Small Business Marketing Archives - Page 22 of 22

October 27, 2015 by RonTester Leave a Comment

3 Great Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses

Looking for Great Marketing Ideas to Grow Your Small Business without Breaking the Bank?

Of course you are. You know marketing is incredibly important but you also know money doesn’t grow on trees. Every week small business owners ask me about marketing ideas for small businesses. What works and what’s a waste of time and/or money? How can I make the biggest impact with the smallest investment. In my business, I teach my marketing folks that they should imagine their marketing expenses are coming right out of their wallets. If they wouldn’t spend the money out of their own wallet on something, they shouldn’t spend the company’s money on it.

If you’re a small business owner, the idea of marketing expenses coming right out of your wallet may not be far from the truth. Yet you know you need to market your business to grow and serve your community. How do you do that? Here are three great ways:

Publish Great Content. I know it’s cliche at this point, yet so few small business owners really take this to heart. If you want to capture someone’s attention, you can do it by interrupting them (think radio and television commercials or annoying pop-up ads on websites). The better way, and the way that will make people not want to change the channel or shut down your website or hate you, is by publishing great content. Great content is stuff people actually want to experience. If what you’re producing doesn’t grab my attention, I delete it or ignore it unless I’m doing research on bad marketing. On the other hand, I love to engage with commericals, ads, popups, etc. that are actually interesting to me. This weekend, for example, I looked up a music video on Youtube and ended up spending more than two minutes watching an ad by Revlon. I wasn’t the target market (directly), but the ad was about relationships and the way a woman’s sense of her own beauty affects the relationship. It was brilliant. I even wanted to share it with a friend! Interesting is in the eye of the beholder, so you need to know your market, but the more interesting and relevant you make your content the more likely you are to gain readers, viewers, audience and fans. I once heard a world famous copywriter say, “Make the advertisement itself valuable.” That should go for all your content.
Hold a Contest. I was at a conference recently where a small business owner shared how he was able to cut his Google AdWords spending from more than $4000 per month to $200 per month while improving his site traffic and increasing his sales. His secret? Hold a contest. Engage people and get them to share with their circle of friends. The gentleman who spoke started doing monthly contests and increased his customer engagement, sales, and bottom line while spending 1/20th of his previous spend on Google advertising. What sort of contest should you hold? The sky’s the limit. Consider a contest that makes sense given your business, that is cost-effective and engaging. Be sure to track your metrics, figure out where people are coming from and what they’re spending. Run a series of small tests and, when you find something that gives you a big bang for your buck, repeat and refine. Tweak the contest through multiple iterations to see what works best. Be careful not to find something that works once then run it again and again without paying attention to your metrics. You could turn a winner into a loser through neglect.
Build and Email List and Stay in Touch with Customers. If you are consistently publishing great content and holding contests that grab your audience’s attention and keep them engaged, you will have plenty of opportunities to build an email list. Be sure to get your audience’s permission for you to send them relevant communications, then do. What kind of communications? You can tell stories of people that love your product. You can tell stories about how your product helps people. You can share new ideas about how your service can save people time and money. You can share testimonials. You can ask your audience to complete surveys so you know how to serve them better. If you are reaching out to them in ways that people appreciate and don’t ask the world of them, most people are happy to receive your emails (or at least not be cranky about receiving them). Two bits of advice about emails: use a service such as Aweber to manage your email accounts. With all the laws and regulations out there right now, you don’t want to get your email efforts wrong and end up paying a huge fine. For very little money, Aweber and similar services can and will keep you compliant and out of trouble with the Feds. Once you have an email service, be smart about what you send. Always be thinking, what do my customers really want? What makes sense to share? Would I be happy to be getting this email? I am on some lists where all they do is pound me with offers to buy stuff. They use formulaic headlines and false scarcity to try to get me to open their emails. You know what I do instead? Delete. Delete. Unsubscribe. Delete. If you wouldn’t send that email to your mom or your best friend, don’t send it to your email audience.

