As the air gets chilly and the year draws to a close, people look to complete their holiday shopping.

How can you take advantage of the season and convince more people to purchase from your e-commerce site versus a competitor’s?

In this post, we’re going to cover 3 ways to make your site more cheerful and less bah-humbug so you can generate more sales this year.

3 ways to ready your site for the holiday season

Be a trusted resource for your site visitors.

How often have you heard someone say that the person they’re shopping for “already has everything they need” or is “impossible to shop for”?

Take the guesswork out of shopping for your customers by compiling a gift guide (or a few) for your site visitors. By doing this, you can direct them to the products that are the best fit for their needs or highlight the products that you most want to sell.

Your gift guides should be clearly titled. There should be no confusion as to whether your gift guide is best suited for someone’s grandmother or great-nephew. Make sure to use keywords and details in your product descriptions to give people enough information to make an informed decision.

And remember that appearances matter! It’s not 1997 anymore — so as much as you might want to throw together a list of goods in a Word doc then post it to your site, don’t do it. There are so many retailers clamoring for attention and sales that you need to stand out.

There are many free graphic design sites and tools that can help you craft a good-looking gift guide. Check out Canva or do a quick internet search to find the tool you like best.

Give your site a festive facelift.

When was the last time your website got a little TLC?

People don’t keep the same clothing or hairstyles forever, and there’s no time like the holidays for updating your site, too.

You don’t have to overhaul your website, but consider updating your main banner image to something better suited to the holiday season. Coca-Cola is a great example of a company that updates its look and feel for the holidays. Before the holidays last year, they updated their site to highlight a seasonal product, Coca-Cola Cinnamon, and their banner image had also been updated to support that.

If you’re thinking, “I can’t afford a photographer or new graphic designer just for this!” then we have good news. The days when you’d need to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for good photography and imagery to use on your site are long gone, so don’t let that be a concern of yours. When creating your new banner image, consider adding a highly-visible coupon code to attract holiday shoppers.

Check out this article for free image resources you can use to spruce up your site.

Be a little less Scrooge and a little more Santa

We’ve talked a lot about shopping this holiday season but that’s not entirely what it’s about. Your customers are looking to purchase gifts for the people they care for as an act of consideration and love.

Help them know that you’re on the same page by dedicating a certain percentage of your holiday sales to charity or a non-profit organization. Even a very small amount, like 1-2% of your profits this time of year, can add up to make a big difference in someone’s life.

Don’t be shy about letting your customers know that part of their purchase is going towards a good cause. It could be the differentiator you need to stand out from the crowd and convince someone to purchase from you instead of your competitor.  

Happy holidays to you and your site

The holiday season is a great time to update your site. Give your visitors what they’re looking for with gift guides, updated seasonal imagery, and another reason to feel good about themselves with a donation to charity.

Do you have other ideas for giving your website a holiday look and feel? Share them with the rest of us in the comments below. 

No matter how beautiful and functional your site is, you can’t gain traction and build a successful business if no one knows about it. Sure, you can craft a few social media posts and create some flyers, but those ad hoc efforts won’t result in much if they aren’t part of a larger, strategic business marketing plan.

If you’re not a trained marketer, the idea of creating a marketing plan for your business can seem intimidating. Where do you begin and what’s included?

Rest assured, you can write a great marketing plan, and we’re going to help.

In this post, we’ll start by defining what a marketing plan is, then we’ll discuss the different elements that make up a marketing plan, and finally, we’ll provide tips so you can craft the best plan possible.

Creating a Business Marketing Plan

What is a business marketing plan? It’s a strategic document that outlines how you’ll communicate your products and services to your audience. It details what you’re setting out to accomplish, why you’re doing it, how you’ll get there, and in what time frame.

Marketing plans aren’t static documents, they are actionable guides that can and should be edited and reworked when necessary.  

Your plan helps take the guesswork out of connecting with prospective customers — it serves as a roadmap for your marketing efforts and ensures you aren’t throwing money away on random tactics. Unless you have plenty of disposable income (and who does?), you want to know that the money you invest in marketing is well-spent.

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

-Benjamin Franklin

Keep in mind that no two marketing plans are exactly alike. Depending on your business and specific needs, you may end up with a more simple or complex plan. But regardless of its length and complexity, your plan should always be backed by research and data.

