Key takeaways:
- Starting a business can be overwhelming, with various tasks competing for attention, including marketing.
- Establishing marketing channels early on is crucial to avoid sitting idle after opening your business.
- Building online visibility through activities like website SEO and social media takes time, making early marketing efforts essential.
- Organizing marketing efforts from the beginning can reduce stress and provide time to refine strategies.
- A customer journey map is a useful tool for organizing marketing efforts, as it models the steps potential customers take before and after making a purchase, helping to formulate a comprehensive marketing strategy from the start.
Starting a business is one of the most stressful and intense endeavors you can experience. You’re probably doing it for the first time, you’re by yourself, money is tight, and it feels like every time you cross off one item from your to-do list, another two come up. With all this craziness going on it’s almost a given you’ll forget to do something, or at least you’ll have to cut some corners in certain areas.
As if all the administrative and operational stuff wasn’t enough, you have to think about marketing, too. It’s not as pressing as getting the papers done and ensuring your business will be able to do what it’s supposed to do, but without marketing there will probably not be much to do in the first place. You don’t want to sit around the first weeks (or months) doing nothing while all the fixed costs that come with running your business keep piling up.
Getting some initial marketing channels in place takes time, and it’s a very good idea to do so well before your business opens its doors. You’ll save yourself a lot of stress, you’ll be able to formulate your marketing strategy better because you’ll have more time to do it, and you’ll also have time to refine it as needed. If this is your first marketing “project”, you’ll find out many things don’t work as you thought they would and if you started your marketing early, you’ll be grateful for having plenty of time to figure it out.
It takes a while before your website starts showing up in Google search results high enough that people searching for the services or products you offer will actually find it and building a social media following isn’t as simple as it used to be back in the day either. And with these two we’re still only scratching the surface of your overall marketing strategy. If you don’t want to get lost in it and contribute to your already-high stress levels when you finally launch your business, having your marketing organized will go a long way.
There are many different ways to accomplish this, but perhaps the most useful one is a customer journey map. What you do when creating a customer journey map is modeling the steps (and their order) your potential customers will take before and after becoming actual customers. Most steps your customers take will be marketing-related, because after all, that’s why you do marketing: to reach potential customers and guide them, step-by-step, to dropping the “potential”. If you’d like to learn more about this, we have an article that explains in detail what a customer journey map is.
Having your marketing organized in this manner will help you to better formulate your marketing strategy because you’ll have to really think about the role every marketing channel plays in your customer’s journey. Whenever you’d like to adjust your marketing strategy or brainstorm about why some part of it doesn’t work as expected, you’ll have a bird’s-eye view that will allow you to see the big picture.
Businesses that choose not to create a customer journey map (or just don’t know about it) can easily get into a situation where they forget how a given marketing channel is supposed to work and what’s its role in the broader context. If you sometimes notice a marketing endeavor that looks like it has no particular goal in mind, it may well be because the company marketers, believe it or not, never thought about it since they had no framework in which they could think about it.
As a new business, you’ll have the advantage that you can start doing all your marketing activities with a customer journey in mind outright. In that case, it’s very unlikely you’ll be counted among the companies with disorganized marketing and their bosses stressed out because the marketing isn’t working and nobody knows why.
