What should you do when you want to get more clients?
Plan a realistic campaign based upon the facts and your research.

What sort of research should you do before starting a marketing campaign?
Look at what your competition is doing and check out the technology that can help you reach your target market.

How do you decide on what technology to use to market your business?
Read reviews, get help and try out free trials yourself, to see how they all work.

How can you gauge if you are getting the appropriate results using your chosen technology?
There are many factors to consider with technology, as you may not be using it correctly or you may need to be combining multiple ones to reach your goals.

How do you set realistic goals when it comes to advertising?
It comes back to knowing your product, the market and if you are using the right advertising mix to reach and influence your audience.

How do you start to set up and effective marketing / advertising campaign?
Your research should have identified the elements that go into a campaign, then it’s a matter of either implementing the ideas or get someone who knows this space, to help you. Remember you don’t need to know a lot about marketing, you just need to know enough to recognise when someone is trying to take advantage of you.

If you remember this rule, before you hand over the future of your business to someone else, make sure you know some or all of the process, the budget and the developer know your expectations and are accountable for them.

What should you start with to market your business?
We believe you need a great website that showcases your services and interacts with your visitors influencing them to contact you.

Looking for a new website but don’t know what else you need?
If you are considering updating your website or getting one for the first time, you are no doubt looking to be able to reach and influence more people to buy your products. You may also want to look at where a website sits, within the whole online space.

Although a website by itself is good, you reach more people when you combine additional elements to create a full online presence. This means setting up social media accounts (facebook, twitter, Instagram, linkedin), listing your business in numerous directories and community groups. There are also a number of other connections / channels and marketing tools that can be integrated and therefore automated, making them all so much easier to manage.

Technology has come so far and there are now many tools that are either free or cost very little to access. These tools can be used as much or as little as you need to connect, track and manage all your lead / client interactions.

One of the most important things is having a method to take money from clients and you want to be able to do it in a number of ways. Getting the wrong payment gateway can cost you and your customers more than is needed. You don’t want to upset customers with high transaction / default fees or have them eat into your profits.

The hardest thing to come to terms with is not knowing what you don’t know and this making you vulnerable to people / organisations who will exploit it. At some point you have to put your trust in someone to help who is an expert in the space of online marketing. There is no problem in taking your time, so you fully understand the process and all parties are accountable for the agreed outcome.

What should you do in presenting your goals to a developer?
Write down what you want to achieve in your timeline and the budget you feel will get you there. Then the developer should be able to work out what it will take to reach your goals (what technology to use) and if it can be done within your budget. If there is a big disparity between the goals and the desired budget, they should break down everything to show what is realistic given the circumstances. This way you can go back and make adjustments to give all parties a better understanding of what is achievable with the budget you have or change it.

How do you start creating a comprehensive online marketing solution?
Pick a provider and book a time to chat about your goals. Everything you want should be scalable to meet an expectation and a budget. Some providers may run off and start spending your budget, but the right one will do what they are supposed to. They should know what you need, before implementing anything so start planning.

Graham Slater