Small Business Marketing Strategies

During the course of my consultancy work, I realized that many of my clients from small and even medium sized businesses lack the proper business and marketing plans in place to map the strategic direction of their businesses. This is the key reason why 70% of new businesses fail within the first year of business. Hence, I have taken the onus to provide the key and critical aspects of What successfully Drives Your Business Fast Forward in this series of small business marketing strategies and planning guide.

There is however, two key groups of people who are entrepreneurs and business owners while the other group are the salaried employees. The former group is more often than not, doers, whilst the latter group tends towards being planners.

Being a “Doer” means that you have the willingness to take charge, assume responsibility, make things happen rather than wait for things to happen. The mindset of the Doer is one which is always at the forefront of business ideas, adventurous in trying out new concepts, yet clear minded of the priority of the business and customer needs, is financially apt and in some cases, are often very much contrarians in their business perspectives from their counterparts. Planners take the more stable yet very conservative route which encompasses very detailed step by step, conscious planning of the entire process of doing business.

That said, there is no negative connotation in the above intended. In fact, it is to highlight the fact that in a business entity, you would in actuality need both types of personalities to maintain and grow a business, as long as, either personality does not over exert their characteristics overtly.

In addition, my personal experience is that there are small business owners who are doers doing the wrong activities the right way or doing the right activities the wrong way which often than not means running the business up the dead end. Hence, if you wish to be a doer doing the right marketing activities with the right way, you will definitely need proper business planning and small business marketing strategies to support you along the way. And you really do not need to spend weeks or months to draft a proper business plan and small business marketing strategies. The key components lie in working out the what, why, when and how as well as the related allocated budgets.

Your small business marketing strategies discuss the various value propositions which help to define a positioning statement. You have also identified your primary and secondary target segments using demographics and psychographics. Matching your product value propositions and target segments, you begin exploring your marketing mix. You then apply the relevant touch-point strategies, be it a coupon, or press ad or internet marketing, to your marketing plan with the intention to generate leads for sales conversion. Here you will evaluate your marketing budget which will, in most cases, serve as reality-check to you in terms of affordability from a low cost high impact perspective.

Up till now, you have been freely exploring the various marketing strategies and tactics to apply to your business. Now is the time to apply a dollar amount to each of your proposed marketing strategies. Unless you have really deep pockets, likelihood is that you will start to tweak the tactics to suit your budget.

Think Low Cost High Impact Marketing At Onset

Make it a conscious habit until it becomes subconsciously part of you. That way you need much less tweaking on the budget. Imagine how much ad money you have to spend in order to achieve at least 7 times to be seen or heard before you can influence a buy on your product. There are however, ways to achieve Low Cost High Impact Marketing.

Include Social Networks as part of your overall small business marketing strategies such as launch your marketing campaigns via Facebook or MySpace. Leverage on Twitter as a marketing platform, create a credible image and persona to successfully market your products through this channel. They are comparatively effective, efficient as well as cost efficient. The key reason is the extensive and explosive reach of potential target audience.

More Could Be Less. Niche Your Market Segments

Yes, focus on select potential target segments which your product directly maps their needs. What is an ad message when it has extensive reach but appeals to less relevant targets? Would you rather that you focus your ad message to the relevant and willing target segments? And, with a direct need for your product, you are reducing the rejection reasons they have about buying your products. Selling to these groups hence becomes easier with lesser objections.

Collaborate, Don’t Compete

This is especially true if you run a small business which has limited resources both financially and physically. Forge strategic alliances with other small businesses of similar nature or become a major link in their business supply chain. This gives you stronger bargaining power and potentially opens up new distribution channels for you.

Member-Get-Member Scheme

Referral plans or whatever you term it, it still is word-of-mouth marketing. Not just the Banks do it. And you can do it too! But it has worked since time in memorial. Why? Because people believe people whom they know, who have tried and test your product and genuinely recommend to one another the goodness of your product.

So put on your thinking hats and start to churn out low cost high impact small business marketing strategies.

For everything you do, you need to set a timeline. In the real world of business, there is always a sense of urgency to complete your tasks within targeted timeline set either by your superior or your clients.

Your S.M.A.R.T. Small Business Marketing Strategies Timeline

A timeline is a target completion time for your projects. Your Marketing Plan Must come with a set time line for completion. Many novices when writing marketing plans do not include a timeline but get overtly engrossed in planning the strategies involved.

And yes, get S.M.A.R.T. with your marketing plan timeline. As you measure your goals with the S.M.A.R.T. Formula in your Marketing Plan you may also use it to evaluate your marketing plan timeline with this same guidelines.

A quick recap of the S.M.A.R.T. Formula is to set your goals to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely. Check out how we apply similar principles but with slight twists to set your Marketing Plan Timeline below:

Marketing Plan Timeline – Adopting the S.M.A.R.T. Formula

“Specific”

Be Precise & Exact. This defines the exact actions that Must be achieved within the set time frame.

