“Ignoring online marketing is like opening a business but not telling anyone.” - KP Marketing

The importance of online marketing

As with any new business venture, if you don't have sufficient capital to market your new venture then you will need to find it. You can't sell a secret so online marketing is your first and most important step to success.

To start online you'll need at least $10,000 to build a good solid foundation. Think of it as planting a forever tree and wanting to watch it grow for years to come. If you cut corners and plant it in a wee pot to save money, you're wasting your time. Same with online marketing. Build strong roots and reap the rewards.

How to raise the capital

Money can be raised through various means, such as borrowing from family and friends, through venture capital investors, taking on a new partner or by approaching a bank or lending institution.

When borrowing money from family and friends, you may not always need to give them a formal finance proposal, but this will definitely be required for finance institutions, prospective partners or investors.

A formal finance proposal takes the form of a business plan and includes all information necessary to evaluate the proposal’s potential.

It is extremely important that your business proposal is accompanied by realistic facts and figures. Don't over inflate your proposal, work with us to create a clear picture to your investors. We can also look at your competitors and create a marketing strategy giving you leads from areas other businesses haven't thought about.

This will show you are serious about the viability of your online venture and carefully considered all of the issues.

Business plan features

Your business plan must show how much money will be required, how you plan to repay your loan and predictions of when the online venture will start to make money.

A business plan essentially includes the following features:

• An executive summary

• Current business information

• Market analysis

• A SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis

• An action or strategic plan

• Financial details and budgets.

Once you have your business plan completed, you and the financial institutions will be able to clearly see the viability of this online venture.

Creating a budget

When determining your budgets, as with all budgets, it is useful to create at least three, taking into account the range of possible outcomes.

It is best to create these budgets to take into account:

• Your worst-case scenario

• Your anticipated scenario

• Your best-case scenario.

These budgets will show how each scenario will financially impact on your business. With this information you will be able to determine how to react in each case. It will also provide you with a useful means of tracking your actual business performance against what is anticipated.

With each of these scenarios you will need to determine particular levels of achievement or critical success factors to assist you in determining how well you are performing.

These may include factors such as:

• The number of sales to online customers

• The daily/weekly/monthly income you gain from your site

• The time taken to achieve a particular level of income

• Costs associated with maintaining your search engine position, etc.

Each business will need to assess its operations to determine useful factors for benchmarking its progress.

This is necessary since the nature of the Internet means rapid changes can take place. To take advantage of positive changes, and to minimise the negative, you will need to react quickly and appropriately.

Building your website

Now you have your funds be prepared for your website to be launched in around 1-3 months. It does take time. There are many moving arms to building your website from research keywords, good copywriting and design through to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation - how Google finds and ranks your websites) We can help find you a good marketer that can help with all of these aspects.

How to launch

Once you're ready to launch, don't just tick it off your "done" list. The game of marketing has just begun, it's not luck, you need to help it be found in google and get traffic to it. Here are some basic tips on how to start.

1. Post on social media. Launch your website on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google My Business, Instagram etc. Make sure once you launch your new website that you continue to post. Talk to us about social media and our Social Media Planner which makes life so much easier.

2. Send out emails. Use your database in your CRM (Client Relationship Management software) or talk to us about creating a database and CRM to send out an introduction to your new website. Again, keep emailing your list so that are consistent and ensure if you don't have permission to market to them you have an unsubscribe option.

3. Write a press release. Submit a press release to an authoritative site. This will increase your Search Engine Optimisation and a link to your new website

4. Use other digital marketing tools - Google Ads, SEO, Google website submission on Google Search Console and asking other website owners to link your website to theirs IF their website will add value. Talk to us about how to do this.

5. Make a compelling offer, discount, referrals etc. Both on your website and in your marketing.

Budget warning bells

If your online business is not performing to expectations, you will need to know the early warning indicators and how to react. It is also important to realise that it is highly unlikely your business will immediately do phenomenally well. The majority of online ventures don’t. Google looks at 200 aspects of your website to rank it accordingly and if you've built it yourself it's likely that you won't have covered off many to help in Google. Talk to us about how you can improve your online presence.

Saying this, you must be patient and realise it could take a number of months before you start to see a return from your site. Your budget must, therefore, take this into account. You will need to allocate funds to carry your business if necessary.

Your budgeted financial projections will be useful to help you track anticipated performance against what actually occurs. For example, if you predicted a three per cent increase in your turnover, and your actual results show you are not achieving this, you have an early indication that you might need to reassess your strategies.

Creating financial forecasts can be time consuming and tricky. This is particularly true when creating three forecasts to deal with something as unpredictable as Internet trading.

There are a multitude of possible outcomes and influencing factors. Therefore, it is important to consult closely with your accountant to make sure you have considered all factors.

Start your own website checklist:

Here is a quick checklist to your marketing plan success.

• I have a website

• I am marketing my business at least once a month

• I have indexed my website in Google

• I have links from other websites to help Google find mine.

• I update my website often

• I know where my website is ranking in searches

• I am getting a steady stream of leads

• I have checked out my competitors website in the last 6 months to see if they have made changes and how that could impact on my business

If you haven't ticked at least 3 of these statements, then it's time to talk to us about marketing your business online. At SME Marketing and Sales we can audit your current marketing and make suggestions on what methods can help and introduce you to our marketing partners to implement your plan for you. In some cases it's a quick fix and we can do that for you.

Contact us today - https://www.smemarketingandsales.co.nz/contact