Idea to Profit – 5 Essential Marketing Skills for Every Start Up Business

marketing skills

Every business starts with an idea, but taking that idea and turning it into profit is a long and difficult path. That said, you can make things much easier on yourself if you focus not only on bringing your idea into reality but also on developing marketing skills that will help you both now and down the road when your business is up and running. Marketing is the lifeblood of any business, so let’s take a look at some of the most essential marketing skills that will help make your business profitable for years/decades to come.

Connecting vs Selling

Marketing has changed drastically with the advent of the Internet. The days of “hard selling” have almost completely died, giving way to an age where it is vastly more important to connect with your potential customers on a more personal level. Social media, emails, text messages, and chat groups have all become ways of drawing people into your sales funnel.

The benefit here is that using these methods allow you to better connect with your customers, building loyalty, respect, and trust among them. This can lead to fantastic results in repeat sales, and word-of-mouth marketing. The downside is, of course, the fact that it can take longer to make a sale from point of contact, and it takes a bit more effort. Fortunately, there are many marketing solutions available online that help you to save time, save money, and, of course, make money.

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Leveraging Your Connections

The Internet age has made it easier not only to connect with potential customers, but also potential business partners, contractors, and employees as well. One person could make all the difference in your business, so always keep an eye out for opportunities to connect with people who could be beneficial to your business.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the true value of your connections isn’t necessarily the connection itself, but the doors it opens up. You’ve probably heard the saying that on Facebook you’re just five connections away from someone famous, but this principal really shines when you begin thinking about how to use it to connect with people who could help you explode your business and reach new markets.

Content Writing vs Copywriting

While a video is a very powerful form of marketing online, much of your marketing efforts will still be made through text. This makes it critical to understand the difference between content writing and copywriting.

Just about anyone can be a content writer. The US is the largest consumer market in the world, and the average person reads on an 8th-grade level. Writing a blog post that connects with people is simplicity itself. However, writing a sales page or a blog post that “soft-sells” your readers is a much more difficult task requiring a very specialized set of skills.

When you hire someone to write any form of sales material, make sure you’re hiring a copywriter, not a content writer. Yes, copywriters are more expensive, but they are well worth the investment due to their understanding of sales psychology, and how to implement it to get the most out of your marketing efforts.

When to Sell

Since marketing has a lot more to do with connecting rather than selling, the big question is, when do you sell? The first thing you need to realize is that there are certain places where it is okay to sell and others where it is not okay. Email is for relationship building and for getting a person from Point A to Point B. Do not sell in your emails or they will end up in the spam folder.

Likewise, social media is used for branding, as well as building trust and credibility among your followers. Don’t sell on social media, no one wants to be pressured in such a casual environment. The same goes for social settings, like Facebook groups.

Generally speaking, the best time and place to sell is on your website. There you can create pages specifically designed to hard sell your prospects after you’ve used social media, email, and other methods to build a relationship with them.

Closing a sale on the phone is also an option if that’s the nature of your business. In this case, use your marketing efforts to build up towards getting your followers to pick up the phone and give you a call where you can make the sale and complete the transaction.

Overall, marketing is more complex these days, but in a way, much easier. Hard selling in the past was very hit or miss, and typically had very low conversion rates, requiring a massive audience to make a decent profit. These days you can successfully monetize much smaller groups of people through consistent connection-based marketing that treats them like actual people, not just money cows you want to milk for profit. Keep this in mind, and you’ll soon master the skills needed to turn your idea into a profitable business.