Marketing 101: Learn the basic marketing concepts everyone needs to know - SocialBee (2023)

Welcome to Marketing 101! The only item you have to create yourselfMarketing plan.

So if you're a small business owner or a new aspiring marketer, stay tuned because today we're going to talk about:

• what is marketing
• The 4 P's of Marketing
• The most important marketing skills for small business owners
• The best digital marketing channels for your next campaigns
• How to develop an effective marketing strategy
• Top 3 Small Business Marketing Tools

Let's start with some marketing basics!

What is Marketing?

Marketing refers to a range of activities designed to promote and sell products and services to a specific audience.In addition, it includes all practices used to get people interested in a product or service, such as advertising,The communication tactics, market research and more.

The 4 P's of Marketing

The 4 Ps of marketing (the marketing mix) are key elements that help companies create a strategy for promoting their products.

By considering the 4 Ps of marketing, businesses can consider aspects such as their market, target audience, and key competitors to create a successful marketing plan.

The 4 Ps of marketing are:

• product -Define the key features of your product, including unique features and benefits that will make your audience buy it.
• Preis -Decide on a price that reflects the quality of your product while still being within your customer's financial capabilities. Make sure you research your market and competitors before making the final decision.
• Financial support -Develop a strategyand outline the main communication channels and activities you will use to promote your products.
• Placement –Identify the locations you need to manufacture and sell your products.

Marketing Skills for Small Business Owners

As a small business owner, you're probably used to being independent and, let's face it, good at everything. So it's only natural that you also want to develop yourselfmarketing skills.

So, let's go through the basic skills every small business owner should master to improve their marketing efforts.

content creation

What is marketing without content? Difficult to imagine, isn't it?

Knowing how to craft key messages and present your business in a positive light that resonates with your target market is a must.Even if you have a team of experienced content writers, you need to understand and keep up with the latest content creation practices to evaluate their work and optimize yoursmarketing strategies.

digital advertising

Today, the majority of the advertising you do for your products and services takes place online on social media, web browsers, websites, apps and more.

You have to go beyond identificationthe right platforms for your brandand learn about the practices that increase your company's visibility.

As you probably know by now, each marketing channel has a unique set of characteristics that contribute to your success.

For example, if you want to win moreWebsite-Traffic, you need to learn about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to drive more traffic to your business website.

Outreach-Marketing

In order to market your business and build authority in your niche, you need to know how to find the right opportunities.Outreach marketing refers to the practice of finding blogs and websites where you could promote your products and services.

But that's not all. You also need to contact the owners and negotiate the possibility of having your business advertised on their website.This is an important skill as it can dramatically improve your search engine marketing, increase your authority, and help you build meaningful business relationships.

project management

While working in marketing, you have several ongoing projects that you need to work on at the same time.

So, as an entrepreneur, you need to know how to:

1. Manage your marketing teams
2. meet deadlines
3. coordinate projects
4. Keep your marketing budget under control

Not to mention you need to be organized and able to move from one project to another and find time for each.

sales knowledge

As we've talked about before, the main goal of marketing is to attract customers and sell more of your products and services.

So it goes without saying that business owners and marketers should know how to:

1. identify sales opportunities
2. Understand customer needs and offer solutions
3. Create attractive offers and promotions
4. Convince consumers to make a purchase
5. Ensure a positive customer experience

The best digital marketing channels for your next marketing campaigns

Now that we've covered the concept of marketing and the skills every small business owner should master, it's time to better understand the best marketing channels to use to grow your business.

Let's start with...

Social-Media-Marketing

Did you know that54% of social browsersUse social media for product research?

Well, now do it. So let that sink in.

You can find almost any business on social media these days - as you should. But the goal is not only to have a business account, but also to maintain an active online presence.

Why is that so important?There are several good reasons.

What you need to remember is that social media allows you to:

• Promote your business
• Increase your brand's visibility
• Build a loyal customer community

In addition, you can interact and communicate with your prospects, learn their needs and challenges directly from them - how handy.

Additionally, active business accounts that post regularly have a better chance of reaching more customers:more posts = more attention.

That being said, some social platforms value consistency, which means their algorithm will improve your posts and show them to a larger audience, such as Youtube and TikTok.

It's true that if you want to successfully market your business on social media, you need to invest time and effort into creating valuable content for your audience. But not as much as you might think.

