RiRi Okoye: 5 Marketing Practices Every Business Owner Should Know 

What does marketing mean to you? Marketing is everything you do to place your product or service in the hands of potential customers. What activities are then considered as marketing?

• You have a website.
• You send out newsletters.
• You have a podcast.
• You run events.
• You go live on Instagram.
• You run adverts.
• Your staff picks up the phone ‘’This Ashley from Majestically Rare Events, how can I help you?
• You give someone a branded pen, branded note pad a branded bag.
• You have a stand in a mall and give out your products.

If you do any of these, you are marketing. Do you know that what I’m doing right now is marketing? I am teaching you marketing tips. I’m sharing ideas to grow your business. Some of you may be wondering who is RiRi Okoye? Some of you may Google me or go to my website at ririokoye.com to find out more about me. I am marketing.

Here are some marketing practices that every business should do:

Create a Marketing Plan

A marketing plan is a strategic document that you use to get a customer. Your marketing plan will include a lot of P’s: product, pricing, promotion, place, packaging, positioning, people. If don’t have a marketing plan, you will be all over the place; doing everything and still not making profit.

Your marketing plan should remain an ongoing process throughout the life cycle of your business and not a one-off document that gets filed in your draw.

Conduct Due Research

Always ask your customers questions when conducting your research. How can you improve your services or products if you don’t conduct research? How can you know your customers’ deeper desire or pain if you don’t ask? I run a business coaching service and before my clients joined, they filled a detailed feedback form.

Here are some of the questions I asked:

• What are you currently doing to market your business?
• What are your 3 top issues relating to marketing your business right now?
• What are your top 3 marketing goals for your business?

You must ask questions regularly. Don’t rely on assumptions. If possible, speak to them face to face, talk to them via a phone call, or through surveys. You can even run polls on Instagram. Recently I ran a poll and asked my audience if they love marketing. 70% said yes and 30% said no.

Create a Marketing Campaign

A marketing campaign is all the marketing activities that the business will deliver for the year. This may include email marketing, live events, and webinars, social media, seo campaigns. List all the activities you want to do and put a marketing cost for them.

Sell the Benefits in all your Marketing Messages

Your prospects want to know what’s in it for them: How can your product or service make a real difference to your customer’s life? How can it solve their pain? You are confident that if you have a headache and you go to the doctor, he will prescribe something like Panadol to get rid of your headache. It’s the same for your customers – you have to identify your customer’s pain and offer solutions through benefits.

Test and Keep Testing 

Have you ever run Facebook ads that are just not working for you? Or maybe you have a roll-up banner in a shop and nobody is calling you? And you keep running the same ads and getting the same results! Nothing! Crickets.

Why not change the image and see what happens? Why not change the copy? Why not change the location of the roll-up banner in the shop? That could just be the difference in making great sales. Please stop spending money on adverts that are just not working for you. Test and keep testing.

Outsource where Possible

As a business owner, you are supposed to spend your time on activities that will bring you the most revenue and sales. This may include identifying new clients, upselling or cross-selling to your currents clients, coming up with offers, creating sales funnels, giving presentations, following up, asking for referrals, and closing sales.

Marketing has to be your number one business function. Unfortunately, many business owners spend their time on non-revenue generating activities like administrative work. This has to stop otherwise your business won’t grow. So where possible, outsource. What can you outsource? You can outsource your admin work by hiring a virtual assistant. You can hire a social media manager, an accountant, and so on.

Which marketing practice are you going to start doing today?