Marketing Tips For Small Businesses Uk – How to start and boost your business marketing with TV personality Max McMurdo, who shares his experience building his sustainable furniture business, and Jo Sutherland, a marketing expert, who gives great tips on where and how to market your small business with your individual in mind. requirements, and how to make social media work for you.
Jon Watkins Welcome to this latest edition of the FSB podcast, go to podcast for news tips and important information for small businesses and the self-employed. In this episode, we’ll share tips on how you can start marketing your small business or improve your existing marketing activities. Getting the word out about your business and connecting with potential clients and customers is crucial. But it’s not always easy to know where to start. And it’s getting even more complicated because even more channels and platforms are launching and they’ve changed the requirements for small businesses that want to market there. So today, we’re going to unpick some of that and share some top tips from some marketing experts on how to raise your small business’s profile with customers. And our first expert is Max McMurdo, who is a designer, author and TV presenter who you will probably recognize from various TV shows such as Dragon’s Den, Amazing Spaces, Fill Your House for Free and Find it, Fix it Whip it. . Max has a few business ventures of his own, and so can talk about his own experiences marketing those and share some insights. And our second guest is Jo Sutherland who is the founder of Wise Bird Marketing, a marketing agency that specializes in supporting passionate dedicated small businesses across hospitality, retail lifestyle and b2b. Thank you for joining us. I thought we’d just start with each of you giving us a sort of 30-second explanation of your backgrounds; I’ve shared a bit there, but you know why you’re here? And how can you help our audiences?
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Max McMurdo So I’m very grateful, by the way for having us I’m not a marketing guru at all. But I kind of learned how to market my business and myself the hard way probably. So I run a very small business, which is basically me and me, and I design and make things out of junk. So the first item was a chair made from a shopping cart, designed and made it in my mum’s back garden, and then thought ‘Yeah, I’m going to be worth millions of pounds because this is brilliant!’ And then it dawned on me, ‘Oh, I’ve got to sell it, haven’t I, and to sell it, I need people to know about it and for people to know about it, I’ve got to market it.’ And that’s where my life in marketing began. By the way i’m still rubbish at marketing and i’m proud of being rubbish but i’d like to think i’m authentic and for me and my business it’s less about selling products and probably more about selling a lifestyle, a way of life, and me strangely enough, which is something I’m interested in asking Jo about because marketing yourself without sounding arrogant is a really challenging thing.
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Jon Watkins Good stuff, and Jo you’re a bit from the other side – you’re a marketing specialist and guru.
Jo Sutherland Hi, nice to be here Jon, I think guru might be pushing it a bit too much, but thanks a lot. I spent years; long, long time in content agencies. And what that means is that it’s kind of creating things that were first printed magazines, brochures, working with brands to kind of connect well with their customers to sell more things to get new customers to make existing customers more loyal. At first it was very much the print then kind of digital, usually with you know, big retailers say Sainsbury’s, Tesco M&S. And that’s, you know, that’s brutal marketing. It really is traceable, and I really cut my teeth. Then, lastly, working with more B2B brands, which is a little different. It is more targeted. You’re speaking to a much smaller audience, you have to connect in a different way. But I was really introduced to small businesses when I worked as a business director for a digital lifestyle brand for women. The whole purpose of this brand was to connect women with their local businesses, encouraging them to go to bars, restaurants, cafes, hairdressers, and we had that we launched local business awards. 22,000 small businesses came in and that’s when I really started to understand the pressures. The things, is where I also met my business partner Sasha and together we sat down and we realized that there was a huge gap in the market for no nonsense marketing support for small businesses. Accessible, jargon free, no bull and also an accessible price point because it can be overwhelming and confusing. And if what you are is brilliant at making things or doing someone’s hair or running a brilliant coffee shop, you might not be amazing at Digital Marketing.
Jon Watkins Yeah, and Jo, I’d come in there because you might not really know what we mean by marketing, like, you know, if you’re not from that background, or have kind of a traditional view of marketing. When you talked about starting out, it was a bit, you know, in magazines and leaflets and things like that it’s a much more complicated world. When we talk about business marketing, what are we talking about? What does this mean for small businesses? Jo, why don’t you kick us out, and then Max you can knock in?
Jo Sutherland Well, something that Max said to me just really resonated because it’s very easy to start thinking, oh I’ve got to be on Facebook and Instagram, and actually, the first thing you should do, and we tell everybody that. our customers is to understand your purpose. You understand your target, you can market yourself much better. And that’s not because when you said I’m selling a lifestyle that’s exactly what it is, you’re not selling a service or a product – well, you are, but what you really need to think about is how you’re making people’s lives better. , how you make it better, what you give people that they can’t get from anyone else. And so what I mean by marketing is thinking about your purpose, and telling people what that is. And yes, that can end up being through a website, or social, or a podcast, or emailing them directly. But the first thing we tell everyone, and it’s amazing how people struggle, people say I’m a florist, I sell flowers. You don’t, you make people happy because people can send really nice things to their peers. So that’s the first thing is marketing, is to communicate your purpose.
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Max McMurdo Well, as I say, I’m sort of a casual business person. So I didn’t really know. And I thought at first, like I said, I built a chair out of a shopping cart and a sofa out of the bathtub and thought, yeah, I have to sell them. So I have to promote them. And I’m so old I remember the Yellow Pages. So I thought: What should I do? There is no section in the Yellow Pages, for example, a person who makes things from garbage, there was not that section. So strangely, I don’t know if Jo agrees, but probably my first marketing thing was to go to Camden Market, which officially is probably retail, but I just put myself in front of people to promote myself and to get feedback from the customers and learn what the customers looked And, and I used to walk around half the time and witness what they’re buying and figure out why they’re buying it and understand my customer base, I guess. And increasingly, that is changing. As I say, at first, I thought I had to try to sell my products, and I pretended to be a big company, and I pretended that I had set up a lot of fake email addresses. So come to our sales department and, and actually, that put people off because there’s a bunch of big stores out there where you can buy from a big corporation and support, you know, a multi-millionaire getting richer, but actually, when I was more. honest and more authentic and said: Hey, I do all this myself in my little workshop in Bedfordshire, and I’m not a big company, and you can talk to me, the designer on the phone. And quite often I’ll deliver it because, well, mainly because I’m a control freak. And I don’t want a delivery guy to damage my furniture. But also, how cool is that you can actually talk to the designer and the manufacturer.
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