Small Business Marketing Kit For Dummies
Overview
Harness the power of marketing and watch your business grow
Having your own business isn't the same as having customers, and one is useless without the other. Whether your business is a resale store or a high-tech consulting firm, a law office or a home cleaning service, in today's competitive environment, strategic marketing is essential.
If you want your small business to grow, you need a marketing strategy that works. But how do you get people to notice your business without spending a fortune? Packed with savvy tips for low-cost, high-impact campaigns, this friendly guide is your road map to launching a great marketing campaign and taking advantage of the newest technologies and avenues for outreach.
- Using social media as a marketing tool
- Communicating with customers
- Financing a marketing campaign
- The companion CD includes tools and templates to give you a jump-start on putting your new skills to work
If you're looking to give your small business' marketing plan an edge over the competition, Small Business Marketing Kit For Dummies has you covered.
CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of the e-book file, but are available for download after purchase.
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About The Author
Barbara Findlay Schenck (Bend, OR) has spent more than 25 years guiding the marketing programs of organizations ranging from large Fortune 500 firms to small businesses such as ski and golf resorts, community banks, service companies, and equipment manufacturers. She presents marketing seminars to small business groups and two of her marketing courses are currently offered online to bankers and insurance agents. She and her husband are cofounders of Mandala Communications, an advertising agency.
Sample Chapters
small business marketing kit for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
Marketing is the process through which you win and keep customers. Marketing covers all the steps that tailor your products, messages, distribution, online presence, sales presentations, customer service, and other business actions to match the desires of your most important small business asset: your customer.
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General Small Business
A marketing plan powers your business and is at the heart of any good business plan. In 10 steps and on as little as a couple of pages, follow this template for writing a marketing plan that turns your marketing effort into a planned investment rather than a hopeful risk.
State your business purpose.
Define your market situation, focusing on issues that affect your customers, your product, and your competition.
General Small Business
Marketing is the key to achieving customer interest, winning customer purchases, earning customer satisfaction and loyalty, and keeping your small business in business. Following is the least you need to know as you plan your small business marketing program:
On marketing: Marketing isn’t about talking to your customers; it’s about talking with them.
General Small Business
Whether yours is a start-up or an existing business, whether your budget is large or small, whether your market is local or global, and whether you sell online or through a bricks-and-mortar location, your marketing follows the same nonstop cycle.
Conduct research to gain knowledge about your customers, product, market area, and competitors.
General Small Business
Television ads are the most memorable form of advertising. For small businesses looking to maximize advertising reach in a small market area, broadcast advertising may be essential to success. With the advent of cable, television advertising is suddenly an affordable way for small businesses to spread their commercial message.
Small businesses are turning to online advertising more and more, because it's cost-effective and a pretty good way to target your marketing ads to a specific audience. Although your website is probably your best small business marketing tool, other options include search and banner ads, and increasingly, interactive and video ads.
General Small Business
Public relations (PR) is about getting your small business noticed by customers, business partners, and prospects. Develop a working public relations plan to target specific audiences with your small business marketing message.
The Public Relations Society of America defines public relations as activities that “help an organization and its public adapt mutually to each other.
General Small Business
Your small business needs to stay on top of the competition and your share of the market. Having a sense of your market share provides a good indication of your competitive rank and a way to monitor your growth within your target market.
Size up your small business target market
To calculate your share of the market, first define the size of the market in which you compete.
General Small Business
Selecting the best media vehicle for advertising your small business can be a hair pulling experience. However, you can easily convey your small business marketing message to your target audience through careful scheduling of ads and effective use of media choices, and still keep most of your hair.
Back in the day, advertisers chose from among three TV networks, a couple of local-market AM radio stations, and a single hometown newspaper.
General Small Business
Good blogging follows a blogger-designed posting schedule and an established blog-post format. Although you might be tempted to create a rigorous blog-post schedule, blog only when you have quality content to deliver. Planning your blog-post approach helps you attract the audience you desire, and to keep it.
Establish a small business blogging calendar
To plan your blog posts, take these steps:
Divide your blog into categories that address various aspects of the topic you plan to blog about.
General Small Business
Use your small business blog to leverage the content you create. Through your blog, you can cross-promote small business happenings, such as when you or someone in your business makes a major presentation or generates news coverage.