Those are three inexpensive ways to market your small business without blowing your budget. They all take some time and none of them are “set it and forget it” tactics, but they will work. And if the shoe were on the other foot and someone was trying to establish and maintain a relationship with you as a customer, would you prefer honest interaction with that person/business or would you like to be the recipient of a “set it and forget it” campaign designed by marketers from the home office? When it comes to establishing relationships with small businesses, I’ll pick personal over impersonal relationships every time. I may not care about having a relationship with Exxon, but I want to know my butcher. And my massage therapist. And the guy who runs the gift shop downtown.

What other ideas do you have to market your small business without blowing your budget? Please share in the comments or email me.

October 15, 2015 by RonTester Leave a Comment

The Benefits of Marketing Your Small Business

You Should Be Thinking About Marketing All the Time

In my previous article “What is Marketing,” I defined marketing as any action you take to put your service or product in front of your customers. The ultimate benefit of marketing may seem obvious, but I am going to spell it out here. If you don’t market your products or services, you will probably not have enough of the right kinds of customers. And if you don’t have enough of the right customers buying your products and services, you will go out of business. And if you go out of business, you won’t be able to serve to people/businesses/customers you were meant to serve. That would be a real shame. I see too many businesses where the “grand opening” sign is replaced by a “going out of business sale” sign within the year. I don’t want that to happen to you. So think about your marketing. It will drive everything else in your business. IN here are specific, clear benefits to marketing your product or service. Let’s take a look at them.

Brand Recognition

Enhanced recognition of your product, service, and/or brand. Creating an effective marketing strategy helps place your brand into the minds and eventually the hands of your customers. When you think of a soda company, a particular brand comes to mind. You recognize their logo, their slogan, and their theme song. Branding is one benefit of marketing that will help get the phone to ring. At the same time, if you’re a small business, I highly discourage you from making branding a primary goal of your marketing efforts. It costs a ton of money to effectively brand your product or service on the scale of a Coke or Pepsi, and that’s money you could better spend doing something that will more directly help you to get more customers. When it comes to your marketing plan, branding should be a secondary goal for most small businesses, not a primary goal.

Target Your Customer Base

As you are establishing your brand, marketing helps you identify and target your customer base. By targeting the types of people your service or product will benefit, marketing will help get new customers and keep the ones you have. It will also help pinpoint where to spend your marketing budget by targeting potential clients instead of spending money marketing to just everyone. Here’s the key though: you have to track where your customers are coming from. If you’re like most small businesses, you don’t need a fancy tracking system. Simply train everyone in your business to ask new prospects or customers, “How did you hear about us?” Then jot it down on a piece of paper.

For example, if I am running an ad in the newspaper and radio, my tracking sheet will have the following columns: newspaper, radio, walking by, referral from customer, referral from employee. Once the prospect or customer tells me how they heard about me, I make a check mark or tick under that column. At the end of the day, I can see that 2 customers heard about me on the radio, 43 read about me in the newspaper, 4 customers were referred by a current customer, etc. With good data (which would obviously need to be more than one day’s data), I can decide whether to keep running the radio ad, incentivize current customers to refer, etc. But this only works if I know where my customers are coming from. (As a side note, I realize this is a simplistic was to get started and it would be helpful to track sales/profit per lead type. You can get there eventually, but starting simple is better than waiting to deploy the complex system.)

Communicating Through Content Marketing

Communicating with your customers as well as providing information and establishing trust are valuable aspects of marketing. The best way I know how to do this is through content marketing. Sharing great content with your audience shows your level of expertise in your field and helps your audience to trust you. Also, by providing relevant and valuable content, you are communicating with your customer base. Information about your industry and your product or service helps your potential customers know whether you are the right person or company to meet their needs. Remember, for most small businesses, you don’t want just any customers, you want the right customers. If you sell the wrong solution to the wrong customers, they may be disappointed in what they receive and go tell everybody on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. In the long run, the wrong customers will do you more harm than the short run revenue will do you good.

