If you’re a new entrepreneur, chances are you’re hearing new phrases and acronyms on an almost daily basis. All you wanted was to launch your dream, not learn a new language. This is part of a crash-course on terms and ideas every new entrepreneur needs to know (and mostly understand).
If you have any type of business background, you should already understand the concept of marketing fairly well. Marketing is how businesses communicate their product’s value or services to potential customers or clients. The most visible form of marketing is in advertising: TV ads, print ads, magazines, pop-ups, banners, ads are everywhere.
So, what does marketing have to do with your business? Well, if you have a subpar product or service, the best marketing in the world will simply expose the lack of quality faster. Having a fantastic product without a strategic plan to share its value with your target audience is equally unproductive.
When it comes to marketing, there are multiple concepts in marketing to keep in mind as you launch your new business. I’ve narrowed them down to the more basic forms, but there are many variations of marketing that all fit inside this arena.
Content marketing
Content marketing is about sharing relevant, timely information to a carefully targeted market audience. Translation: content marketing is saying what you need to say when you need to say it to who you want to hear it who might want to buy what you’re talking about.
The purpose of content marketing is to share your information without a typical sales pitch attached. It’s informative, interesting, and helpful to meeting everyday needs.
Direct marketing
Since content marketing is the overall process of sharing relevant content, direct marketing is one of the ways in which the content is shared. Some examples of direct marketing are mailers, catalogs, telemarketing, brochures, and much, much more. Direct marketing is one of the oldest forms of advertising still used today because it works!
Email marketing
This is the online form of direct marketing. Countless companies have found fantastic success through email marketing simply based on one reason: there’s no interruption. If an email comes through an inbox, it will sit there until the owner opens it. Unlike a phone call or door-to-door sales, there’s no window of opportunity.
Email marketing is based off email subscriber lists, usually provided by platforms such as MailChimp, AWeber, Constant Contact, and others.
Social media marketing
This is the even shorter version of email marketing, but with a twist. It puts less emphasis on what you have to say as an entrepreneur and more on the quality of conversation you can be a part of on social media. Social media marketing leverages the conversational and shareable side of social media in strategic ways to share your entrepreneurial value with your audience.
I work with entrepreneurs every day to help build their dreams. Whether you’re a new entrepreneur or you’ve been building your dream for a while now, I can help you take the next step in reaching your potential clients.
