Ultimate Guide to Marketing 101: How does marketing work?

The beginners’ guide to marketing 101 – everything you need to know to market your business.

So you have been thinking about starting a business but you aren’t sure where to start? 

Beyond the legalities and the accounting aspects, you need to find out how you are going to get your product or service out in front of the people that need it most. In order to do that you have to market your business. So how does marketing work? 

This is your Ultimate Guide to Marketing 101. Read on to find out all of your options and the things you must do in order to market your business.

The term marketing is very broad and I think a lot of people shy away from it for that very reason. What does marketing even mean? What is the definition of marketing? The Action of promoting and selling products or services. According to the American Marketing Association, Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. 

There are many levels to marketing and many ways of marketing but when you are just starting out or have a very small business you don’t need to know everything. You need to know a place to start. You need to know what to do to get results right now. Once you have created your online presence you can build onto it over time but you have to start somewhere and that is here.

You Are Here

You have a product or service to sell to consumers. You know that you can help people and you know how much they would benefit from your product or service. But you also know that not every person on the planet wants or needs what you have to offer so you need to determine who does. Who is your ideal customer?

Your Customers Are Here

Your ideal customer is also known as your target market or your target audience. If you are just getting started in your business, you may not know who your ideal customer is yet. If that’s the case, you will need to make your best guess as to who they are. These questions can help you make an educated guess:

*While doing this, try to think of just one person. It could be a friend or family member or a customer that you already have. Think about why you decided to start your business. You saw a need in the marketplace for your product or service so who had that need?

1. Who are they?
2. What is important to them?
3. Where do they live?
4. What are they struggling with?
5. What problems do they have?
6. What are their pain points?
7. How do they spend their time?
8. What are they trying to accomplish?
9. Where are they on their journey?
10. How much money do they make?

You may not be able to answer every one of these questions for your business but the idea here is to create a profile of who your ideal customer is. 

For example, if you are starting a landscaping business and your service is to offer weekly lawn maintenance, then your ideal customer would probably be someone who:

• owns their home 
• lives locally to where your business is located (or as far as you are willing to travel), 
• maybe they have a very demanding job or they travel for work and don’t have time to maintain their lawn
• they probably fall in a higher income bracket and have the excess funds to pay for a lawn service
• They may be elderly and can’t physically care for their lawn themselves

Once you have an idea of who your ideal customer is, you can then determine how to meet them where they are, how to speak in their language, and how to best serve them. 

After you have been marketing yourself for a while and serving some of your customers, you may find that your original idea of your ideal customer was incorrect or even just slightly off. If that is the case then you go back to the drawing board and test a different ideal customer. Your ideal customer is never set in stone. 

People change as do their needs and you and your business will change as you grow as well. You may decide that you don’t want to offer a specific service anymore which in turn changes who your ideal customer is. 

Just remember that this is an ever-moving target. The only way to stay on top of it is to create a strategy and roll with it for a while. Test, test, test. 

You Know Who Your Ideal Customer Is So Now What?

Once you have determined who your ideal customer is, you need to determine where they are hanging out online. Are they Google searchers, do they trust Yelp reviews, are they on Facebook or Instagram or maybe Twitter. Do they scroll Pinterest for new ideas? You need to be where ever they are. 

In order to find out where they are you have to do a little research and it also requires a little trial and error. Get on Facebook, join some of your local groups, and pay attention to the things people are talking about and the questions they are asking. 

The best way to find out where your customers are hanging out is to create your business profiles on a few different platforms and then see if people are viewing you, interacting with you there. More on this in the next section. 

How to Get In Front Of Your Ideal Customers

At this point, you know who your ideal customer is and you have an idea of where they are hanging out. So now it’s time to meet them where they are and give them multiple avenues to be able to find you. 

The first thing you need, and this is a must-have for any business, is a website. A website is one of your most important business assets. It shares information with your potential customers, builds credibility for you and your business, and helps you stand out from your competition. Your website is the only asset that you will own that will continuously work for you around the clock.