Turn small business news into blog content
Each time you distribute a news release about your small business, rewrite the information in blog style using a conversational tone; incorporate links to any relevant photos, video, or supporting resources; and post it on your blog.
General Small Business
To design the best print ad for your small business, the headline, copy, and graphics must work together to advance your small business brand. The best print ads capture attention, inspire the target market, promote the product’s benefits, prompt the desired consumer action, and advance the brand of the business that placed the ad.
General Small Business
All marketing communications or advertising for your small business, whether delivered in person, through promotions, or via traditional media, direct mail, or e-mail, need to accomplish the same tasks:
Grab attention.
Impart information the prospect wants to know.
Present offers that are sensitive to how and when the prospect wants to take action.
General Small Business
Developing a small business brand requires hard work, but the payoff is increased sales. Your small business may not have a globally recognized “power brand” simply because you don’t have the marketing muscle that would fuel that level of awareness. But you can be the most powerful brand in your target market.
General Small Business
Press releases (news releases) about your small business can be distributed through online and conventional media sources. Press releases help market your small business by highlighting news or events related to your small business.
Distribute a hard-copy news release about your small business
If you deliver your release by mail, hand, or fax, prepare your story in the long-standing form of a printed release.
General Small Business
Adding e-mail marketing to your small business advertising mix isn't as simple as blasting out traditional marketing messages via e-mail, or using e-mail in place of other advertising outlets. E-mail mass mailings can easily turn into junk mail, and for legal and marketing reasons, you want to be sure yours don’t.
General Small Business
For all the money that small businesses spend on marketing, they often look right past free opportunities to add marketing messages to their own products, vehicles, and more. With the right moves you can amplify your marketing message with practically no investment at all.
Turn your small business packaging into ad vehicles
Every time you package a product for a customer, you’re creating a vehicle that can give your marketing message a free ride.
General Small Business
Hiring a web design company to build your small business website is similar to hiring a marketing agency. Your small business website deserves professional treatment, as it represents the main gateway for reaching your target audience with your marketing message and small business branding.
Find professional help in designing your small business website
When businesses look to hire an ad agency, they contact ad agencies.
General Small Business
An effective marketing strategy for a small business or startup follows the same basic marketing cycle as a big business, but for the small business marketer, the similarities stop there. Budgets, staffing, creative approaches, and communication techniques vary hugely between an international mega-marketer like, say, Coca-Cola, and a comparatively micro-budget marketer like, well, you.
General Small Business
Research your current small business customers and track the information so you can better target them with marketing. Customer information you collect helps retain current customers and reach more people just like them. People with the same profile as your current small business customers are apt to become customers as well.
General Small Business
When a small business customer expresses a concern or has a complaint, don't panic. Use the customer complaint as an opportunity to improve small business service or product for all your customers and to grow your business as a result.
Dissatisfied customers complain to dozens of friends and post disparaging messages that go viral online, but you’ll find it comforting to know that if you handle complaints well, you’ll circumvent potential damage and strengthen your customer relationships.
General Small Business
Every business plan includes a distribution section that details how you plan to get your small business products and services into the hands of your customers. Developing a good distribution system blends knowledge about your small business customer with knowledge of how that person ended up with your product (that’s what distribution is about).
General Small Business
Preparing for a press interview on your small business is perhaps a bit daunting, but it's a media publicity jackpot for your small business. Media requests for interviews often follow a press release, so you should prepare accordingly.
Before the press interview about your small business
Get the details. Confirm the media outlet and deadline, along with the interview topic, the story’s angle, and the type of questions you’ll be asked.
General Small Business
Pricing your small business products and services properly is one of the most important business decisions you'll make, and it centers on the relationship between perceived value or quality and the price customers are willing to pay for it.
When sales are down or customers seem dissatisfied, small businesses turn too quickly to their pricing in their search for a quick-fix solution.
General Small Business
A small business owner may hesitate to raise prices, but often prices may need to be increased in order for a small business to remain viable. Your customers may resist or barely register price hikes. Their reaction largely depends on how you announce the change.
One of the worst approaches is to simply raise prices with a take-it-or-leave-it announcement.
General Small Business
Protect your small business by controlling the impression you make on your customers, especially in-person. In-person contact can happen via telephone and voice mail, or through a visit to your on-ground location. It's up to you to ensure that the impressions your customers form drives them to your small business, rather than away.
