Week 16 Part A: Developing Your Marketing Strategy

 The main social media platform that I will be using to market myself will be Instagram. I will also be using Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. These social media platforms offer the best tools and opportunity for improvement for my specific business. My options may change in the future considering that other forms of social media could come out or some may go out of business or even make drastic changes to themselves. But, these are the primary ones I will be focusing on for the years to come.

The tool that really helped me out is creating a website and formatting an email that contains important details, logos, and wording. I've never actually considered marketing through emails even though I receive hundreds of emails that are advertising something. Same goes for a website. When you're checking out a website for a popular company you pretty much expect it to be a well formatted website but first impression, easy to navigate, and authenticity are all key factors to making a presentable website. That was one thing that we learned that I'm very appreciative for and enjoyed doing very much.

The other tool that impacted me positively was learning more about the specific tools and insights that social medias have to offer to business accounts. I had an idea of what insights were through Instagram but I had no idea about the extent that you could use them to. You can connect your Facebook and/or website. You can see your likes and comments ratio, how many people are viewing your profile or post, how they saw your post, etc.. All of these can be so impactful on growing a successful business. It makes me wonder how challenging it was to grow and advertise a business before social media was a thing. 

I personally think that my business should focus on marketing on social media as much as possible. With the way things are going, every thing is online now. The best way to advertise your business is through technology. How many people look to newspapers or billboards anymore for advertisements. Everything is being absorbed through a cell phone screen. As sad as it sounds, it really is the best form of marketing in todays age. 

I truly am so thankful for this class and am glad that I decided to enroll in it. It has taught me so many things from the assignments, reading my peers blog posts, and just creating my fictional business and trying things out. I'm very excited to use the tools and methods I've picked up from this class in order to grow my business into something beautiful. I cannot wait!