When you first start a business, you feel like you’re faking it until you make it. You don’t 100% know what you’re doing and you’re taking in information through a fire hose. It’s A LOT. Wouldn’t an online business startup checklist for marketing be SO helpful? 🙂
Lucky for you, that’s what I have for you today! As a Fractional Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), I know the ins and outs of all the marketing activities you should do as a beginner in your business. I put together these things to do before you start a business for all the newbies out there – I hope this helps you establish and grow your business!
In addition to the best practices listed below, I also listen to a lot of marketing podcasts. It’s always helpful to stay current on emerging trends and learn from our peers. Here is a list of my favorite marketing podcasts, and a list of podcast episodes I’ve done as well!
Create Buyer Personas
It’s crucial to understand your customers. You should know them better than they know themselves! The easiest way to do that is to think of one person you would LOVE to work with. It can be a fictional person or someone specific you know and want to work with. Either way, this person should represent your ideal customer. Consider things like:
- How long they’ve been in business
- Demographics (age, gender, location, etc.)
- Annual revenue
- Values and beliefs
- Interests
- Personality traits
- Professional pain points
- Business goals
- Customer journey stage
These points will help you create a profile for your ideal customer. Have fun with it! Give them a name, find a stock photo for a visual representation, and create a whole background story on them. The more detailed you can be, the more you’ll understand your ideal client. When you have this person in mind, you can write more targeted messaging.
Here’s more about creating a customer persona!
Have Consistent Branding
Step two in our online business startup checklist is having consistent branding. Consistent and professional branding helps you build a strong, recognizable, and trustworthy brand. Consistency across all platforms impacts how your audience perceives and interacts with your business. You obviously want potential clients to have a good experience with your brand, and consistency is the baseline.
Here’s a little more on why consistent branding is important to growing your business:
- Builds Brand Recognition
- Establishes Trust and Credibility
- Reinforces Brand Identity and Messaging
- Encourages Customer Loyalty
- Streamlines Content Creation
- Boosts Perceived Value
- Reduces Customer Confusion
- Supports Brand Expansion
The most identifiable companies have consistent branding. You wouldn’t see McDonald’s using purple in their logo. You know them to have a red and yellow logo – it’s all over their website, logo, social media, and advertising. It would be so confusing and off-putting to see a purple McDonald’s logo. Branding shapes how people see your company.
How to Create a Consistent Brand
So how do you do it? First, you need to be clear on your brand identity. Your mission and vision statements define what your brand stands for, why it exists, and where it’s headed in the future. You also need core brand values and a unique selling proposition. These elements should be reflected in everything you do to market and run your business.
Next, create brand guidelines. Brand guidelines communicate how your branding is to be used, no matter who is working within your company. This includes:
- Logo
- Color palette
- Typography
- Imagery
- Voice and tone
Messaging is very important for brand consistency. Every interaction a customer has with your business needs to communicate the same core values, tone, and key messages, regardless of the platform they use to interact with you. By keeping your messaging consistent across all marketing channels (website, social media, emails, advertising, etc.), you reinforce your brand identity and build trust with your audience.
Build an SEO-Optimized Website
Nowadays, businesses can’t survive without a website, especially online businesses. And not just any website, but an SEO-optimized one. One that helps you rank on search engines to access new ideal clients. This is one of the most important things to do before you start a business.
There are so many reasons why you should have an SEO-optimized website. We helped this client realize how an SEO-optimized website could increase their business. Here are just a few reasons to have an optimized website:
- Higher Rankings in Search Results
- Increased Organic Traffic
- Builds Authority in Your Industry
- Provides Long-Term Benefits
- High Return on Investment (ROI)
- Improved Website Performance
- Boosts Brand Awareness
- Supports Content Marketing Efforts
- Helps Measure Success
- Adapts to Changing Customer Behavior
A lot of business owners who are just starting out want to invest their time and effort into social media. I want to challenge you to instead focus on building your authority with search engines. Social media could disappear tomorrow and your audience would be gone. On the other hand, search isn’t going away (even with AI.) It’s best to build an SEO-optimized website first, then use social media to drive traffic to your site.
We wrote an article outlining SEO basics for every website – read it here!