General Small Business
You never get a second chance to make a first impression, so you must guard the online impression your small business makes. Online impressions are created through your small business website, Facebook page, email communications, social media communications, and search engine results, and they either bring potential customers in or send them away.
General Small Business
Customers form impressions of your small business whenever they come into contact with it even through a telephone. Protect your small business by controlling the impression you make through telephone conversations and your voice-mail system.
First impressions of your small business by telephone
Often, with no prompting at all, callers will tell you how they found your number.
General Small Business
Your small business customer service is measured by how well you deliver your product to your customer. Improving your small business customer service is often the key to survival, especially in a tough economy.
In many small businesses, customer parking and free coffee are considered expected offerings. They become indicators of great service when they rise above standard levels.
General Small Business
Increasing market share is a business plan strategy any small business can benefit from. You win market share by taking business from your direct competitors, thereby reducing their slice of the market pie while increasing your own. Here’s what you must do:
Get to know your direct competition.
If prospects don’t buy from your business, where do they go instead?
General Small Business
Increase sales in your small business by improving your relationship with customers, so they return to buy again and again. Closing sales in a small business begins with establishing relationships with sales prospects, whether online, in person, or by phone, mail, or e-mail.
Increase your small business customer conversion rate
Here’s an amazing fact: Fewer than half of all people who enter a retail outlet make a purchase.
General Small Business
Whether you use social media to market your small business or simply to share content, it's important that you are active and engaging. With social media, consistency in frequency and message is as important as it is with other forms of advertising.
Participate with your social media networks through a combination of three activities:
Sharing useful, relevant, interesting information, called content, created by your business.
General Small Business
One-to-one marketing through direct mail targets your small business customers. Direct mailers focus your marketing communications on your best prospects, while also providing a simple way to measure their success.
The best direct mailers feature the following materials and information:
A clear offer: Feature the offer on the envelope, the letter, the letter’s postscript, and any additional enclosures.
General Small Business
As a small business owner, you must constantly monitor your customers' loyalty to your business, and do everything you can to maintain it. Customer loyalty is cultivated through every interaction your customer has with your small business.
Customers vote with their wallets, and your cash register is their ballot box.
General Small Business
Monitoring your small business' presence on social media is important in order to understand how you customers view your company. Monitor your social media program in two ways:
Watch to see who’s talking about you and what they’re saying.
Observe how your comments and content are received and how your network is expanding as a result of your efforts.
General Small Business
Great news for small budget marketers: The most effective small business newsletters look inexpensive, newsy, and current, which translates to the fact that newsletters are among the most economical of marketing materials.
Whether you’re creating printed or digital newsletters, consider the following points:
Stick with a simple format issue after issue.
General Small Business
Understanding how to set goals and objectives is key to developing a good marketing plan. Your marketing strategy should reflect the goals you want to achieve as a business. As a small business marketer, if you start with a goal, a marketing strategy, and a reasonable budget for achieving your desired outcome, chances are you’ll get where you want to go.
General Small Business
Press releases are also called news releases, and they can be used to market your small business online and in print media. A press release can highlight news or events related to your small business, and attract additional interest in your service or product.
Options for distributing your small business press release
Whether you distribute your release via traditional media or online, after you circulate it to media outlets, amplify your news in the following ways:
Post your release on your own website before distributing it elsewhere.
General Small Business
Market positioning involves figuring out the niche your business is designed to fill, and then filling that market position so well that people have no reason to allow any other business into the space in their minds they hold for your brand.
Brands live in consumer minds. But just like you need to find an empty lot if you want to build a home to live in, you need to find an empty mind space (market position) if you want to embed your brand in your customer’s brain.
General Small Business
Today’s marketers live in a world where pull marketing rules, especially online. Pull marketing involves developing consumer interest by providing entertaining or educational messages that pull attention toward your business, often via your website.
In today’s screen-connected marketplace, pull marketing is interactive; it’s two-way communication that begins with information, usually referred to as content, that you originate and customers encounter through search engines, referrals, and social media.
General Small Business
After creating a small business marketing message, you need to choose not only the best media to use but also when to advertise and how often. Scheduling the effective use of marketing media is almost as important as the message you are trying to convey.
When advertising on all mass media except digital media, the amount of money you spend and how you spend it depends on how you balance three scheduling considerations: reach, frequency, and timing.