We have some sweet news for you - SocialBee is here to automate your content creation process. Why go to every social platform to create and post content when you can do it from one dashboard.

SocialBee's content editor allows you to customize posts for any social network from one place.

Power your social media marketing by creating, editing and scheduling all your content with SocialBee!

Create and schedule your posts in advance, repurpose your evergreen content, and use SocialBee's integrations to curate relevant content for your audience. So easy!

Start your free 14-day trial todayand explore the helpful features SocialBee has to offer!

Influencer-Marketing

In recent years, the potential of this type of marketing has increased significantly. There seem to be a handfulInfluencers for every business niche.

Even if you sell smoothies, you can still find a fitness guru willing to champion your fresh and healthy produce.

Collaborating with influencers is something brands should consider regularly.

Here are some of the reasons why:

• It increases brand exposure
• It boosts sales
• It provides more credibility

And if these benefits aren't enough for you, get ready:Businesses earn $5.78(even up to $18) for every dollar they invest in influencer marketing. Great ROI if you ask us.

content marketing

content marketingdoes not just refer to social media content, it is a much larger part of marketing and includes all types of content from blog posts to video tutorials - basically any type of content that you share with your audience , to interest your company.

Its success depends on consistency, quantity and quality. Additionally, it's a mix of great content and smart marketing practices that can boost its performance.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

We cannot name our itemMarketing 101Not to mention search engine optimization. It would be like making a sandwich without adding the sauce. Craziness!

No matter how great your content is, you can't reach your audience before your competitors without SEO.

Let's take a look at some of the most important onesThe SEO practicethis brings you closer to your customers:

1. Use relevant keywords that match your audience's search intent
2. Adding internal and external links to your content
3. Improving the performance of your websiteand designs
4. Include visible CTAs in your content
5. Optimize images and URLs

E-Mail Marketing

Email marketing is a powerful channel that can help you drive more website traffic and increase your sales. In addition, this effective marketing channel helps your brand stay in the mind and increase customer loyalty.

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There are many email marketing platforms you can use to share your content and nurture your leads such asAWeber,Sendinblue, AndOmni Shipping.

Videomarketing

Not only are videos great for increasing reach and engagement, but they are also smart business practices for lead generation. As a matter of fact,83% of marketersfound that video content helped them generate more leads.

While it's true that more effort is put into creating video clips, it's no reason to give up on video marketing entirely, especially when it produces such great results.

Here are someVideo ideathat don't require professional equipment that you can craft and reuse for multiple marketing channels:

1. Go live on social media, save the recording and use it on your YouTube channel.
2. Create product videos and use them on your website, blog and social media.
3. Film a tutorial and share it across all your marketing channels.
4. Lay yourOn-Demand Webinarsand share them with your audience after the event as well.

Paid ads and pay per click

To achieve marketing success, you need to know how to organic and blendpaid practices. If you only use one of these, you will not reach your full potential.

Today, ads have become so targeted that you can reach people based on their interests and hobbies. Over and beyond,PPC advertisingallows brands to promote their stores to customers searching for the type of products and services they sell.

The best part is that companies only pay when people click on the ad, and they can also see exactly how much they're spending on PPC and how much they're getting back.

Over and beyond,Social Media Adsare also very effective, making it easier for brands to connect with specific segments of their audience and increase sales.

Now that we've got marketing channels out of the way, it's time to dive into the eight essential marketing strategies you should be using for your business.

But remember, just because they're basic marketing concepts doesn't mean they're any less important than other practices. On the contrary, they are the cornerstones of your marketing plan.

Let's not waste any more time and get straight into the most effective marketing strategies that everyone needs to know.

Also check out our top 7 most effective onesMarketing Strategies for Small Businesses Under $100.

Step 1: Set marketing goals

Every successful project starts with a clear objective.

It may not seem like a big deal, but it's a step you don't want to overlook.

Let's think of it this way: creating a marketing strategy without hiringmarketing goalsis like trying to go out with your friends but no one knows where or when you should meet up. Of course, since you don't know the place, you don't know how to get there either.

Your goals are your goal - only we're not talking about a physical location, we're talking about the results you want to achieve.

The best way to start a new marketing project is to formulate specific goals that define:

1. what you want to achieve
2. How do you intend to achieve this?
3. When should you be able to reach your goal
4. How to measure success

When in doubt, you can always stick to the S.M.A.R.T goal formula:

Now let's move on to step two and see how you can monitor your progress.

