Is Marketing Your Business a Luxury or Necessity?

Is Marketing Your Business a Luxury or Necessity

Welcome to episode 3 of The Determined Mom Show. Welcome to episode Three of The Determined Mom Show. I am your host, Amanda Tento, and today we will discuss whether marketing your business is a luxury or a necessity.

So I’m going to run through some questions, and we’re going to expand upon them and give you some real-life examples. So today, the example of the business I will use is a newborn photography business, super specific, super niche down.

Why did you start a Business?

So then that way, you know, your business is also specific. So I will give you this one as an example and clarify what we’re talking about. So my first question is, why did you start a business? If you started a business to make money, that’s great. If you started a business to help people, that’s also great.

Maybe you’re passionate about what your business is. So I’m going to give the example of a newborn photography business. I know quite a few newborn photographers in our local area here in Washington, and they are all pretty darn passionate about what they do and how they help people.

Who are you trying to Help?

So the second question is, who are you trying to help? Are you trying to help aliens from Mars? Are you trying to help men from Texas? Are you trying to help? I don’t know kids from Alabama, I don’t know where, who you’re trying to help, but whoever that is, most likely, you have a very specific, very niche down audience you’re trying to connect with.

Can they find you without Marketing?

So the next question will be, will they flock to you if you do no marketing? So let’s say you’re a new photographer, and only your friends and family know you do it, even if that is technically word-of-mouth marketing. So even telling your friends and family is technically marketing, but we’ll give you that one for free.

So let’s say you rely only on word-of-mouth marketing, but will that be enough for you? Will that be enough to keep your bills paid? Keep the money flowing in? Most likely, it’s not going to be. You will need to let them know exactly what you do, where you do it, how you do it, what to expect, and how much it will cost.

Yes, Marketing is a Necessity

Marketing is not a luxury. It is an absolute necessity, and some things that go into marketing, like your website, business cards, branding, and personality, all go into marketing. Everything about you and your business is marketing. 

Providing information about your services is Key.

When marketing a product, you provide that information to your target audience and allow them to decide. Of course, you want to be persuasive. You want to be informative. You want to make sure that they have all of the information they need to make the best decision possible, which is purchasing your product or service, including price, the quantity you’re going to provide, etc. These are some of the things that go into a purchase decision. 

So those bits of information that you need to provide your potential buyers, aka your audience, are very clear. You want to make them easy to understand and ensure no objections. Any questions you think they might need, you have them answered on a frequently asked questions page or FAQ section of Facebook.

So you could even consider doing videos of questions that people have asked you in the past, and also, you want to make sure that in your marketing, you’re answering all those questions. You’ll be able to see more easily how all of that correlates. 

Website

The biggest marketing need I would say every business should have is a website. You want to have your own space in the internet, where people can visit you. They can come to your Facebook page and find your pricing. It should just be a place where all of the information about your business lies in all your services.

Everything should be in this one place. Think of it as your home, away from home. Your website reflects your business, and it’s the landing page where everything lies. 

SEO

So the second thing you need to do with your website will be some basic SEO. So SEO is Search Engine Optimization. You want to make sure that you’re at least ranking in Google. You might not need to rank on the first page. 

You don’t have to do a lot of in-depth SEO at first, but if you want to rank, you will have to invest in that long term. For SEO, there are some great plugins and things that you can use.

If you use WordPress to help you, Yoast is probably my favorite SEO plugin, and it will help you to craft titles with keywords. If you go through the wizard, it’ll help you to set up your Google search console and go analytics. All that stuff is going to be very important for your website.

Google My Business

The third thing is going to be Google my business. You need a Google my business page to help you with rankings, and I think it’s very much non-negotiable. One of the biggest misnomers in marketing or in, I guess, the mom business owner arena is that I’ve found many people think that you have to have a product-based or storefront business, like a physical location, to have a Google my business page.

Be Social

The third thing is very important, and it’s at least two social media platforms where your audience lives. So if you’re marketing to other business owners, I think you will want to be on LinkedIn. If you’re marketing to other moms, e.g., maybe you want to be more on Facebook, Instagram, or even Pinterest.

Especially if you have a product- or service-based business that you can provide information or blog posts or anything like that. Pinterest is a goldmine for moms. So if you market to more of the tech industry, that a lot of the tech industry is on Twitter and LinkedIn is also great.

So you need to identify and focus on one to two platforms. You don’t need to be on all the platforms, but you can have a profile on all the platforms.

Blogging

So the fifth thing that I highly recommend is blogging. It’s going to be good for SEO, and it’s going to give Google more signals about your business, what your business is about, and what your website’s about, and it’s going to rank you higher on the web slowly. Google is all about content now, especially long-form content. You should be golden if you can get some blog posts up to over a thousand words. 

Outsource

The sixth item, probably one of the most important, is outsourcing what you can. So find a virtual assistant or a marketing agency where you can outsource some of these tasks, which will help you tremendously.

This will help you in your marketing game; there’s no reason why you shouldn’t. There are all of the reasons why you should. So hopefully, this episode helped you to realize that marketing is not a luxury and that it is a complete necessity. 

I aim to provide as much information about marketing and being a mom in general to as many moms as possible. So you join The Determined Moms Show, our Facebook community. So let me know what you want to hear more of or If you have any specific marketing questions.