How to get your ideas to market

You’ve developed your business idea and are sure it’s going to work. You’ve identified your market and how to access it successfully, and you know what your business goals are. Now it’s time to get your business online and into the market. There are three aspects to keep in mind while you do this:

Identity

This includes things like your choosing your organisation’s domain name, finding a design company to create your digital logo, and researching current web designs to find a website that will fit your brand best. To do all of this successfully you need to clearly define your brand and your ideal customer. Entrepreneur magazine has some excellent ideas on how to build a strong brand identity.

Mechanics

In order to succeed in an online environment you have to have the correct tools. Choose a design company that will build you the website that you need at the start of your organisation, and that will also develop your ideas and implement them as your organisation grows and changes.

Marketing

This comes in three branches: Your website, social media, and advertising and promotions.

Website

You need to set your online goals – What is it exactly that you want the online aspect of your business to do, and how will it do this? Will you measure your online success in unique visits? Revenue gained through sales or downloads? You should be keeping track of your progress using analytics programmes like Google Analytics or Open Web Analytics to measure site visits, page hits, and campaign success. Also very important is how you optimise your content to be picked up by search engines. Knowing exactly how to tailor your content for crawlers without ruining the user experience for the reader is the difference between life and death for a website. Moz.com has a brilliant SEO checklist to make sure you’re ranking well.

Social Media

Social media is how you “talk” to the wider world about what’s happening with your organisation. Frequent posts using either images or video are very useful and the more you post, the better the wider web will get to know your organisation. Obviously, this is highly desirable as consumers are more likely to spend with a known entity than an unknown entity, and the more people know you the more likely they are to repost your message. Think of social media as word of mouth advertising, but on a global scale.  RS Websols has some top tips for making a strong social media presence.

Promotions and advertising

Promotions are a good way to build brand loyalty. These one-off events can be offered through email or social media, targeting segments of your client-base. Email can be a little more work than a straight social media promotion as it pays to personalise the message. Platforms like Mailchimp can help you with getting your message across without sounding like spam.

If you have the budget, online ads can be an excellent way to pull traffic to your website. Platforms like Google AdWords will promote your organisation via other websites, however something to note is that consumers are becoming less tolerant of ads, so be careful how you choose to advertise.

Progress

It is vital to take stock every month, after each campaign, or both to see how well you’re performing. Analysing your progress using your web analytics tools and the reporting functions in the social media platforms will show you where you’re succeeding, and where you need to improve. Adapting to the information gained in these reports will be the key to your organisation’s success.