Company Overview examples & key points

Now that you have your team assembled, it's time to put your heads together for this first important task.

Your company overview is a key piece of content that will be used for multiple purposes, both promotional and in-house. It should be short, concise, and descriptive, giving people an insight into of who you are, what you do and how you do it. It should communicate what makes you stand out from your competitors and address your core values as a company and a brand.

This is Your Story, an important piece of content will be adapted consistently across promotional areas such as your website, social media profiles, business directory listings as well as marketing and promotional materials.

You'll need to introduce people to your company, your ethos, and mission statement, whilst communicating your products and services. You'll need to identify what makes you stand out in your industry, with your USP's clearly defined.

Your company overview contains a great deal of promotional information, so it's important to keep it clear, simple and interesting, always writing with your target audience in mind.

Remember, your company overview will be used and adapted across several platforms, so be sure to keep it clear and malleable to use across different mediums.

We recommend reading this useful article - "How to write an effective company overview" - for more advice and guidance.

Business Goals are needed to monitor your success

A critical part of your digital marketing plan is establishing clearly defined, quantifiable goals. You should think about exactly what you are looking to achieve from your digital marketing and assign goals that reflect this. Creating goals for your business can be anything from financial to process based. Both quantitative and qualitative goals are extremely important. Such goals can be related to leads and sales or the quality of feedback about your services. For each goal you should identify what you want to achieve, the strategy to do this, how you will measure it, and the time in which you want this to happen.

These “Smart Goals” should be measurable and include deadlines as markers for success.

You should look to break your business goals down into smaller milestones so that you can track your progress.

Later in the guide, we will look at using these goals to introduce our metrics and defining how each will be measured. So for now, just identify the business goals, and we will expand on them later in your marketing plan to complete them with Key Performance Indicators.

You can read our article on "How to identify and set effective Business Goals" to learn more. 

Key Performance Indicators

Once you have established your business goals and target audience, it's a good time to start thinking about how you will measure the performance of your digital marketing campaign.

To do this, we use Key Performance Indicators.

A KPI is a quantifiable measure of performance over time for a specific objective. KPIs provide targets for your business progress, milestones, and insights that assist you in measuring success and making important decisions for your company.

There are KPIs for every aspect of business, whether it's financial, marketing, sales, or operational. We look at the defined business goals and decide the metrics which will give us the best insights. We recommend that you create a spreadsheet or table with each of your business goals listed, the KPI for each of these goals and an area to add the value each month for ongoing comparison.

To understand more about KPI's, how to use them and see some examples, read our resource here - "What is a Key Performance Indicator? KPI's in simple terms"

Understand your Target Audience and Demographic

The next essential part of your plan is to identify who your marketing efforts will be geared towards. Before you launch any sort of marketing campaign or website, it is crucial to establish who you are communicating with.

This will affect every decision for your campaign, from the writing style and content, the use of images, the places you advertise and promote, even your branding style. Understanding your target demographic is extremely important, so let's define who our audience actually are.

We need to profile our audience, looking at factors including;

• Demographics
• Buying Habits
• Challenges and Goals

You can profile your audience in a number of ways, and once you understand who your audience is, you can make decisions on how best to reach them, and how to effectively manage your brand to resonate with them.

For some useful advice on how to identify your target audience, read our article here - "How to determine the target audience for your business"

Understanding and Assessing your Competitors

Competitor research is the process of identifying businesses in your industry that offer similar products or services and evaluating them based on a set of predetermined business criteria and Key Performance Indicators.

This will help you assess the ongoing performance of your business comparitively from the point of view of your customers. It is important to know how your customers view you in comparison to your competition. A competitor analysis will give you a better idea of what services are currently available to your target customer and what areas are being neglected.  

It is important to conduct routine competitor research throughout the lifecycle of your business to stay up to date with market trends and product offerings. This will reveal important information about market saturation, business opportunities and industry best practices.

Key points to address in competitor research

• Who are your Competitors

  We recommend selecting 3 - 5 of your key competitors based on similar services, location and target audience with which to run your research and comparisons. If you are unsure who your main online competitors are, try searching on Google for a key phrase that customers may use to find you and see who is coming up first - for example if we search "Plumber in Shrewsbury" we would instantly get a list of businesses competing for the top spot in that location.

• Activities and Promotion

  Where are your competitors promoting? Where are they active and engaging with customers? How are they positioned in search results and how user friendly are their websites?

• Measure KPIs

  It's a good idea to monitor your competitors in relation to your own metrics. You can use the predefined KPIs you set up for your own measurements to evaulate your competitors current performance

• Learn from success to find opportunities

  Look at where your competitors are performing well in each analysis to find opportunities for yourself. For example, if they are gaining a strong following on social media, what sort of activities, posts and promotions are they engaging in?

• Listen to customers

  Be sure to check out customer reactions and opinions on social media and review websites. Their voice is an extremely important one for identifying areas where your competitors are struggling to meet demand and expectations, shining a spotlight where you can improve their experience.

Once you have conducted your competitor research you should have an understanding of your current placement and performance within the immediate scope of your industry. Be sure to add any findings into your S.W.O.T analysis.

Explore Marketing and Promotional Opportunities

Now that we have a wealth of information about ourselves, our target audience and our competitors it's time to evauluate the industry as a whole. We need to see what opportunities are available to us and what tools are at our disposal before we start planning our promotional strategies. To do this we should research the current climate of the industry, consumer needs and requirements and general challenges facing the market.