General Small Business
Building a social network to market your small business brand takes effort and time, because you are building relationships with your customers, and not simply distributing advertisements. Each social media outlet has its own characteristics to consider.
Use Facebook to market your small business
Facebook profiles are for people and Facebook pages are for businesses.
General Small Business
Small business marketing budgets include two variables: time and money. You can reach your small business customers with paid advertising and marketing communications, or through personal contacts, which requires time but little if any cash outlay.
As a small business owner, the most important commitment you can make to your marketing program is to establish and stick to a budget.
General Small Business
Customers decide to buy based on their perception of the value they’re receiving for the price they’re paying. As a small business owner, you must understand your customer's decision-making process so that the price you charge for your product reflects what your customer thinks your offering is worth. If nothing distinguishes your product, it falls into the category of a commodity, for which customers are unwilling to pay extra.
General Small Business
Marketing is the process through which you win and keep customers. Marketing covers all the steps that tailor your products, messages, distribution, online presence, sales presentations, customer service, and other business actions to match the desires of your most important small business asset: your customer.
General Small Business
Often, how you present your small business offering can make or break your chance to close the deal and make the sale. As a small business entrepreneur, it's critical that you use your sales presentations to present your product or service in the best light, and to turn prospects into customers.
Prepare your small business sales presentation
Effective sales presentations match product benefits with customer needs or desires.
General Small Business
In a customer’s mind, your business name is the key to your brand image. Choosing a business name can brand an image for your business that’s unique, memorable, appropriate, and likable.
What kind of small business name do you want?
Most business names fit into one of the following categories:
The owner’s name: If Jim Smith opens an accounting firm, he can name it Jim Smith Accounting.
General Small Business
Social media provides unique opportunities for marketing your small business. Leveraging the power of social media marketing is just plain smart, if you’re a small business with an equally small budget.
Define your small business marketing objectives
In descending order, most small businesses say their social media objectives are to connect with customers, enhance visibility and awareness, promote business offerings, share news quickly, and stay on top of market and industry news and trends.
General Small Business
A great marketing plan is focused on your target audience, market environment, and competitive situation. When creating a marketing plan, be clear about the image and message you want to convey. Choose engaging marketing tactics that pull customers to your business, your products, and your cash register.
State your business purpose
Write your business purpose, such as:
To fuel the success of small business leaders and entrepreneurs by providing big-time marketing advice and tools scaled to fit the clocks, calendars, budgets, and pressing realities of small businesses in today’s customer-empowered, screen-connected world.
General Small Business
Attracting customers to your online business involves a sophisticated e-commerce marketing plan that protects your online reputation and brand while attracting customers you want. An online business must be easily findable through online search engines, while also exploiting social media.
Become findable online
More often than not, people form first impressions by what they learn about you online, which is why you need to commit to becoming findable online and to developing search results that consistently lead to accurate, trustworthy information about you and your business.
Especially for a small or start-up business, marketing is a nonstop cycle designed to win and keep customers. To build a strong business, every successful marketing program follows the same marketing cycle that begins with customer knowledge and goes around to customer service before it begins all over again.
Along the way, the marketing cycle involves product development, pricing, packaging, distribution, advertising and promotion, and all the steps involved in making the sale and serving the customer well.
General Small Business
Each social media outlet has something to offer for marketing your small business. Using social media to effectively market your small business brand takes time however, because you need to build customer relationships and simply push ads at them.
Once you've select which media outlets to use to market your small business, it's easy to get started.
General Small Business
Identify your small business's target market by analyzing your product sales data, and focus your marketing efforts precisely at target audiences that have the interest and ability to purchase your products. To match segments of your market with the categories of your product line they’re most likely to want to purchase, take these steps:
Marketing is a matter of resource allocation.
General Small Business
Calling in the professionals to help advertise your small business is often the smart choice. But whether to call on marketing professionals at all depends on many factors, including what you’re trying to accomplish, the audience you’re targeting, the talent available within your company, the size and scope of the effort you’re about to undertake, and the communications tools you need to create.
General Small Business
Your small business brand is important because it represents a promise to your customers. Your small business brand is the mental image your customers form whenever they encounter your name or logo. Your brand is what customers believe about you based on everything they’ve ever seen or heard — whether good or bad, true or false.
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