Let’s look at what you need to have prepared in order to write a business marketing plan. 

Preparing to write your business marketing plan

Before you sit down to write your marketing plan, you should have an idea of what data supports and informs it. Take a look at the following list and make sure to have this information handy as it will help guide the shape your plan takes.   

Your business’s mission statement

A mission statement sets the tone for your business. It’s a short, and to-the-point statement that describes the purpose of your business and it informs your business decisions.   

Ideal customer persona

Your ideal customer persona, also called a buyer persona, is like an archetype of your perfect customer. Creating a customer persona gives you a better understanding of their needs and how to address them.

This persona should include actionable information, like:

• Their demographics (age, income, location, etc.).
• Goals and challenges.
• Their interests.
• Any relevant behavioral traits.

Your customer persona should give insight into how you can better communicate with your prospective customers — from where you can find them to share your message (i.e. on social media) to what language you should use (for example, avoiding jargon and buzzwords.)

Target market information

Identifying your target market is a lot like identifying your ideal customer persona; however, there are a few key differences.

While they both involve demographics and psychographics, your target market deals with a broader group of potential and prospective customers. Your target market could be people in a certain age or income bracket, whereas your ideal customer represents a more segmented piece of that market. 

General market information

When we talk about knowing your general marketing information, we’re talking about your customers, competitors, suppliers, along with industry news and trends.

Look at your competitors, the businesses offering products and services similar to yours, and try to identify the following things:

• What are they doing well?
• What are they doing poorly?
• Do you know what their customers look like?
• What differentiates you from them?
• What marketing materials do they use?
• Where do they share their message?

Knowing these things helps you understand what works and prevents you from making their mistakes.

Have you taken the time to know your suppliers? What’s available to you and when? This helps you plan your inventory and can help as your business picks up and demand grows.

Keeping your finger on the pulse of your industry is always a good idea. It helps to know when there are new trends you can capitalize on, and it can provide insight into your own products and processes.

Your business goals

Your business marketing plan exists to support your business goals. It’s never a bad idea to restate your goals and come back to them often. This keeps them front-of-mind and helps you craft a marketing plan that ultimately supports your goals.

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.”

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 

Business marketing plan elements

Now that you’ve prepared, it’s time to work on drafting your marketing plan.

Not all marketing plans look exactly the same — you can create email marketing plans, social media marketing plans, and various others. Below, we’ll provide a basic framework you can use to create a general business marketing plan, but feel free to customize or tweak it for more specialized marketing plans.  

1. Description of your business and goals.
2. Describe your target market and ideal buyer persona.
3. Defining SMART goals.
4. Marketing tactics.
5. Measuring success.
6. Roles and responsibilities.

1. Description of your business and goals

The first step in writing any business marketing plan is to lay the groundwork.

Your mission statement helps direct your business, and it helps direct your marketing plan, too. Don’t use your general mission statement in your plan; instead, adapt it so that you have a similar statement to set the tone for your marketing plan.

For example, HomeChef’s mission statement is “to make cooking fresh food at home as easy as possible.” That could be turned into a marketing mission statement by editing it so that it reads, “to engage an audience of amateur and time-starved home cooks, educate them on the joys of cooking, and turn them into subscribers of our service.”

In one fell swoop, you’ve both set out your mission statement and created a goal that the rest of your plan will help support. 

2. Describe your target market and ideal buyer persona

There are people out there who need and want your services, but they don’t know about you yet: Who are they?

Let’s continue with the example we used above — in that statement, we’ve identified that we’re looking to market to an audience of “amateur and time-starved home cooks.”

This section should address that market: Where do you find these people? What are their worries and how can your product or service answer their needs? What do they “look like” (demographics, income, etc.)?

This is also a good time to think about your competition. How do you stand out in your target market? Do you have a unique selling proposition (USP) that differentiates you from other similar businesses? If you don’t know what sets you apart then it’s going to be difficult to target your market and make sales.

All of this information helps you think of, discover, and revise your marketing strategies and tactics, which we’ll get into shortly. 

3. Define your S.M.A.R.T. goals

Smart goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. They make you think practically and realistically, breaking down lofty ideas into achievable goals.

Your marketing mission statement is a great starting place when drafting your specific goals. In our example, we said that our mission is “to engage an audience of amateur and time-starved home cooks, educate them on the joys and techniques of cooking, and turn them into subscribers of our service.”

