Marketing Must Do’s For Every Small Business
Monday, January 12th, 2009 Instant Download eBook + FREE BONUS Audio Program |
So, you've started your own small business and although you aren't starving (yet?) the money just isn't rolling in the way you had planned. You are not alone thousands of small businesses fail to live up to expectations. Most don't even last a year. Yet others seem to grow exponentially, posting enviable profits month after month. What is the difference between these small business powerhouses and your struggling enterprise? MARKETING is often the simple Solution! You need to Create a Marketing Plan |
Being a small business is all about flexibility, speed and creativity, this also must include the development of a strong marketing strategy. Let’s look at what you need to do to create a workable marketing plan.
The first thing you have to do is to define your business. That might seem overly simplistic and like a waste of time to you. After all, you live, breathe, eat and sleep your business already. Breaking it down helps make the process run more smoothly.
“Successful marketing requires timely and relevant market information. An inexpensive research program, based on questionnaires given to current or prospective customers, can often uncover dissatisfaction or possible new products or services. Market research will also identify trends that affect sales and profitability. Population shifts, legal developments, and the local economic situation should be monitored to quickly identify problems and opportunities. It is also important to keep up with competitors' market strategies.” In other words, you need to figure out who wants your product, where to find them, how much they’d be willing to pay, and what you need to do to make your product or service as attractive to them as possible.
It is impossible to sell products or services that customers do not want. Learning what customers want, and how to present it attractively, drives the need for marketing research. Small business has an edge over larger concerns in this regard. Large businesses must hire experts to study the mass market, while small-scale entrepreneurs are close to their customers and can learn much more quickly about their buying habits. Small business owners have a sense their customers' needs from years of experience, but this informal information may not be timely or relevant to the current market.
The big boys in business and internet marketing etc. have been using press releases to their advantage for years. All of the major companies have people dedicated to handling media relations and one of the most important parts of that job is overseeing the production and distribution of press releases. Unlike many of the marketing and PR strategies used by the mega-corps that would never work for the little guy, press releases are non-discriminatory. Whether you are operating a one-person shop or running a Fortune 500 firm, you can get a lot of mileage from a press release. A press release is a document, distributed to media and news sources, that provides information about an interesting or newsworthy story/event. A press release is circulated in hopes of convincing media outlets to run a story on the same topic. So, what’s involved in writing a press release? It isn’t the world’s most complicated proposition, but one does need to understand a few expectations and conventions to pull it off effectively. For instance, if it reads like an advertisement it won’t get any mileage. Press releases must be written for the media, not for the people who will eventually be reading the stories. This is an incredibly common mistake for many novice release writers. They assume that they should write the story the public wants to hear. The who, what, where, when, why and how all need to appear right up in the first short paragraph. Each subsequent paragraph should provide information in a descending order of importance.
Blogging is a common way to create awareness. All small businesses need a web presence of some sort. It’s become as expected as a telephone number and can be remarkably valuable even in industries where you wouldn’t think high-tech efforts would work. One can create a web presence with little more than a single page, static site in some cases. On the other end of the spectrum, some businesses will need extensive, professionally designed sites with every new bell and whistle in order to succeed. The extent of one’s online efforts needs to be guided by the overall business plan and the exact nature of the enterprise. For those who aren’t familiar, a blog (short for web-log) is sort of an online journal. Generally, information is presented in a chronological order and is used to provide insight and news to visitors. Blogs are extremely popular, in part, because they are so easy to operate. The marketing advantages of blogging are numerous….. To Read More About, or Order Your Instant Download of "Marketing Must Dos For Small Business" Please Click Here If you would like to comment or leave feedback I would love to hear from you! If you would like to claim your free gift go to www.betterlifestyleebooks.com
