Building your business with effective and powerful stress-free marketing
How can marketing help my business?
Marketing is essentially the way that customers hear about your business. It encompasses everything from big billboard on a busy road that capture the attention of everyone who passes to direct social ads to a very tight and defined audience. The secret is in determining which type of media and communication is correct for your brand, your business, your customer and your strategic aim. The aim or goal is the most important thing to clarify effective marketing is based on what you are trying to achieve rather than simply copying what other businesses do it appearing anywhere for the sake of it. Square Balloon work closely with you to plan Marketing activity against your business goals, to report against those goals and deliver results.
Common marketing aims may be to increase awareness that you exist, especially if you are a new business or new to a certain area; driving new sales; encouraging repeat sales or highlighting the benefit for customers to choose your business over your competitors’. There are many other scenarios and each requires full understanding of the investment and expected output to deliver effective results.
What is outsourced marketing?
Whatever your business, keeping sales level and growing is critical to the long-term success. However, most businesses suffer from the same issue: time and energy for new business is incredibly hard to balance with the time and energy needed to complete the work that is currently in progress. Depending on where your business is at, this may sound like a nice problem to have but if the new business pipeline isn’t constantly being renewed, it will dry up before long and you will inevitably have to throw everything back into new business. This eventually creates an endless cycle that is frustrating, inefficient, and exhausting. Unfortunately this is how many businesses end up failing, even though they are working very hard and delivering an excellent service or product to the customers they already have.
Outsourced marketing allows you to focus on business growth and provide the brand experience that your customers deserve, keeping them coming back and recommending you for the quality they receive. It enables you to do what you do best and to bring in expert skills for areas that you either have no experience in or no time to complete. Building a marketing campaign, adapting it to make sure it works as hard as possible for your investment and tracking the results takes time. Getting your business to the point where you might consider hiring someone internally with these expertise takes time is another example of how great marketing can get you to that point! Outsourced marketing is a great solution for the short, medium or long-term needs of your business to fill the requirement.
Why choose Square Balloon?
There are many short courses and books on marketing for businesses and keen business owners may start by doing some bits themselves but marketing is a real specialism and this can be a false economy. To make the most of your marketing spend takes both expertise and experience. Eoin Oliver BA MCIM is the owner of Square Balloon and has a degree in Marketing, is a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. This means that everything we do at Square Balloon is influenced by marketing know-how, from website design to software development, graphic design to branding. When you outsource your marketing needs to Square Balloon, you don’t just receive useable assets, you receive deeper expertise and advice to help your business to succeed.
The Square Balloon team of experts work as one group to deliver effective results. This includes social media, digital advertising, SEO, graphic design, branding, visual and written content and marketing strategy, alongside trusted recommendations for printers, merchandise and other physical outputs. The alignment between the team means that you receive clear information and know that the separate elements of your brand are well cared for with the right things cross-referenced between us. This also helps us to move swiftly, using our internal expert resources to deliver you excellent results rather than having to rely on third parties.
As your business grows, the option to outsource your marketing to Square Balloon allows you to keep headcount down, utilising the right expertise only for the hours you need them rather than bringing in someone at the same level of experience on a full-time wage. This gives your business the opportunity to grow in the right direction without the added responsibility of additional management and gives you the flexibility to add appropriate marketing services as you and your business need them.
Is Marketing the same as advertising?
The terms Marketing and Advertising are often confused. Whereas marketing is the process of identifying and meeting the needs of businesses through appropriate strategy, advertising is one of the possible outcomes to do this. Square Balloon provide advertising campaign thinking and assets, and can run campaigns through social media, print magazines and newspapers, billboards and as paid content on websites. The difference is that we bring marketing expertise too, making sure the goal of the campaign is in alignment with the place and way that it is communicated.
How can I use outsourced marketing in my business going forward?
Marketing should always be both reactive and proactive. There will be times when an unavoidable change in the market, a new campaign from a competitor or a new customer need, will determine your strategy and other times that you may be leading the strategy by creating that customer need, working to change the market and stand out from competitors. Effective marketing is not just about inputs but the outputs too, tracking the results of different messages in various places and whether there is more return on investment for your business from particular activities. For example, if a digital campaign run locally through Facebook has more conversions than a similarly priced campaign run in a local magazine, that will effect the strategy for the next phase of marketing.
In this way, outsourced marketing is constantly adaptive, driven by the needs of your business. At Square Balloon we can help you to clarify those needs and fill any gaps that might be preventing your business from reaching potential. Outsourced marketing can be used to generate new business leads even when you are focused on other areas. It can also be used to remind previous customers of your product or service to encourage repeat custom and keep you front of mind when they are asked for a recommendation by the people they know – extending your word of mouth reach with some gentle persuasion.
Digital marketing allows very specific targeting for marketing so that if someone is weighing up a few different options they can be brought back to you again by highlighting the benefits you offer. In social media it not just a case of showing up and posting something three times a week, it is about creating engaging content that receives views, likes, comments and shares that extend your influence online and help to spread the key messages you are putting out. Likewise Google Ads and paid Google search results (pay per click) can be very effective when used with clear strategy to reach the people most likely to purchase from you.
How do Square Balloon work with you on your outsourced marketing?
Outsourced Marketing works by adapting and growing with your business. Square Balloon act as an extended part of your team to understand the challenges you are facing, spot potential need for a switch in strategy down the line and to share our earned expertise with you to provide the support your business needs to thrive.
We can start right from the beginning to identify the requirements for your business marketing, we can pick up where you have got to already and equally we can help your business to turn in a different direction if required. By combining the skills of our graphic design and brand definition team, we are able to deliver a complete re-brand if your business needs it to be able to market appropriately to your target customers.
Working on a retainer or project basis, we will discuss the goals, the KPIs and results tracking with you so that you can always see where your money has been spent and what your business has seen in return. This allows us to remain flexible and to adapt as new challenges come up to continue to approach them with the right strategy.
Is Graphic Design separate from Branding?
The terms ‘logo’ and ‘branding’ or ‘brand mark’ are often used loosely to mean the same thing. In fact, they are connected but not interchangeable. A logo is a visual device, it can have substance, it can look pretty, or it can just as easily miss the mark and not create the right impression. A brand mark brings in the foundations of the brand to create something meaningful that fits with the rest of the brand experience. Branding is the consideration of this whole experience.
A logo is rarely viewed on its own: if it is on a sign, it is part of the building you see behind it; if it is on a website, it is part of the overall impression the website gives you; if it is on a product, it is only part of what a customer will be taking in when they see the pack. It’s important to consider how the logo works in the ways that it will be applied and what that whole experience should feel like. A clearly defined brand will ensure that the visual interpretation of it fits with this and inspires your target customers into action.