Now, it’s your job to think of how that can be turned into more specific, actionable goals. We’ll share an example to give you an idea of how it’s done.

We know our target audience cooks at home, but they’re often at a loss for time and might not know all the proper cooking techniques. In researching their behaviors, we discovered that they use certain social media channels for meal ideas. With this information, we can create the following smart goal:

• Set aside one hour each week to create short videos that illustrate our simple, delicious recipes, and share those on social media to create interest in our service.

That goal shows you understand your need to create brand awareness and are sensitive to your ideal customer’s time and abilities, and that you know where to find them online. It also gives you a concrete, achievable goal that you can easily put into practice. 

4. Marketing tactics

Fundamentally, your marketing strategy is designed to promote your products and services so that you can convert customers.  

Your marketing tactics are the specific things you do to support your overall strategy and plan, and can be made up of many different activities, like the following:

• Public relations
• Online marketing
  • Social Media
  • Email
  • Website
• Sales and promotions
• Other marketing materials

You can use this section of your plan to detail the tactics and channels you’ll use to communicate your marketing messages in support of your smart goals. 

5. Measuring success

As a small business owner, you don’t have the time or energy to invest in wasted marketing efforts. Implementing KPIs, or key performance indicators is a great way to measure the efficacy of your marketing and helps you understand what’s working and what isn’t.

If one of your goals is to increase brand awareness through the use of social media, then you might want to consider social share of voice as a KPI. Social share of voice (SSoV) helps you understand how much people are talking about you versus others in your industry. If your SSoV increases on platforms where you share your marketing messages, you can assume that your strategy and tactics are working.

If you’re running a seasonal promotion on certain products, you can look to your click-through rates and conversion rates to see if they drove any increase in traffic and sales on your site. Google Analytics is a great, free tool that can help you understand your website performance. 

6. Roles and responsibilities

Do you require others to help support and implement your marketing plan? Use this final section to define what everyone’s responsibilities are so there’s no question or debate.

Implement your business marketing plan

And there you go! Using this guide, you should be able to craft a business marketing plan that helps direct your efforts so you can achieve your goals.  

Do you have any tips and tricks to share with other entrepreneurs as they craft their marketing plans? If so, share them in the comments below and let us know what’s worked for you.

Getting online is a critical part of successfully reaching the people that matter most when you’re looking to promote your business, showcase your work, or raise funds for an important cause. An online presence is how your audience will find you, learn what you have to offer, and potentially become loyal customers, fans, and supporters. 

What is a niche?

One of the very first steps of marketing yourself online is picking a niche. A niche is the industry or genre that you specialize in and the types of products or services that you offer. Some popular niche markets of 2019 are alternative health and diets, environmentally responsible living, and the latest modes of transportation. Essentially, it’s a particular market that you know you can serve over and over again. 

Why finding your niche is important. 

Finding your niche will help you to strategically concentrate your efforts in one direction. If you’re clear on what you offer and who your audience is, you will be able to best determine how to entice them. 

A new business that attempts to market itself to the masses often results with a watered-down message. Creatives often seem more experienced when they have a distinct specialty, and non-profits can seem more trustworthy when known for benefiting a specific cause. 

Marketing with focus will help you build expert status in your space. You will be able to bring value to your potential audience by identifying and meeting their unique needs. Starting with a small, well-defined niche doesn’t mean you can’t expand into other spaces as you grow. Take notes from contemporary culture online publisher, Milk.xyz. They have been able to expand beyond writing about innovative brands to rolling out their own collaborations and podcast due to the growth of their community.

How to pick your niche. 

1) Explore the possibilities.

Start defining your niche by making a list of possible ideas. Some questions to ask yourself are:

• What is my biggest passion or interest? 
  • Think about your hobbies and the ways you like to spend your free time.
• What problem can I help solve? 
  • You may want to review questions on internet forums to find what people are asking.
• If I won the lottery, how would I spend my days?
  • Consider what you might find fulfilling if money was not an object (after the shopping spree and around-the-world trip is over).

This is exactly what Chicago Tribune reporter, Louisa Chu, and WBEZ’s Monica Eng did when they started Chewing.xyz. The pair combined their shared interest in food culture to create a podcast and website that explores the intersection of good food, good health, and good policy. 

