Marketing is a crucial part of making money and growing your business.

Every successful business knows how important marketing is, and in this article, we will be covering everything you need to know about marketing, and how to use it in your business.

Marketing is "the action/business of promoting and selling products or services, including market search and advertising".

While studying this topic, we discovered that marketing is so much more than what people say, and how widespread it actually is...

Jump to a section:

- E-mail Marketing

- Social Media Marketing

- SEO

- How does SEO work?

- Pricing

& so much more. But, we will be focusing on only these three parts of Marketing. Let's begin...

E-mail Marketing

E-mail marketing is one of the most effective ways to grow your audience.

The basic principle of E-mail Marketing is collecting e-mails, and then starting campaigns that use bulk e-mail sending as a way of promoting a service, product, etc.

It all sounds quite straightforward: Taking the e-mail address from a visitor, and then periodically sending e-mails to promote your products, but, there is a lot more to consider before you click "send"...

1. Design: A lot of businesses will use over-the-top, boring, and spammy templates that just look like one big fat ad.

Avoid that! Top-level companies already took notice of that and they started using the good old plain e-mail because that is what actually grabs someone's attention and connects with them personally.

When you see a genuine, professional, and short e-mail, it's obvious that it would be much more likely to be seen, read, and clicked. So, avoid putting tons of photos, links, large letters, and try to imagine that the e-mail you're making is for a friend, someone you care about.

2. Content: As we mentioned earlier, the e-mail shouldn't have too many pictures, links, and pretty much anything that makes it look like an ad. The goal is to have a clear (and catchy) subject, a relevant message, and a clever way of shifting the focus to your products.

The content you provide needs to be relevant to the message, well designed, and make the customer feel that even tho they might not need it right now, they want it! Make them feel like not buying your product would be a bad decision, and that they will miss a great chance.

A great way to do that would be to mention a common situation that might be uncomfortable or awkward but would be greatly improved by the use of your product.

Or, you could write about someone who already decided to use your product/service, and is extremely happy with the results.

3. Executing: This may be the toughest part of starting an e-mail campaign...

In order to send e-mails to your potential clients, you need to either have a locally hosted SMTP server or, you need to subscribe to a 3rd-party website that offers Bulk e-mail sending.

Services like those can be extremely expensive for those who are only starting out and don't have much money to invest, so, we recommend using Gmail as a temporary solution.

Google's Gmail has a limit of 500 e-mails per day, which stacks up to around 15000 e-mails per month, and has a neat option where you can keep all your contact in groups, to easily send e-mails to the right people.

But, after building a list of 10k e-mails, It would be best to move on to a more professional service that provides more freedom.

Social Media Marketing

Today, unlike a few years ago, digital advertising is the best, and cheapest way ("bang for the buck") for businesses all around the world to promote their products, build an audience and earn a lot of money doing so, and most of that comes from Social Media.

Social Media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, have maintained their dominance for many years now, with billions of users all around the world using the platform, so, how do we take advantage, and use the cheap attention to grow our business?

1. Post it! A lot of people will hesitate to post in the beginning, thinking that they will be judged, or laughed at, and thinking that way can lead to missing a great opportunity... so, just post it! Don't overstress about the quality of the content, or what will others think.

You don't have to be on all social media platforms, but we recommend starting with the top 3: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and focusing on posting daily to maximize your reach and monitor what works best.

After you published a few posts, check out how well they were received and try to copy and reproduce what worked the best to further increase your reach.

2. Learn from the best: Every beginning is tough, and it requires a lot of patience before you are able to achieve your goals and dreams, but, the best way to avoid the mistakes most people make is to copy from those who already achieved your dream.

For example: If you are a designer who started a small business of selling your designs on Instagram, for you to succeed and stand out from the crowd, you need to figure out, what are other designers like you doing that make them stand out.

They could be using a certain set of hashtags that maximizes their potential reach, posting simple, yet eye-catchy posts that stand out from the rest, engaging with their audience through comments and messages, or something completely different... Monitor what they do, and try implementing it in your strategy.

At the end of the day, a lot of it can be luck and timing, but 95% of it is hard work and never giving up.

To be successful, you need to have the stamina, to get up when you fall, and to keep going when it's tough.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization is crucial when trying to stand out from an ocean of similar gigs and businesses. The goal of SEO is Quality of traffic, Quantity of traffic, and Organic results.

How does SEO work?

Google (or any search engine you're using) has a crawler that goes out and gathers information about all the content they can find on the Internet.

The crawlers bring all those 1s and 0s back to the search engine to build an index. That index is then fed through an algorithm that tries to match all that data with your query.

So, focusing on SEO is a great way to get organic, high-quality traffic on your page.

Pricing

Pricing is the method of determining the value that a producer will get in the exchange of goods and services.

Some things to keep in mind:

- Nature of the product/service

- The price of a similar product/service in the market (the competition)

- Target audience i.e. for whom the product is manufactured (high, medium, or low class)

- The cost of production (labor, raw material, machinery, inventory, transit, etc.)

- External factors such as Economy, Government policies, Legal issues, etc.

Every price needs to be well thought out and planned before being set so that it's attractive, realistic, and profitable.

Conclusion:

Marketing is mandatory for growing a business, and it needs to be properly executed in order to give good, lasting results.

E-mail marketing is a great way to promote your products/services and engage with your audience but requires a strong strategy in order to be successful.

Social media is crucial for business growth in this day and age, and executing it properly can result in massive success. Focus on monitoring what others that already achieved your goals do, and experiment with that in your growth strategy.

Using keywords, relevant titles, and being where people are searching is the best thing you can do for your business to get organic, high-quality traffic.

Lastly, don't give up! To get anywhere in life, you need to be patient and consistent, and keep going when it gets tough. "If you're going through hell, keep going! No one want's to stop in hell".