“Measurable”

Quantify Your Goal. How many percent of works in progress should you have completed within the set miles stones or phases of your marketing plan timeline.

You Must, in this criterion, factor in a very critical aspect, namely to Pre-empt contingencies that could arise. Even veteran marketers tend to omit this and prefer to fight the fire when things go awry.

“Achievable”

Be Realistic of your Resources. Be fair to yourself and your co-workers whenever you set timelines or target completion time. Never over stretch and compete with time. It hurts the quality of your work and could even adversely affect cohesiveness in the process.

“Relevant”

This is Relative to other functions. How relevant and applicable is your marketing timeline to the ad design department if you need to run a TV Ad campaign in three days? Again, be aware of other functional schedules.

“Timely”

Your Marketing Timeline should be set in stages of milestones for easy measurement of completion.

The above formula has actual application effectiveness with my clients especially with they lack the discipline during project management.

Stay tuned for more where we shall be walking through together the lateral mapping of your Marketing Plan Timeline with your marketing plan and small business marketing strategies for Implementation.

Meantime, you can get more information on Marketing Plans here

One sure fire way to kill your business is to try and avoid competition. Sounds ironic? You probably have heard of business experts and many a consultants telling you to avoid competition whenever possible. And a lot of people tend to believe that the secret to a successful business or making a lot of profit is to find a market almost virgin from competition. But do take note that if there is any known buyer demand and a good niche, it is most likely that someone would already have spotted these entrepreneur opportunities and marked that space.

How Sure Are You Of The Demand?

And indeed untapped entrepreneur opportunities are always out there, but finding one without competition could literally backfire on you. It probably has not dawn upon some of us who, while enthusiastically burrowing our heads into finding the perfect niche out there, have omitted the fact that the eventually chosen niche could be one without sufficient buyer demand because of the lack of competition. Rhetorical it may be, but there is great true in the fact that it could be a niche that no one wishes to enter as most realize that there is literally no demand. And even if you manage to find or create a niche and market with little or no competition there will soon be swarms of competition jumping onto the bandwagon. So the strategy should be that if there is literally no way to avoid competition, excel above them.

How Does The First Mover Advantage Concept Measure Up?

Many businesses are still hung on the concept of first mover advantage which suggests that the first to enter into a particular market niche will be able to generate massive profit, competitive advantage as well as extensive market share. They will also be the ones who will be able to maintain their leadership position for good.

Despite the fact that there are numerous first mover advantage situations which holds true, we need to understand their characteristics from the perspective of The Porters’ Five Forces. Those who could hold on to their leadership positions are probably in the businesses which require extremely high capital outlay in areas like oil rigs and pipeline development or industries with highly professional and exclusive expertise like fund management and precision technologies. These capabilities serve as high business entry barriers to new aspiring entrants. Alternatively, businesses with low business entry barriers like the internet will continue to see new blood and new ideas swarming an already busy marketplace.

Entrepreneur opportunities will always exist. But you need to ensure that there are adequate market size, buyer demand, long term potential, good amount of target audience and the right amount of barrier to entry to help you maintain your leadership within the industry.

This is going to be a short post. But it should start giving you some food for thought on overdoing your small business marketing strategies into oversights. Sometimes deliberate paradoxes do invoke the added attention, but whether such attention is profitable, productive or even positively beneficial is very subjective indeed. Do no engage in unnecessary deliberate paradox whenever you are working out your small business marketing strategies as they could literally backfire on you. Check out the following.

I read an email today and choked with surprise upon reading it. As a marketer, I felt compelled to share this with fellow marketers.

A popular job search directory hub has recently launched a membership recruitment drive coined “I Love My Job Photo Contest”…. The prize is a Nikon DSLR D80 camera and many other prizes”.

This contest has all the usual membership drive tactics for membership recruitment drive purposes. And of course, you have to become a member of job search site to join the contest.

But up till here, do the above read normal to you or have you already spotted the rhetorical paradox?

What seems more like a “work life balance awareness drive”, it is rather paradoxical, don’t you think that in the 1st place, if I really love my job, would I need the services of a job search directory hub … ?

And if the marketer is trying to imply that you are happy after finding a new job though the search hub and join the contest, it defeats the purpose of the recruitment drive!

This is a true life example of an unthinking marketer, who lacks in-depth understanding of his/her potential target market’s mindset and needs.

There are other more effective and rewarding marketing tactics for instance Career Seminar Tie-Ups with participating MNCs, Large Locals Employers, Small Businesses or Job-skill -Based Contests like planning and implementing a business plan etc.