2) Determine value and public interest.

Next, pick the top three ideas and narrow them down by general interest and profit potential. It’s important to know if there is an audience out there that can benefit from what you have to offer, and there are a few ways that you can determine this. 

A useful way to gauge general interest and profitability is by checking keyword search query reports online. Generally, focus on keywords with at least 10,000 search queries in order to find a niche with a substantial audience. A high level of competition is not necessarily a bad thing, as competition means there is a market interested and ready to buy. A low level of competition may mean that there are not many interested people out there. 

Another way to measure the market size for niche topics is by checking the amount of books, articles, and papers written about it. If there is a substantial volume of work on your topic out there, then that means publishers have deemed it to be a profitable subject, publications consider it to be newsworthy, and researchers find it to be important. A low amount of published work on the subject could mean that there’s relatively low public interest on the subject.

3) Decide how to stand out.

After determining which topics have an interested market, it’s time to research the competition. Search the keywords associated with your niche and see what and who comes up. Start logging all of the major competitors and defining the characteristics that make you stand out in the crowd. 

Key differentiators may be the pricing, level of quality, and innovation of your product or service. 

Fashion tastemaker, JovelRoystan.xyz, stands out from other influencers by catering his content towards ambitious young professionals, and sharing on-trend style sharp enough for the office.

One way that anyone can instantly differentiate themselves is with content and design. An expertly branded website with clear navigation and functionality can be the ultimate decider for a new customer or supporter. 

Get a domain name that is the exact name of your business, or your first and last name, so your audience can easily find you online. An .xyz domain is generic yet memorable, so it’s perfect for any niche market.

Register your .xyz domain today to start building your online reputation! 

9 High-Growth Niche Terms

¹Source: Google Trends

Seems like just yesterday we were toasting one another while wishing everyone a Happy New Year. And yet here we are, nearing the end of the year’s first quarter. If you’re looking to increase your sales before the month is out, you’re in luck — this is the blog post for you.

March is a festive month. You can’t deny the popularity of celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. It’s a day where people “claim” Irish heritage, wear green, attend parades, eat corned beef and cabbage, and perhaps even drink a Guinness or two.

According to the National Retail Federation’s Annual St. Patrick’s Day Spending Survey, 56% of Americans plan on celebrating this year, and that jumps to 73% in the 18-34 year old demographic. If that age group is part of your target audience, don’t skip this holiday.

We’re not going to focus on how to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day as we’re pretty sure you’ve got that covered. Instead, we’re exploring St. Paddy’s day marketing tips and ideas to help your business do more business.

This year, consumers are expected to spend a total of $6.16 billion for St. Patrick’s Day, so let’s make sure you get some of that pot of gold.

5 St. Patrick’s Day Marketing Tips and Ideas for Your Website and Business

1 – Dress Yourself and Your Site Appropriately

The most popular way to celebrate St. Patty’s day, by far, is to wear green. In fact, it’s how 79% percent of people surveyed said they’d celebrate this year.

Consider adding some green elements to your website to get into the spirit. You can accomplish this by temporarily updating your color scheme (many website builders offer the ability to toggle between different colors and themes) or adding some St. Paddy’s-centric images to your site.

If you can’t afford to splurge on expensive stock imagery for a seasonal holiday promotion, don’t worry! Check out these free image resources where you’re sure to find what you need. (Bonus: these aren’t just for St. Paddy’s day materials; you can refer to these resources whenever your site needs a refresh.)

Do you have a brick-and-mortar business? Encourage your employees to get in on the St. Paddy’s Day spirit. They can help decorate your store or restaurant with St. Paddy’s Day decorations and wear green to celebrate the festivities.

Make your location a place where someone would want to celebrate the holiday, or if you’re in retail, make it apparent that you sell the holiday-related materials and supplies they need.

2 – Help Your Customers Save Some Green

Saving money feels good. Saving the planet feels better. Help your customers do one, or both, this March.

Encourage your customers to start “thinking green” as a way to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. Consider offering to donate a certain percentage of your profits that day to a “green-friendly” organization, like The Nature Conservancy, or run a promotion on environmentally friendly items, like reusable straws and bags.

In doing so, you’re keeping to a green theme that’s in line with St. Patrick’s Day, and giving your customers a reason to feel good about themselves and the impact they’re making on the environment (and their pocketbook.)