Step 2: Establish your core metrics

Their marketing strategy involves using different channels and creating multiple campaigns throughout the year.

With so much going on, it would be difficult to monitor your progress and see how close you are to meeting your marketing goals if you don't have established metrics to monitor.

These quantifiable measurements are also referred to asKey Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Depending on the campaign you're running or the marketing channel you're using, there are different KPIs you can use to measure your progress.

In the following table you will find the most important marketing key figures.

• Return on Investment –The profit you make compared to the money invested in marketing.
• Return on Advertising Spend –The profit generated for every dollar spent on advertising.
• Customer Acquisition Cost –The financial resources you need to devote to lead generation.
• Market Qualified Leads –A lead who has engaged with your business and has the potential to become a serious prospect.
• Sales Qualified Leads –A serious prospect ready to make a purchase.
• Exchange rate -The number of visitors who took the requested action.
• Website Visitors –The number of people who have visited your website.
• Referral traffic –The source of your website visitors.
• Social-Media-Engagement –The number of likes/comments/shares/mentions on social media.
• Follower Growth –The number of new followers you gain on social media.
• Net Promoter Score –customer satisfaction
• Organic Traffic –The free traffic you get from search engines to your website.
• customer retention -The ability to retain a customer for a period of time.
• The lifetime value of a customer –The total profit a company can make from just one customer.

Now that you know your core metrics, you can start using itGoogle Analyticsto monitor your progress and see how close you are to your goalmarketing goals.

Step 3: Know your target audience

who is yourtarget group?

The answer to this question determines your entire marketing strategy. After all, the goal is to get people to discover your brand and convince them to buy from you.

But how can you gather all the information you need about your audience?

Very simple, here's what you want to do:

1. Go through your social media andGoogle Analyticsand write down the most relevant information.
2. Go tostatesmanand look at the demographics of each social media platform to figure out where to find your customers.
3. Create a survey and share it on social media or send it to your customer base to gather more information.
4. UseSocial-Media-Monitoring-Toolsto find the people talking about your business.
5. Look at the people who are following your competitors on social media.

We know that it may seem difficult to keep all this information, especially when it comes from so many sources. So next you want to create a buyer persona or more (depending on your business model) and give structure to all the data you need.

Basically, by creating a buyer persona, you develop a fictional character to represent your audience.

Here are the key details you should provide:

• Name
• Demographic Information
• Interests
• behavioral characteristics
• Challenges/ Pain Points
• Goals
• Values
• buying behavior
• needs
• Wishes

Download ourHow to create a social media marketing planand also access the fully editable buyer persona template. Use the template to create your own ideal customer profile in less than 10 minutes.

Step 4: Conduct competitive research

If you want to keep up with the competition, you must first do research to identify their strengths and weaknesses. As a result, you collect valuable information that will come in handy when you want to improve your strategy, your content, and even your services.

For example, if when conducting your competitor analysis you find that most of their complaints indicate that they deliver orders late or in poor condition, you could improve your delivery system and use it as a quid pro quoUSPwhile promoting your products and services.

Take a look at the aspects to consider when conducting your competitive analysis:

• target group
• Pricing Information
• Website design
• Social-Media-Strategie
• Content Marketing Strategy
• Email Marketing Strategy
• Digital Marketing Strategy
• Sales Materials and Activities
• business reviews
• mood/public opinion

Access ourSocial media audit templateand use our competitive analysis sheet to research your competition faster and easier than ever.

Step 5: Get to know the marketing funnel

TheMarketing Funnelis a simple concept that informs companies what they need to improve in their strategy based on their customers' journey.

To better understand the marketing funnel, let's look at its three stages:

• Top of Funnel (TOFU): Customers don't know about your company's products or services.
• Center of Funnel (MOFU): Customers are looking for your products.
• Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU): Customers want to buy from your company.

Let's say you have a decent number of website visitors, which means your customers are now taking notice of your products. However, there are not enough conversions compared to your weekly traffic.

That means you lose customers after the MOFU phase. So you need to work on improving your website. Perhaps you could add more visible CTAs, use a chatbot to initiate conversations with your customers, add a popup asking them to subscribe to your newsletter, and more.

Step 6: Identify your key marketing channels and activities

For this step, consider the data you've gathered through your audience and competitor research so far, while keeping an eye on your marketing funnel.

