30 Day Marketing Challenge: Marketing Checklist for New Entrepreneurs

HOME / / 30 Day Marketing Challenge: Marketing Checklist for New Entrepreneurs

If you’ve just started a new business, then it’s likely that you have a never-ending to-do list.

One huge item on that list will be the marketing of your business and its products / services, but how do you know where to start?

With our partner, Shopify, we’ve pulled together this checklist of marketing activities to complete within 30 days that will help you to pull in traffic to your website and, your first sale.

1. Set up Google Analytics
Setting up Google Analytics will let you keep a close eye on your traffic. As you deploy each of the suggested marketing tactics below, you’ll be able to see the difference that each of them makes.

Going forward, this will mean you can refine the tactics you implement to get the desired results.

2. Share Your Store with Relevant Online Communities

You’ve established your business, chosen your branding, selected your products and launched your website, so by now you’ll have a clear target market in mind.

Think about where your target market ‘hangs out’ online. Which other websites will they be visiting? Which social media platforms?

Draw up a list of relevant online communities and then contact those communities to see if they will list or mention your store. Failing that, list your website manually.

This might be more successful if you offer a discount code to add value and entice users to your site, but be careful not to spam your audience.

Offering a discount code unique to each community will also allow you to track which sites have resulted in the most sales on your site.

3. Leverage your personal network

For many start-ups, the majority of their early sales will come from people they know.

Every business starts somewhere, so there’s nothing wrong with leveraging this. Share your store across all of your personal channels so that your network knows about your business.

4. Spread the word…

Once you’ve shared your business and discount codes with your personal network and communities (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – business and personal), it’s time to cast your net a little wider.

Forums like Reddit, and online communities like Facebook Groups represent an opportunity to reach people who have specific interests.

Just do a search for interests that relate to your business and share a link to your store (perhaps with a discount code) in relevant forums that your target customers frequent.

Of course, you'll have more success if you are already an active member, so it might be worth building up a profile across these community platforms first.

5. Paid Advertising

All of the above suggestions are free of cost, but require time to be spent – perhaps the most valuable commodity. But, as the old saying goes, you need to spend money to make money.

Pay-per-click advertising can be a good way to begin paid advertising on a low budget. It’s also relatively easy to measure its success.

You can advertise across a whole range of platforms, from Google and Bing to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest.

If you’re not 100% sure about where, when and on which platforms to spend your initial advertising budget, then we suggest you attend a local course or training event. This will limit the amount of budget that could potentially be wasted by targeting the wrong audience on the wrong platform.

If you want to take the full 30-day marketing challenge, download the full checklist here and keep it on hand for the next 30 days, executing as many of these strategies as you can to drive as much traffic (and hopefully sales) as possible.

If you are interested in starting up your own business, visit our registration page to register your interest in obtaining a start-up loan to get your business idea of the ground.

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