Diving in - What you should know before starting to market your product/company ?

You have finally taken the plunge and hired a marketing agency for your business. Or better yet, you hired a person to handle your marketing efforts in-house. 

It is of vital importance you ask yourself what you hope to achieve by doing this. Some of your answers could be -

• We understand the importance of marketing our service/product and don't want our lack of expertise to hinder our growth.
• Handling this process ourselves as a business owner has become unmanageable. 
• We want to have grown by X at the end of the month/year/decade.

Your answer could be any of these or a mixture of all of these or none of these.  What is imperative is that you take the time to fully understand why you are on this road. 

Once you do that, it becomes easier to measure how effective or ineffective you were in achieving your goals. 

Side note - I don't particularly like to use success vs failure analogy, because even failures teach us something. I prefer to use effective vs ineffective to convey that we have or haven't achieved the goal we set our sights on.

It is equally important to have SMART goals. You can talk to your marketing agency or marketing in-charge and come up with these. Remember, 

S - specific, 

M - measurable

A - achievable

R - realistic

T - timely

An example of a SMART goal would be 

We want to increase our FB followers by 5% by the end of the month. 

This goal is - 

specific - increase FB followers by 5%, 

measurable - since we can see a change in followers on the FB platform, 

achievable, realistic and 

has a definitive time frame attached to it. 

The marketing agency or your in-house guy should be able to help you set up these goals. And get clarity on how to go about achieving them. 

Communication is the third and final point to keep in mind when starting your marketing endeavors. Be sure to communicate with your agency, your employees, and everyone that has a stake in this. Be sure to have the hard conversations with whoever you need to - about what you want and what you wish to accomplish; be it sales, leads, a new website, or all of those things. 

For any further queries, you can contact me by email - growthhackingforsmes@gmail.com