To have a website that’s driving traffic from search engines, you need an SEO strategy. A strategy will make sure your marketing efforts are working toward your business goals (which I assume is somewhere along the lines of booking more clients.) This is an inside look at our SEO strategy!
Already have a website but not sure how well it’s performing? Contact me for a free SEO audit!
Design a Content Marketing Plan
Now that you have a beautiful and optimized website, you can start working on your content marketing plan. A marketing plan lays out how you want to market your business and drive qualified traffic to your website. For this online business startup checklist, I’ll share three content strategies.
Social media
Social media can be a great way to market your business. You might be tempted to promote your business on your favorite platform, but you should actually focus your efforts on the platform your audience uses.
For example, most of my audience is on LinkedIn, so even though it’s more popular among entrepreneurs to use Instagram, a lot of my content marketing efforts focus on LinkedIn. I want to connect with my target audience and to do that, I need to be active where they hang out online!
Blogging
Blogging is a great marketing strategy because you can reuse the content in so many ways! Once you have an article, you can repurpose it into social media posts, emails, freebies, and more.
Not to mention, blogging is amazing for SEO. Google loves to see websites that are frequently updated because it indicates you’re providing consistent value to people. The best way to do that is through blogging consistently. I started posting blogs every other week earlier this year and it’s been amazing for my marketing and content strategies.
Email marketing
People say email marketing is old news, but data says otherwise! Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to market and grow your business. These are qualified buyers who are interested in your product or service and you get to communicate with them directly!
Send regular emails with value such as new blogs, discounts, tips, promotions, updates, etc. to your list. You’ll start to build authority and trust among your audience. Even if they don’t become a customer themselves, they could purchase low-ticket items or refer you to someone in their network.
So how do you get people on your email list? With a freebie! Create a guide, template, quiz, or ebook and offer it for free in exchange for signing up for your email list. You’ll get qualified leads and the opportunity to nurture them into clients. Here is one of my freebies as an example!
Begin Building Your Local SEO
Local SEO is the process of optimizing your website and online presence to rank higher in local search results. This is a great strategy for brick and mortar stores, as well as online businesses.
One important piece of building your local SEO is setting up your Google Business Profile. This gives you the little business feature on the right-hand side of local search results. You can collect Google reviews, provide business information including your website, hours, and services, and post updates. It’s a valuable tool to have to boost your local SEO search rankings.
Did you know this isn’t the online business listing you have on the internet? Sometimes you create profiles or list-building sites will use your company in their business listings. It’s very difficult to manage your profile on every listing directly. Using a listing service can help you manage them seamlessly across the internet. This allows you to ensure your business information is accurate no matter where your business is listed. My local SEO package does this for you!
Establish a Referral Program
Creating a referral program is one of the key things to do before you start a business to ensure long-term success. You’ll have to hustle in the beginning stages of your business to earn new clients. Once you have them, it’s important to keep them. When you create loyalty and rapport with your clients, they’re more likely to refer you to their network. They know and trust you and see firsthand the value you provide their business. They want their friends to experience the benefits of working with you, too!
Create a referral program to reward the customers who refer you. It doesn’t have to be anything crazy – I just send a small gift to my client as a thank you. Whether it’s a gift, gift card, or discount on future services, show your appreciation for the referral. A hot lead came straight to your inbox by someone you know and trust – it can’t get much better than that!
BONUS: Experiment with Paid Ads
This is a bonus to my online business startup checklist! In addition to the organic marketing strategies listed above, paid ads for new business owners can be a great addition to your marketing strategy. It’s important to have a strong organic foundation in place before you jump into paid ads. You also must have the expertise (or hire someone who does) to build high-performing, strategic paid campaigns.
I don’t recommend that new business owners DIY their paid ads – you’ll likely waste your money and I don’t want that for you! But if you have a budget to jump start your business, paid ads can be a great tool to add to the tool box.
Using Your Online Business Startup Checklist
This online business startup checklist is for entrepreneurs who don’t know where to start with marketing their new business. I wish I had this when I was first starting Woods MarCom! Use it to create a marketing strategy that works for your business, audience, and goals. If you need help along the way, reach out to me! As a Fractional CMO for small to midsize businesses, I’d love to work with you to help your business reach the potential I know it has!