3 – Make the Most of Email Marketing

 Are you using email marketing on your website?

If not, now’s the time. Email helps you stay top-of-mind with your customers and subscribers, and can bring people to your site when they aren’t otherwise thinking of you. 

Make the St. Patrick’s day theme immediately apparent in your customer’s inbox by paying attention to your subject line. Your subject lines should be short and to the point, like “Save some green this St. Patrick’s Day ☘️” or “Feeling lucky? Today’s your day to save. 🌈☘️” Using emojis is a great way to attract attention, but as with everything, don’t overdo it.

Your themed email can include special offers, links to St. Patrick’s day goods for sale, recipes, trivia, and more. Make it worth your reader’s while, but be mindful not to overwhelm them with content. You can include “Read More” links back to your website from your email, thereby bringing them back to your site where they can transact.

Pro-tip: When your email address matches your domain name, it creates trust in the inbox. 

4 – The Luck of the Draw

Who doesn’t like winning?

Incentivize your customers, email subscribers, and social media followers to interact with your business by running a sweepstakes or giveaway.

St. Patrick’s Day lends itself well to sweepstakes and giveaways because we often associate luck with leprechauns and the Emerald Isle. Create a sense of excitement around your business with a giveaway, and leave one lucky winner (or more, depending on how you decide to structure your sweepstakes) feeling sweet on your business.

5 – Be Respectful

Why do we celebrate holidays?

Holidays and days of festivity are commonplace the world over. They’re intended as days to celebrate what’s important to us, and many places take their holidays seriously.

Above all else, when celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, be respectful of Irish tradition and culture. A simple example is knowing the difference between a shamrock and four-leaf clover, as only one of them is actually a symbol of Ireland. And make sure to avoid any negative Irish stereotypes in all of your marketing materials.  

Being respectful and mindful of different cultures will help you celebrate St. Paddy’s Day, and will help ensure that your marketing isn’t tone deaf and falling flat.

March is your lucky month.

If you want to see a little extra gold this month, consider joining in on the St. Patrick’s Day celebrations both online and off.

Consumers are poised to spend a record-breaking $6 billion USD this year on St. Patrick’s Day supplies, like clothing and entertaining goods, and celebrations, like going out for food and drink.

How will you be celebrating St. Patrick’s Day? Do you have any marketing ideas for the holiday? We’d love to know, so leave a note in the comments.

If you think about advertising, it’s a lot like bragging, isn’t it? Except, in this case, you’re paying to talk about yourself and get your differentiator in your audience’s face. Sometimes, prospective customers get tired of hearing us talk about ourselves and if that’s the case, what alternatives do we have? 

Enter word of mouth marketing. If you don’t have a word of mouth strategy already defined, you’ll want to do that after reading this article. 

Get a memorable domain name so others can easily remember it and share it with their friends.

What is word of mouth marketing and why should I invest in it?

You’re probably wondering, “What is word of mouth marketing and how can it help me brag less about myself while inspiring others to talk about my business?” Dear internet reader, we’re glad you asked. 

Entrepreneur’s Small Business Encyclopedia defines word of mouth as:

Jay Baer, of Convince & Convert, takes it further and breaks word of mouth down into two buckets: proactive and reactive. How does he define the two? 

Reactive word of mouth: You can think of reactive word of mouth as similar to referrals. When someone is looking for a solution to their needs, they may ask their friends and family for a recommendation. Their family and friends react to their question by recommending a solution or business that they’ve used before and enjoyed. 

Proactive word of mouth: Proactive word of mouth is generally unasked for. An example of proactive word of mouth is when someone is so happy with an experience or service they tell all their friends about it — even if their friends aren’t asking for those details and recommendations — they’re proactively sharing that experience or recommendation.

Is one form of word of mouth, either proactive or reactive, better than the other? Both are great! Both will do wonders for your business. But if we had to rank them, we’d give the edge to proactive word of mouth. That’s because proactive word of mouth isn’t asked for — those people are willingly taking time out of their day to shout your praises and share your product just because they like you. When someone is that happy with your service, you know you’re doing something right. 

Does word of mouth marketing make a difference to my bottom line?

Developing a word of mouth strategy for your business can affect your bottom line in two ways.