Aside from that, you also need to align your marketing goals with the channel and activities you want to addMarketing plan. This keeps you focused on achieving your most important goals.

The following questions will help you decide on your most important marketing channels and activities:

1. What are the best social media channels for your business?
2. What are the top activities that can help you overcome your weaknesses?
3. What can you borrow from your competition?
4. When are the best times of the year when you could run advertising campaigns to increase your sales?
5. How can you turn your strengths into business growth opportunities?

Step 7: Create an editorial calendar

The content you publish for your audience is a constant source of business opportunities. It has the potential to increase your website traffic, help you generate new leads, nurture your relationship with your customers, and increase your sales.

For these reasons, you need to focus on maintaining a consistent publishing schedule across your business blog and social media platforms, and sending regular emails and newsletters to your customers.

While this may sound like a daunting task, it's actually quite simple once you get the hang of itCreate an editorial calendar.

This will help you organize all of your ideas and materials you need to maintain a consistent release schedule and deliver your content on time.

Not to mention keeping your content writing team up to date with your content marketing strategy.

And to help you put together an editorial calendar in no time, we've created a free editable template that you can access below.

Step 8: Monitor your marketing strategy to maximize your ROI

Be prepared to adapt and improve your strategy over time.

No matter how much thought and effort you put into your marketing, you will still encounter situations that produce a different result in practice.Because of this, it's important that you: Regularly review your analytics, change what's not working, and evaluate whether your activities are bringing you enough profit.

Remember, you can use SocialBee to find out how many people have seen and interacted with your posts and to identify your top-performing content.

Monitor your social media performance with SocialBee. Access data from an easy-to-use dashboard: activity status, audience growth, post reach, and engagement levels. Start your 14-day free trial today!

You can also monitor the growth of your accounts by looking at the evolution of your follower count.

Additionally, you can access your post history to view your past posts in chronological order. This helps you track and constantly improve your social media activity.

To make sure yourThe Marketing Campaignare effective, calculate your ROI using the following formula:

Marketing-Software: Top 3 Marketing-Tools

Now that you know how to create an effective marketing strategy, it's time to find out how you can simplify your work and even increase your performance.

Read on to see the top three marketing tool recommendations guaranteed to streamline your workflow.

SocialBee – Social-Media-Management-Tool

Say goodbye to the messy multiple tabs you used to publish your social media content and welcome SocialBee to your team - the only platform you need for content creation and distribution.

SocialBee allows users to create, edit, schedule and post content on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google Business Profile, TikTok and YouTube.

Connect your social media accounts to SocialBee and manage all your content from one place.Start your free 14-day trial today and explore all the features SocialBee has to offer!

And it gets better! By using SocialBee, you can organize your posts into content categories, schedule your evergreen content to be reposted multiple times, and tailor your posts to each social network's needs.

But wait, there are more things this social media tool can help you with, such as:

• Curating relevant content for your audience from your blog and other web sources.
• Add and create visuals directly using our Canva integration.
• Customize your URLs.
• Streamlining your team workflow (add comments, approve content, discard).
• Monitoring your social media analytics.

MobileMonkey – Omnichat Messaging-Plattform

MobileMonkeyis an omnichannel chatbot that enables businesses to interact with their customers across multiple channels: SMS, Facebook Messenger, websites, and other additional applications.

This great marketing tool can help you generate new leads and provide real-time support to your customers.

Additionally, MobileMonkey allows users to create campaigns such as chat blasts, conversational drip campaigns, and website chat dialogs and use them across multiple marketing channels.

AWeber – E-Mail-Marketing-Tool

AWeberis an email marketing software that helps you grow your email list using website forms, integrations, and a free WordPress plugin.

Additionally, this marketing tool helps you create automated drip campaigns, autoresponders, and more to share your emails and newsletters with your audience.

Plus, you'll have access to free, beautifully designed email templates and automated email campaigns that will save you valuable time.Aweber also provides you with insightful analytics so you can monitor your progress and adjust your strategy for better results.

Start growing your business with these marketing basics

Congratulations! You've reached the end of this Marketing 101 article, which means you have a solid understanding of basic marketing concepts and how to put them into practice. Sweet!

All you have to do is act.

Feel free to access any editable resources we've added to this article and go aheadSocialBee-Blogfor more interesting marketing tips and tricks.

Don't forget to try the SocialBee app. Create, post content and monitor your social media performance for free!

Benefit from a 14-day free trial- No credit card needed.