Small business marketing for North Norfolk

Marketing basics 

In this first session we look at the fundamentals of marketing for small businesses. We’ll work on building an understanding of how a marketing funnel operates and how businesses can use a variety of marketing tools to drive customers through the marketing process.

Understanding your audience

This session focuses on understanding your audience. We’ll look at different tools and methods such as creating audience personas that will help you get to know your audience better. We explain how a deeper understanding of your audience can help you reach new customers and improve your relationships with existing ones.
 

We’ll also look at the specifics of the audience in North Norfolk and discuss what this means for small businesses operating in the area.

Your marketing channels 

This week we focus on marketing channels and how they can help you reach your audience. We’ll discuss ‘owned’ media channels such as your website and social media, ‘earned’ channels such as PR and customer reviews, and ‘paid’ channels such as advertising. We’ll discuss the strengths and limitations of each channel and where they sit in the sales funnel that we cover in week one.

Evaluating your marketing 

This practical session brings together everything you have learned in the three previous sessions. We’ll cover evaluation and using data to help understand how effective your current marketing is. We’ll look at strengthening areas where your business is already performing well, improving areas of weakness, and when to introduce new channels
you may not be using yet. We’ll also discuss how marketing can be used to improve other areas of your business such as your pricing and product strategy.

Writing your marketing plan

Building on sessions one to four, now is the time to write your draft marketing plan. We’ll look at the audience you are targeting and how you can use different marketing channels to reach them at different parts of the sales funnel. This will range from raising awareness of your business, to nurturing people who may have considered you but haven't purchased yet, to turning your existing customers into advocates for your business through word of mouth and online reviews

Delivering your plan: Owned media channels

With your marketing plan ready we’ll look at how to put it into action. This session looks at what marketing professionals call your ‘Owned’ media channels. These include your website, your email marketing, and social media. We’ll look at the fundamentals of a good small business website, from content, to navigation, to search engine optimisation
(SEO). We’ll also discuss how to use the data you have available to you to make evidence-based decisions to improve your site.

We’ll also look at best practices for email marketing and how to use data to improve your approach. We’ll look at the strengths of different social media channels such as Instagram and Facebook and how you can use them most effectively to promote your business to different audiences.

Delivering your plan: Earned media

‘Earned’ media is when other people shout about your business without being paid to do so. This includes journalists writing about your business, customers sharing reviews, and people posting social media content about you.
 

Earned media is extremely valuable and this session will look at how you can maximise its value. We’ll also spend some time discussing how to respond when things go wrong such as when you receive negative reviews from customers.

Delivering your plan: Introduction to paid media

Paid media means advertising. This could mean taking out an advert in a local newspaper or magazine, or paying for adverts on online platforms such as Google or Facebook. social media ‘influencers’ will often expect payment or gifted services in exchange for posting about your business so we will cover influencer marketing in this session.
 

We’ll discuss the strengths and weaknesses of different forms of paid media, when to use them in your marketing strategy, and using data to improve your campaigns and to make sure you are getting the best value for money.

Adapting your marketing plan for changing
market conditions

Nobody could say the last few years have been easy. This session looks at how you can adapt your marketing strategy when things change. Could you effectively survive another economic downturn? Could you scale your business quickly if you suddenly get a big rise in new customers? As with all our sessions, we’ll use our knowledge of North
Norfolk to look at the specific challenges faced by businesses in the area.

This session is designed to help you build resilience into your marketing and wider business, to make sure you are ready for anything.

Course Review 

This final session reviews everything we’ve learned throughout the course, offering you a chance to fine-tune your marketing plan and to make sure you have a clear action plan moving forward. It’s also an opportunity to ask any final questions before you put
your plan into practice.