
Yeah.
So a name a logo, your colours. We've talked about this stuff before, guys in all our podcasts go back through. We've talked about colours and branding. We've talked about naming, we've talked about lots of things. So listen back through them. They are worthwhile. But number one, I would say or very important up there, put your hand up and ask for help.
Yeah, definitely. And one other thing I'd like to mention as part of this help and part of your goals, actually, is to learn how to use certain tools as well. So you may want to use Facebook Creative Studio to help you post to Facebook and Instagram, and now you can post directly to Instagram as well from your desktop, let alone from your phone. So that might be another tool you want to familiarise yourself with now that it's become available, you may want to understand how to use Hootsuite or Agora Pulse. Why are we mentioning AgoraPulse?
Because we love it so much
and we're ambassadors that help. So you've got to make as part of your goals time to understand how to use this source to research the ones that you need for your business, because every business is different and there's lots and lots and lots of choice out there as well. So that needs to be part of your goals as well. Not just how to set up a website, but how to create images using a website. So maybe you want to learn to understand how to use Canva or Adobe, you know, but you've got to set time aside to do this. And as part of that is asking for help. So that could be going to the state agencies in your country to get support and training to speak to dedicated experts in that field of expertise. Maybe it's watching YouTube videos, but either way, whoever it is, don't be afraid to ask for help, because honestly, the only thing that holds you back from making your business a success is you.
Yes, definitely. And a lot of the other platforms that Melanie mentioned Agorapulse, Facebook, they have in training built in to it. They have their academies, they have their Bluetooth, they have all that it's right there. Block off time either half an hour every day, an hour, or whatever it will take you daily or weekly, but block off time for business development, because otherwise you won't get very far and you'll get frustrated and you'll get annoyed and you'll just feel like you're drowning because there is just so much to know that you need to know. But how do you learn it? If you're trying to get the business off the ground, you're trying to get the financing in place, you're trying to get all the products in, you're trying to get your services set out
Account packages as well. We haven't even talked about that yet. There's all these sort of tools out there that are out there to help you. And if you don't set the time aside, to understand how to use them, you really will just be stationary.
Yeah, you really will. We are here today, guys, to help you give you a basic idea of what you can do. Obviously, you can reach out. Melanie and I are both trainers. Melanie more so than myself. To be honest, if you want to outsource it, come to me. If you want to learn more, go to Melanie. But don't be afraid to just say, I don't know what I don't know.
Yeah.
Nobody's going to think worship you for it. Nobody's going to say, oh, but you have a business. What do you mean? You don't know how to post to Pinterest. Each social media platform is really designated really different from each other. There's a whole world of difference between 280 characters on Twitter and 2000 words on Facebook. There's a big world of difference. When do you use hashtags? When do you not use hashtag? What hashtags do they use? All of that will come. Just don't stress the little thing.
And if you've gone into the field of marketing, that's one thing you're not allowed to do because it changes so frequently. Two or three changes a month from Facebook, sometimes more. Actually, sometimes you can see the changes. Sometimes you can't see the changes. But I'm sure if you update your phone on a regular basis, you'll notice that Pinterest are updating stuff on a regular basis. Etsy they're all doing it. So if you're going to pick marketing as a sector that you're going to be helping people in, you've got to know that people out there are always going to know more than you. We do. We know for a fact. People know more than us in certain areas.
But do sign up for Melanie's newsletter because she gives you a breakdown of all the changes each month.
Yes, well, not all the changes, but certainly the significant changes each month. So. Yeah, thank you for saying that.
But in all seriousness, guys, do not be afraid to reach out to Melanie to myself. We are here to help you. Our podcast is here to help you. We're here for a laugh as well. If you just need somebody to scream at and go, Ah, this doesn't work. We've been there, done that. And more than likely are wearing the AgoraPulse T-shirt right now. But that's it for night, guys. We'll be back next week with more Monday morning marketing. Bye bye
bye, for now.