The Bare Essentials of Marketing
Most women have wardrobe staples: the little black dress, perfect-fit dress pants, blazer or white blouse. There are also key essentials that form the basis of concerted marketing:
Strategy: Before any copy or design development begins, a clear strategy – even a high-level one – is necessary to define audience(s), key messages, benefit statements, goals, specific tactics to meet goals, and timelines.
Logo: A logo and tagline (or brand promise) is essential to visually capture your key messages and benefits. This is the “face” of your company and what defines you.
Design Template: Develop one large-format communications piece as an overarching design template to guide style, fonts, colours, images and supporting graphic design. This piece can be resized or cut/pasted into smaller formats and used as an insert, door knocker, event literature, leave-behind, ad, postcard, etc. as opportunities arise.
Brochure: Develop a succinct core marketing piece that highlights your offerings. Done right, the copy of this piece will inform a host of other in-house communications such as social media postings, website content, press releases and presentations.
Website: Website development and management software mean you can easily build, customize and update a site. And while complex programming is still the purview of experts, a lot of simple programming code (like making cool buttons) is free to source.
Social Media: You don’t have to do it all, but some form of presence in social media is important. Evaluate all the options and decide which best support your strategic goals: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, a blog, etc.
E-marketing: Get your message right to your audience through an easily-modifiable eblast template that you can update as necessary and send yourself through an online service.
These bare essentials are tools to be expanded upon as time – and resources – permit in order to create a more fulsome marketing strategy.
