Discovering Your Marketing Priorities

For business owners, it’s important to know which branding and marking-related projects you need, and which can wait until later. Identifying your marketing priorities is the first step toward successful advertising and new customers.

This is especially true if you have a limited budget and can’t afford to have all your advertising created all at once. It can feel overwhelming to new small business owners trying to choose between multiple seemingly equally important items like a logo and a website. 

Here’s how to weigh your priorities and choose which projects you should prioritize first in your marketing strategy.

First, Analyze Your Marketing Needs

You’ll want to determine who your target will be before making branding choices. In other words, you’ll want to figure out where you want your business to go before you can design a plan for getting there. 

If you’re a restaurant, you may decide your target will be surrounding businesses that may have employees who could come to your place for a fast lunch on their lunch breaks. Alternatively, you may want to target families with children who want an affordable meal. Or perhaps your restaurant will be targeting clients who want an upscale, gourmet, fine dining experience. Chances are, you’re not going to be reaching out to people looking for fast food if your service includes five course meals and a long sit-down dinner with a dress code. 

While that may seem obvious for a restaurant, the same goes for any sort of business. Your tax filing business may be targeting local working and middle class families, but not investors in crypto or large corporations. 

Determining your target audience is the first part of building buyer personas for your potential customers. This will help you develop your marketing strategy, so that you can make a well thought out decision about what to invest in first, based on your research. 

For instance, if you have a physical location, you might benefit more from completing your branding identity than you would a website right off the bat. If you had a website created before your branding, it might share your location and info about your business. However, if people walk past your store and there’s no sign or branding, they may not know which door or building is yours. You don’t want them going somewhere else—a competitor!— if they can’t find your business, or your business just doesn’t look open and trustworthy.

Next, Establish Your Brand

As a rule of thumb, you should establish your branding before you build your website or begin advertising. While there may be some exceptions for certain scenarios, most cases will require strong branding first, in support of your advertising. You don’t want to have the cart before you get the horse. Your brand identity, including your logo, will be the foundation of all of your later marketing materials that build upon it. So, once that is in place, you can decide the next most important piece based on your objectives and target market. Working on other projects without cohesive branding first can result in disorganized marketing materials that look like they’re coming from different businesses.

Your logo, graphics, color, and font choices are what make up your branding. If you build a website before any established branding it will lack cohesiveness and feel generic. For instance, if you have a website with different colors than your brochures, or your banner uses a different logo or fonts than your storefront sign, this could be confusing to potential customers and make your brand seem unreliable and not well thought out. 

What’s worse is that if you develop your branding after you’ve built your website, you’ll end up paying more (or spending more of your own time) to update it with your new branding.

Nail down all the elements of your brand, your logo, colors, typography, mood, mission, and more, then you can carry this through to every other piece of your marketing that you’ll go on to build.

Finally, Develop Your Advertising Strategy

You don’t want to waste money on materials your business isn’t ready for yet. 

Before you can start pumping out digital or print advertising materials, you need to decide which ones would best benefit your business and which ones aren’t completely necessary to get started. You’ll want to figure out what kind of marketing will reach your buyer personas best and tackle that first.

For instance, do you have a storefront, or do you plan on solely having an online presence? If your business is strictly online, your advertising may be chiefly digital. What is the age range of the buyers you’re trying to reach? Perhaps you have a customer base made up of generations who aren’t as tech savvy. Would they be able to navigate to your site, or might they benefit more from seeing signs or receiving coupons in the mail? 

As you can see, it isn’t practical to develop everything all at once. Generally speaking, you want to develop your branding first, but you should always take the time to analyze and decide what makes the most sense for your business, so that in the end you can develop a marketing strategy that is tailored to your business and customers. Getting your marketing priorities in place

If you aren’t sure what project you should start with, contact us to schedule a marketing consultation. We can work with you to come up with a plan, and design your projects as well, to satisfy all your marketing and business needs.