Section 1: Understanding your customer and the market
01 – Introduction
10 Sections | 1 Quiz 03 – Being remarkable
10 Sections 04 – Researching your customer
9 Sections 05 – Understanding why vegans buy
9 Sections Section 2: Your vegan marketing toolbox
06 – Your vegan marketing toolbox
5 Sections 07 – Creating your vegan brand
9 Sections 08 – Your website
8 Sections 09 – Google
9 Sections 10 – Email marketing
7 Sections 11 – Creating and using ‘content’
7 Sections 12 – Social media: paid
9 Sections 13 – Social media: free
10 Sections 14 – LinkedIn
8 Sections 15 – Networking, events and fairs
10 Sections 16 – Offline marketing
9 Sections 18 – PR and getting your business in the news
12 Sections 19 – Working with influencers
7 Sections Section 3: Creating and carrying out your marketing plan
20 – Creating your marketing plan
7 Sections 21 – Creating your marketing funnel
11 Sections 22 – Creating your marketing mix
7 Sections 23 – Setting your timeline and tasks
6 Sections 
Recap, resources and support
What we've just learned
- Google has 85-90% of the global search traffic, so concentrate your efforts here over other search engines.
- Organic ranking on Google is free, but takes time, effort, knowledge and may never get a great result.
- Paid advertising (PPC) is instant and hugely controllable.
- Even if Google isn’t right for you now, you should know what can be achieved because it will likely play a part in your marketing at some point.
- Get someone who already uses PPC to show you how it works – the initial steep learning curve soon flattens out.
- The more you know your customers, the more you can target your Google advertising and the cheaper it will be.
- Test, monitor, tweak and test again on small budgets until you find the combination of advert, keywords and landing page that delivers results.
- If you have a physical business, go claim or set up your ‘Google My Business’ listing now.
- If you have a physical product with a good profit margin, take a look at ‘Google Shopping’ adverts.
- Know your figures before you start – make sure you don’t end up getting the smallest slice of the (vegan) pie.
I’d like to try Google ads but we don’t sell our vegan cheese direct to customers – we only sell wholesale – so I don’t know how I’d measure the success of the ads.
Hey Alice, there are two options. Either you would use Google ads to support your retailers – so capture anyone in NZ searching for Vegan Cheese and then direct them to your product listing on other people’s sites. If you are very friendly with your retailers you can also add a query string on the end of your link so that the retailer will be able to see which orders have come from your adverts.
The other option is to use Google ads to find new retailers and wholesalers, so set up ads specifically targeting search terms such as ‘vegan cheese manufacturer New Zealand’ or something similar. I don’t think you would get lots of traffic – but that’s OK because you only pay for what you get with PPC!
David
Do you think there is any value using other search engines? I was thinking perhaps that it may be more directed to our target audience – Ecosia for example might capture more like minded individuals – or am I completely off the mark with this one!
Hi Laura. It’s an interesting point to make. Google has close to 90% of the global search engine traffic, so you know that no matter who your audience is then they are on Google. Looking at other search engines is for when you’re already getting everything you can out of the most obvious source and so then need to start picking up traffic from secondary ones. If you are starting out with a limited budget though, then start with the one that’s going to give you the most back. In 90% of the case this is Google.
Although Ecosia.org is something that is wonderful to support, I would only consider advertising on it if it keeps coming up in your customer research. That’s the great thing about 1-2-1 customer research, you can add a really specific question like ‘what search engine do you use’ and that will give you all your answers to where you should be promoting yourself.
If you want to move beyond Google, then YouTube is actually the world’s second biggest search engine – although this requires more effort put into creating video advertising, it’s not outside the remit of many small companies.
David