What's important in your industry landscape?

• What are the best places to engage customers?

  Check out social media, look for online forums and review sites. Where ever your customers are searching or browsing for your services or products, you need to be active. Where ever your customers are, there is an opportunity!

• Price points and quality

  Where do you place in terms of the cost of your products and services and how well does your quality and customer service stack up?

• Tools and services

  There are different ways to reach your customers. Through your website, Social media, paid advertising, content marketing and email marketing to name a few. It's important to assess which your customer base tend to respond to within your industry.

Once you have evaluated the landscape it's time to take all of the information we have established to date and make a start into putting an actionable plan in place for the different branches of your campaign.

Create a SWOT Analysis

Now that we know how we're going to measure the performance and effectiveness of our marketing efforts, let's take a baseline reading of our current position.

It's important to have a grasp of how we are currently performing to guage improvement over time. Use the spreadsheet or table you have created to complete a baseline column.

Once you have recorded all of the data for your current position, you will have a clear idea of where to focus your efforts for improvements and where you are currently performing well. This will allow you to assess any current marketing methods to evaluate where change is needed and what can be learned from successful metrics.

Here we may now consider doing a S.W.O.T analysis.

A SWOT analysis helps you understand internal and external factors that can make or break your success toward your marketing goals. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

You can look at your current performance and discuss with your team where you are performing well, where you need improvement, where those opportunities for improvement are and threats or challenges to moving forward.

You can begin the S.W.O.T analysis at this point and revisit once you have completed your competitor and industry research to add to and expand on your current view on the situation.

Now we have assessed the Industry Landscape, we understand our customers and competitors, we can start to formulate our strategies for how we are going to promote our company, brand and services. One of our primary goals will be to drive traffic to our website.

There are 4 key types of traffic that we need to understand;

• Direct Traffic

  People who access your site directly using the website address.

• Organic Traffic

  People who find your website via search engines such as Google & Bing using.

• Referral Traffic

  People who find your website through 3rd party platforms such as social media, other peoples blogs, review sites and forums.

• Paid Advertising Traffic

  People who see your advert on search engines, social media or 3rd party websites and click through to your website.

We will be placing a huge focus on driving direct, organic and referral traffic to your website through SEO, Content Marketing and Social Media. We will look at this in the next stages.

However, it may be that you will be considering some paid advertising to generate leads and sales. There are a great number of opportunities online that prove successful when it comes to paid advertising, such as Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, YouTube and other social media platforms. It's important to understand the types of advertising available to you and which will best suit your campaign.

A few key points to consider include;

• What are the most successful platforms available to us for paid advertising?

  There endless opportunity for paid promotions online, but we need to look at the most effective tools available.

• What platforms are your target audience using?

  It's important to reach your customer base, so using our previous target audience research, we now can make some informed decisions about where to invest in any paid promotions.

• Which content types will best suit our chosen platforms?

  This is where content meets advertising. If we know that a large portion of our customer base are actively using YouTube, then we need to consider creating video versions of our content to promote our message and brand.

• What budget is sensible to assign to paid advertising?

  Budget is a huge consideration and we need to think about our return on investment (ROI).

Whilst we want as little expenditure as possible, it's important not to dismiss the benefits of paid advertising for generating leads and sales. The resources in this section will take you through what you need to know if you are considering paid promotions as part of your campaign.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is one of the most critical parts of your campaign to consider.

SEO is how we manage our website structure and content (both on and off-site) to rank higher in search engines such as Google & Bing for key terms and phrases that best represent our company, services, products and information. The ultimate goal is that our website pages are ranking high in results as people search for what we have to offer.

Before we can begin our strategy for SEO, we need to understand the key factors involved that we MUST pay close attention to. This information will be important through the stages of planning your content and website so, whilst much of this will come into play when your website is created / evaluated, let's just get a brief understanding now.

6 key factors for SEO;

• SEO Basics

  This includes setting up diagnostic and reporting tools such as Google Analytics.

• Keyword Research

  Understanding what your customers are searching for in relation to your products and services. This will be the core focus of this section.

• Technical SEO

  Ensure that your website is well-structured, clean-coded, accessible to search engines, mobile friendly and optimised to load quickly.

• Content Optimisation

  Writing informative, descriptive and interesting content that engages the user and is easy to read. This process is relevant to everything on your website, from your home page copy, blog articles, product and service descriptions. Your content is key to reaching your customers for a wider selection of key terms and phrases related to your offering.

• On-page SEO

  Crafting each page on your website to include information that search engines will read to index, rank and deliver your content.

• Link Building

  Getting relevant, high quality links from other websites that indicate to search engines a connection between your content and the source website. These types of links can indicate that your content is useful, beneficial, and authoritative.

The key factor we need to consider at this stage is Keyword Research. To plan our strategy, we need to understand what people are searching for. These resources will focus on conducting the keyword research that will provide you with this information, so you can actively plan your content and website structure with these key terms and phrases in mind.

We bring you Web Rocket. A step by step walk through of your digital marketing process, designed to help you prepare for your new website development project.

From preparing your business and branding, to building your website and planning your content and social media strategy, we take you through step by step with a process check list in which you can save your progress as you complete each stage.

We bring you Web Rocket. A step by step walk through of your digital marketing process, designed to help you prepare for your new website development project.

From preparing your business and branding, to building your website and planning your content and social media strategy, we take you through step by step with a process check list in which you can save your progress as you complete each stage.