Choosing your tools
Marketers always talk about our toolboxes, the different channels and tools we have available to put out a marketing message. Perhaps as vegan businesses we should be talking about our marketing sheds, the place we keep our gardening implements. Look at my fine collection of marketing hoes and trowels!
Regardless of what we call them, there are many ways that you can get your message out there. Some are obvious and ubiquitous: pretty much every company has a website or social media page. Other marketing tools have fallen out of favour in the rise of digital but shouldn’t be overlooked – you can still put a stamp on an envelope and pick up the phone and get results. Then there are other things that you can do to market your company that are not quite as obvious; these are less easy to quantify, such as developing a personal brand, or might take you out of your comfort zone such as face-to-face networking.
The reason that people turn towards online marketing first (such as social media and websites) is fairly obvious – it’s quick, it’s cheap and it’s familiar. But it’s also obvious that no-one will ever get outstanding results by keeping to the quick and cheap alone. Social media is an amazing tool but people rarely have remarkable content to put out on it. It’s often just a background noise that is very easy to filter out.
In this section we’re going to look at the wide range of tools which are available to you to promote your business. We call them channels, which is nothing to do with TV (although TV advertising is a marketing channel!) – instead, it means the platform you use to connect with your customer. Social media is a channel. Your website is a channel. Email marketing is a channel. Magazine advertising is a channel. Doing fairs and tradeshows is a channel. Some you can do straight away, or are likely already doing. Some will mean you have to move out of your comfort zone but in doing so will get far better results. For some you will need to either learn new skills or hire in someone who can help you. But growing your experience and skillset will only add to your company’s success, so you should embrace this. If a way of communicating has a barrier to learn how to do it, then the less crowded it will be and fewer of your competitors will be doing it. A good example is video marketing: 10 years ago making a corporate video or advert would cost you thousands of pounds and would need a full video crew to produce something professional. If your company produced video content then it stood apart from the competition who were just printing brochures. Now, the bar has been lowered and anyone can create a video for their business with their phone, a clip mike and some £30 studio lights – so social media is flooded with them. Video no longer stands your company apart like it did.
Marketing a company today often means using digital but its ease-of-use means your message can easily get lost in the background noise. In fact, most digital platforms have algorithms in place to filter you out if you’re deemed to be boring or having nothing unique to say. That might sound harsh, but if you run a Facebook page you might have noticed that you have a few thousand followers but your post only gets seen by a handful of people. Facebook performs a complicated balancing act of wanting to give their customers an interesting timeline to scroll through whilst also making money from advertising. So, if your post is judged to be unremarkable against everything else that someone could see that day, Facebook will simply not show it to anyone. Email marketing also has to cut through the same filtering processes. It used to be that if you sent someone an email it landed in their inbox. Now, a complicated set of rules and algorithms filter your messages depending on that person’s relationship with you and the contents of the message – your email could land in any number of folders, from someone’s ‘priority’ inbox, to ‘newsletters’, to ‘spam’, with a decreasing chance of getting seen depending on where it ends up. This means that in the age of digital communication, offline tactics such as a leaflet posted through a door may actually have a better chance at getting your message in front of a customer.
This is also why being remarkable and having a real story is so important if you are going to succeed. The more your company is pulling people to you through your compelling story and point of difference, the less time and money you have to spend in pushing your company in front of potential customers. People will join your tribe, share your mission for you and be glad to be part of it.
