Who are Start Digital?
If you were a small business in the past and you wanted to spread awareness of your brand and grow, you had two options:
- Hire a marketing team.
- Do your own marketing.
Depending on how small you were, you’d have probably opted to do your own marketing. The problem is… where do you start? There is a lot that goes into all the different facets of marketing, especially digital marketing, and how do you know if you’re doing it right? How do you come up with solutions to the few problems you actually know exist?
Well, with funding from the Liverpool City Region, Start Digital is now able to provide the best online digital marketing courses for free, completely online to everyone living in the region. Alongside their free online digital marketing training, Start Digital also offers specialised courses in web design, social media, graphics design, photography, videography, as well as IT user skills for administration. They work with local company Make A Difference Marketing in order to ensure that their training courses are up to date with current trending standards. In fact, it’s the staff at Make A Difference Marketing who do all the training!
As a small business owner who’s looking to start marketing your company, there’s no reason you, or an employee, can’t take an hour a week for either 4 – 12 weeks to make sure you’re setting yourself up properly. It’s a relatively small time investment allows for a massive ROI for your business. Again, it’s free, so it’s all at no cost to you.
But, before you take a look at Start Digital’s online digital marketing courses, let’s take a look at marketing itself.
Marketing.
What’s it all about?
If you really think about it and break it down, all business is just marketing. Even the products you’re selling are a result of marketing. Of course, you probably have deeper aspirations, but you’re doing what you do because it fills a need or a desire in people’s lives., Figuring out what people need and desire is a product of marketing – AKA market research.
Nike and Product Creation
Let’s think about the company Nike. If they’re looking for a new product to sell, they’ll talk to their marketing department to research a trainer that fits a certain need or desire. They’ll do some research and come up with the perfect trainer for a certain audience.
Next, they need to sell it to said audiance. This is what most people think of when they think of marketing: sales and advertisements.
In reality, good marketing is pairing an audience with a product, even if that means creating the product yourself.
Apple and Brand Identity
Now, let’s look at Apple. In the early-mid 2000s, Apple started to market itself as a high-end luxury goods retailer, full of innovation and sleek designs. After the passing of visionary extraordinaire Steve Jobs, innovation at Apple may have stagnated somewhat, but their designs to this day still communicate importance, luxury, and elegance. That’s their entire brand. Apple isn’t selling phones, watches, or computers, they’re selling a feeling of importance, luxury, and elegance.
It’s very rare for someone when shopping around to start comparing all of the different technical specs of all the different phones, weighing the pros and cons… Instead, you’ll likely pick the phone that feels right, and maybe has a good camera. But, in essence, If Apple’s marketing resonates with you more than Sony’s, Samsung’s, Google’s, or any other phone company’s, you’re going to get an iPhone.
Good marketing isn’t just about selling your product, it’s about selling a feeling
Put It All Together
Put it all together, and you realise marketing is everything in business. Even if your product is simply exceptional and word of mouth alone is carrying your business, you can’t just have a product. You need to figure out what kind of person wants your product and find out more about them. Lynx (or AXE as it’s called in America), with their men’s deodorant range, marketed heavily towards young adults with less than stellar love lives and made them feel like their product would make them more attractive to women. Even if they don’t consciously believe it, the unconscious association has been made.
Ready to Tell the World Who You Really Are?
If you want to learn more about market research, product creation, and brand identity, get in touch ask Start Digital about their online digital marketing courses.
Contact Start Digital:
Phone: 07592 808208
Email: info@startliverpool.net
Website: https://startdigitaltraining.co.uk/