When potential customer visits your website, they should easily be able to find out who you are, what you do, where you do it, how you do it, and how you can help them. They should also be able to easily contact you directly from your website. 

Now, it is not enough to just build a website (or have one built) and then sit back and wait for the phone to start ringing. This is not the Field of Dreams where if you build it they will come! 

So how do you get potential customers to your website? There are multiple, FREE ways to do this:

• Google My Business Listing
• Facebook Business Page
• Instagram Business Page
• Other Social Media Platforms (LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, etc.)
• Advertising (business cards, word of mouth, flyers, signs, etc.)

Think of your website as your hub. All of your marketing efforts need to be driving people to your website.

Creating Content

Once you have created a way to get in front of your customers, you have to start talking with them. This is your content or basically all of the words you will use to talk with your customers. 

Notice that I said talking with them, not to them, and certainly not at them.

You need to answer their questions, serve them, talk about their problems and how you can solve them.

This is where you need to be authentic, unique, and real with them – not unprofessional but relatable. 

People will search for your business on search engines such as Google. But if there are multiple businesses of the same type in your area, how are they going to find you? This is where marketing really comes in. 

In order for your business to be found at the top of the Google page, you have to tailor your  content to match what your potential customers are searching for. You have to speak their language. 

For example, let’s say you offer landscape construction. This could be anything from laying sod to a complete design and build of a yard. You call it construction but your potential clients are searching Google for Landscape Design and Build. This is what your website needs to say then because that is the language that your potential clients are looking for. 

To be even more specific, they may be looking for xeriscaping but when they search in Google they call it rock landscaping, your website needs to say rock landscaping. That is how Google is going to determine whether to show this potential client your website or not, if your website matches the customers’ search terms, then you are more likely to show up in the search results. This process is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. 

Our society does not like surprises. We want to know exactly what we can expect, we want to know what we are going to get before we get it. We want things to be as simple as possible for us. 

So as a business, how do you provide that to your potential customers? The answer is transparency and consistency. I am going to say it again because it is very important, be real, be genuine, be unique, be authentic. 

Now I am not saying that your website should give your life story. What I am saying is that your website should show people who you are, who your business is. Why do you love what you do? (Hint: The right answer is not because it makes you money) What are you passionate about helping people? How do you do what you do? How are you different from your competitors?

Finally, once you have all of this set up and working, the next thing you have to do is consistently show up for your customers. Continue talking with them on social media and continue curating your content to what their needs and wants are. Serve your customers in every way possible and they will reward you in return.

What Now

I know that this can be a little overwhelming at first so I created this downloadable PDF to break it down and make it more simple for you to understand and implement. There is also a workbook to guide you through getting yourself set up.

The biggest question I get from my customers is “How much is all of this going to cost?”

To be perfectly honest with you, you get what you pay for. Whether you are doing this work yourself or paying someone to do it for you, there is still a cost because your time is money. Any time that you are spending working on your marketing is time that you are not spending earning. But in the long run your marketing will pay for itself many times over. 

Remember that your website is one of your most important business assets. Look at it this way, you would invest several thousand dollars in a work truck to help you serve your customers and you would make that investment knowing that over several years it will pay for itself. Your website and your marketing assets are the exact same. 

Many people assume that hiring someone to build their website and do their marketing would cost upwards of $10,000 and there are certainly marketing agencies out there that do charge that much. But I practice what I preach and I meet my customers where they are now. You don’t need a $10,000 marketing strategy, you need a place to get started. 

And that’s why I created the DIY Marketing Course. I wanted to serve my customers by giving them another option, a way to do it themselves and save money because let’s face it when we are just getting started we don’t have a ton of money to invest.

I serve my customers in 2 ways, Done For You Marketing and Do It Yourself Marketing. And I promise that neither one of them have a $10,000 price tag.

Let’s cut through the bulls$!t and get down to the basics. Let’s give you exactly what you need to get your business growing quickly.

Schedule a Free 15 minute consultation with me