1. Saves you money on paid advertising
   1. Remember, if you make your customers’ experiences great, they will brag for you and about you. (Subpar and good experiences won’t cut it. Work to impress.) This could lead to a reduction in how much you spend on traditional advertising. 
2. Brings in new business.
   1. In his study, Chatter Matters, Jay Baer discovered that “83% of Americans are more interested in purchasing a product or service when they’ve received a verbal recommendation from a friend or family member.” You need to kindle those conversations and make your business worth talking about!

How do I increase word of mouth about my business?

That’s a really good question, and we don’t blame you if you’re stumped. You can smile and thank every customer that walks in your door or visits your site, but that’s not enough. You can give them a good shopping experience, or a good website experience, yet that’s not enough either. 

In order for people to talk about your business, they need a good reason. Better yet, they need a great reason. Pleasantries and run-of-the-mill good experiences aren’t noteworthy — they’re expected. Ready for some good news? You don’t need to deck your store or site out in wall-to-wall neon colors and pull outrageous stunts to get attention. All you need to do is create a “talk trigger.” 

What’s a talk trigger? 

Jay defines a talk trigger as “a strategic, operational differentiator that compels word of mouth, reliably creating customer chatter on an ongoing basis.” Your talk trigger should be something you do, not something you say, to set yourself apart and make yourself, specifically your business, a worthwhile topic of conversation. 

In his book, Jay uses DoubleTree hotels by Hilton as an example of a business with a great talk trigger. Whenever someone checks into those hotels, they’re given a fresh chocolate chip cookie. What does this one action do for them in return? It gets about 25 thousand customers talking about their hotel on social media, in a positive light, per day. If you’ve ever found yourself talking about DoubleTree’s cookies, we hate to break it to you, but you were the walking talking advertisement for the hotel. And we bet you were happy to do it!

What makes for a good talk trigger? To explain, Jay lays out the four Rs:

1. Remarkable – Give them something worth talking about, and remarkable doesn’t necessarily mean BIG.
2. Relevant – If it’s not relevant, it’s not memorable.
3. Reasonable – You get a car! And you get a car! And you get a car! Doesn’t sound so reasonable now does it?
4. Repeatable – Talk triggers don’t work if only one or two people talk about them. They must be repeatable. 

Get a memorable domain name so others can easily remember it and share it with their friends.

Can I create a word of mouth worthy experience on my website?

We believe that you can, yes. However, in order to create a word of mouth worthy experience on your website, you’re going to have to cover your bases. Here are our some of our top recommendations to make your website worth talking about. 

• Design your site with your user’s experience in mind. 
  • How will they navigate your site? Are all the buttons visible and working on both desktop and mobile? Taking the time to work through these little kinks improves the end user experience, and will make them think more kindly of your site.
• Provide good content.
  • Good content is what keeps people on your site. A lack of it won’t inspire conversation. 
• Make sure you have the right hosting package.
  • If you expect a lot of website traffic, don’t choose the skimpiest hosting package. The more traffic your website receives the more bandwidth you need to provide a seamless, glitch-free experience to your visitors.
• Know your audience. 
  • You can’t provide a relevant talk trigger (remember the 4 Rs?) if you don’t know your audience. Get to know what motivates them and what they enjoy, and you’ll find it easier to speak their language and market to them effectively. 

What defines your word of mouth marketing strategy?

Your word of mouth strategy will probably look a little different from your neighbors’ and your competitors’ strategies — and that’s ok! People don’t talk about things that are commonplace and mundane. So let your differences shine.

Have you implemented any talk triggers or word of mouth strategies? We’d love to hear about what’s worked for you and what hasn’t. Let us know in the comments!

Pop Quiz: Where do you start?

A)    Digital Marketing

B)    Social Media Marketing

C)    Cold calling

D)    Direct mailers

E)    TV advertising

F)     All of the above

Our point is that it’s hard to know where to crack the marketing nut.

There’s so much information about marketing available at your fingertips that it’s overwhelming. We’re going to get down to marketing basics: what it is and how it’s done, to make life easier for you. Once we’ve covered the basics of marketing we’ll discuss different tactics that you can employ today and some that you can plan for.

Marketing, a definition

If you search Merriam-Webster you’ll find marketing defined as

Look to Dictionary.com and you’ll see

Marketing, in a nutshell, is about getting your product or services in front of people who will purchase them. It’s been around for generations.