Remember, people do business with people they know, like and trust. Everything you do for marketing should be so your target audience will know you, like you, and trust you. It’s important that you note I said your target audience. If you make people outside of your target audience unhappy, don’t worry about it. In fact, sometimes that can galvanize your target audience’s support for you. Think about any specialized brand or service that has a passionate following. If they have raving fans, they probably also have detractors. Don’t let that worry you. Make your audience happy and don’t worry about the haters.

Marketing: Save Time and Money

Effective marketing not only makes you money, it saves you time and money. When you find the right target audience, you can establish your brand while getting the word out to the right people while avoiding spending time and money reaching people who don’t want or need your product. Lipstick companies advertise in Marie Claire, not GQ.

If you’re not thinking about marketing all the time, now is the time to start. Yes, a business needs effective people and processes, but helping your target audience know about and experience your product or service is the best way to ensure sustained success.

If you’re like a lot of small business owners, you may not know where to start. 15 years ago, I was in your shoes, and I know how overwhelming it can feel. My recommendation would be to start small, somewhere, and test to see whether you are getting the results you want. If you aren’t sure how to do that, or would like some help to lessen the uncertainty and stress, please email me and we can talk about how I can help.

October 15, 2015 by RonTester Leave a Comment

What is Marketing?

Marketing: what exactly is it and why is it so important for your small business?

Marketing involves any action you take to put your service or product in front of your customers and potential customers. The great thing about marketing is that, when done well, it makes you money by meeting your customer’s wants and needs. Marketing includes researching and targeting as well as communicating with your customers. Some people think about marketing as advertising or public relations. It is, but it’s a lot more than that, too. Advertising and public relations are just a part of a comprehensive marketing plan.

With target marketing, businesses can pinpoint their audience. John McCarthy revised Neil Borden’s idea of the “ Marketing Mix” and observed that there are four variables within a business’ control to target their customers. These are referred to as the Four P’s of Marketing: product (or service), pricing, placement, and promotion. Where these four ingredients overlap, your target market can been identified.

Another model for target marketing is Robert Lauterborn’s Four C’s of Marketing. This model of target marketing centers on the consumer rather than the producer. The Four C’s of Marketing include Consumer wants and needs, cost to satisfy those wants and needs, convenience or ease of buying, and communication. For smaller businesses, using the Four C’s of Marketing is usually a better way to establish a two-way relationship with their desired audience.

Marketing comes in a variety of forms these days. The oldest and most familiar form of marketing is word of mouth, in which customers simply tell others about the experiences they had with a particular business, product, or service. Another form of marketing includes direct marketing. With direct marketing, businesses have direct contact with their audience through promotional material via mail, email, texts, and fliers. Some companies utilize promotional marketing through contests, coupons, or samples.

Marketing through social media has quickly become a popular means of marketing to customers. Larger companies have created special departments for social media marketing where the employees’ main responsibility is to communicate with customers through social media. Another more recent form of marketing involves mobile devices, allowing for location and time sensitive promotions. With these and many other forms of marketing, creating a plan to incorporate them will help focus your business’ resources.

While marketing can be expensive, creating a marketing strategy for your business is crucial to your business’ survival. Using a variety of forms of marketing gives your business the best chance, but the form of marketing you choose should be based on reason and evidence and not picked haphazardly because “that’s what to competition is doing.”

To recap, marketing targets your audience and establishes a relationship with them. If you’re not marketing your business, your business’ growth will be limited and likely will become stagnant. Marketing allows your business to find more customers and clients and allows for them to find you as well. It’s what we all want, right?

Have you taken a hard look at your marketing recently? Are you doing more than ads in the newspaper or the occasional tweet? To be the most successful, you need a comprehensive plan that you can implement consistently. If you’re not sure how to do that, please email me and let me know how I can help.