You’ve heard of the ancient Greeks, right? What do you think they were doing when they loaded their goods into their carts and brought them to the agora? It wasn’t so people had something to look at, it was to get their products in front of prospective customers. Imagine a crowded Greek marketplace with multiple people selling the same product — they’re competing for the same customers. They need to cut through the noise and get the attention of the buyers so maybe they have a catchy slogan, or brightly colored carts, or a device to amplify the volume of their voice. These could be called ancient Greek marketing tactics.*

We doubt you’re pulling your goods to a crowded, hilltop market in Greece, so your marketing tactics are going to look a little different.

It all starts with the right domain. Get yours today at Domain.com.

An explanation of common marketing terms you’ll encounter

It’s hard to walk the marketer’s walk if you can’t talk the talk. We get it. Here are some common marketing terms you should know.

• Analytics– The information that you get from analyzing data or statistics.
• B2B– Business-to-business. If you sell products or services to other businesses, you’re in the B2B category.
• B2C– Business-to-consumer. If you sell products or services directly to consumers (including e-commerce, or online sales), you’re in this category.
• Bounce Rate– This measures the number or percentage of people who land on your website, but leave it after looking at only one page.
• Brand– A brand is a tricky thing to define. Here’s a good summary.
• Buyer Persona– A representation of what your ideal customer looks like: what motivates them, what are they trying to accomplish, what are their behaviors, and their demographics.
• Click-through-rate (CTR)- This measures the number of times someone clicks on your advertising or marketing materials. It’s a measurement of engagement.
• Conversion Rate– The number or percentage of people on your site who take the action you want them to take (make a purchase, get more information, sign up for your email list, etc.)
• Data– The statistics and facts you collect for analysis.
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)– KPIs describe the quantifiable ways you measure success. For example, if I were to send an email newsletter, I might choose open rate and click-through-rate as two of my KPIs.
• Marketing– We’ve got this one covered. If you’ve forgotten, see the start of this post.
• Marketing Funnel– A model of the path a prospective customer takes to become a paying customer.

Marketing tactics for your small business or side gig

What marketing tactics are best for you? There are so many that it can be difficult knowing where to begin. Unless you have a large marketing budget, you’re not ready for national TV advertising, so let’s look at other options.

• Email Newsletter– Email marketing is a great way for your customers (or prospective customers) to stay connected to you. Consider providing updates on sales, coupons, or special offers for your frequent readers.
• Podcast– What’s your expertise or interest? Can you provide value and insight to your customers by creating podcasts? Depending on your goals your podcast can vary from an entertaining overview of a recent comic (if you’re looking to drive engagement and build a fan base) or you can provide short, actionable tips and advice for your listeners.
• Blog– Blogs aren’t just for stay-at-home moms who share recipes. Writing blog posts increases your subject matter authority and can help your website rank higher in search engine results.
• Social Media– You don’t have to be on every single social media platform, but you should be where your customers, or potential customers, are. Share tips, tricks, offers, and build a community with your followers.
• Website– This is your home base. Your website should be built around the end user experience. Make it easy for your website visitors to find what they’re looking for or complete a purchase. If your website stinks, your marketing can only do so much.
• SEO– Search Engine Optimization. There are some great resources that exist to help you understand what you can do to rank higher in search engine results. There’s a lot to learn when it comes to SEO, so don’t get down on yourself if you can’t master it all in a day.

Keep in mind that no matter how you start your marketing efforts, you should go into it with an idea of what your customers look like and what motivates them; this is what allows you to cater your marketing strategy and tactics for success.

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Ready to take on your marketing?

The word “marketing” shouldn’t strike fear into your heart. Marketing has been around for centuries, and whether or not you realize it, you’ve probably already started marketing your business (word-of-mouth counts, so have you told anyone about your business?) Use our definitions of common marketing terms and suggestions for small business marketing tactics to jumpstart your marketing efforts today.

What else do you suggest a small business owner, or someone just starting a side business, do to start their marketing? Any advice that you’ve learned through experience? We’d love to know, so share it below in the comments.

*The author is no scholar on ancient Greece or Greek civilization. These events are dramatized as an illustration. Though, if you are an expert and have some background information to share, post it in the comments.