I cannot stress more that as true marketers, one needs to delve deep into the needs of one’s target markets, know them thoroughly and activate appropriate marketing tactics to garner their trust. Your small business marketing strategies should never be gimmicks but truly beneficial to your clientele.

At least 70% of people do not plan sufficiently for their retirement, depending on which part of the world we reside in. One can argue that one is ill-equipped, due to lack of financial knowledge to do personal financial planning or simply has no time for it.

Truth be told, the fact is that financial planning is and can be a simple, daily and routine affair. Here’s the Secret of the 5 Simples Steps to Your Financial Freedom. It is pay day, you will be doing the following in this order :

Manage that Debt Monster

First Things First, on pay day, try to pay up not just your monthly mortgage installment, but also all monthly recurring debts eg credit card bills on time in full. Otherwise, if the debt does not “kill” you, the accrued interest will!

A more ambitious step towards living a Debt-Free life, is to bravely do what most of us dread – clear all your credit card debts and cut up all but one of your cards. This is a psychological commitment to liberate you towards your debt-free lifestyle.

In order not to over-leverage your personal finances, use 2 good benchmarks for measurement. The Debt to Service ratio measures your monthly debt payments against your monthly income. This should not exceed 35% on a monthly basis.

Another ratio to note is the Total Debt to Total Asset Ratio should be less than 50% if you are over age 40. This ratio can be as high as 80% if you are at your prime earning age.

“Tax” Yourself before You Spend

Save a portion of the remaining amount, about 10 -15% monthly into a savings account or a mutual fund after you paid your monthly debts. This amount should be saved consistently on a monthly basis and in a fairly liquid account.

You will need a sinking fund for life’s emergencies such as retrenchment, medical bills etc. A rule of thumb is to keep aside at least a total of 3 to 6 month’s disposable income to tie over emergencies as contingency funds. This fund should be kept in a liquid account such as a savings account.

Cut the Fats

Low you can start spending, but not before you give yourself a daily allowance, after having set a monthly and daily budget. Spend only when you really have to.

When planning your daily allowance, use a monthly benchmark so that it gives room for day-to-day adjustments. Spend with a budget at the back of your mind. Learn to DIY a dinner or home improvements. The joy and satisfaction is could be unspeakably rewarding.

Be a Warren Buffett in the making

With your remaining monthly disposable income, you should observe the following suggestion should you intend to invest your money. Your investment should be defined by your level of risk threshold. Invest with a long term view with an investment timeline of 5 to 10 years. Build a portfolio of blue-chip defensive stocks on dips for dividends in a bear market and sell into strength in a bull market. Do not average down on a down-trending market. Go for gold if you anticipate real interest rates to be lower than inflation. Invest about 10% of your disposable income on a regular basis.

Don’t Miss A Beat!

The operative word here hints of “consistency”. Repeat the above 4 steps faithfully and consistently. Very soon you will be classically-conditioned like clockwork.

When you subconsciously start picking up that checkbook to pay for your mortgage and credit cards, and start eyeing that rib-eye steak at the supermarket, you are on the road to financial freedom.

There will surely be times when you do not meet your goals and targets set and you would be wondering why and where you went wrong. You are probably wondering if your small business marketing strategies have not been effective. But lets start the root of the issue. My simple short question to you is, if you have followed the S.M.A.R.T. system to a tee?

Adhere To The S.M.A.R.T. System For Goal Setting Strategies

The S.M.A.R.T. system is one of the timeless goal setting tools which is simple, scalable and easy to apply. When you do not achieve your goal setting strategies, you probably did not adhere to the rules of S.M.A.R.T. system. Remember that your goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. The key when you are prepare your goals, be them personal or work related, it is always critical to ensure that your goals are be realistic and readily achievable, with the available time and resources.

Start Small With Your Goals Setting Strategies

Ask yourself if you have broken down your goals and objectives in smaller, bit size tasks which are manageable and phase them to scale upward. Set your timeline for each milestone so that each baby step leads to completion and you can then embark upon the next with ease. Give yourself reasonable amount of time to achieve the milestones.

Have You Reviewed Your Progress Lately?

One of the key to success with goal setting strategies is to constantly monitor your progress. Set up a schedule either in Excel format or a project management schedule plan and review the progress on a daily or bi-weekly basis. Set a fixed day and time to do your review, say on Wednesdays and Friday afternoons. The middle of the week review would give you a good indication of whether you are constantly reaching your objectives and if not, you can work out alternative tactics to achieve them The end of the week review gives you a good perspective if your adjustments to new tactics worked or simply if indicates how much you have exceeded your milestone goals.

Goal Setting Tools Should Never Be Complicated And Time Consuming

It is important to note that many people tend to spend more time planning than executing what they are set to achieve and there are times when you really need to put a stop to planning and start implementing your strategies and tactics. A simple Excel spreadsheet would do fine as one of your goal setting tools and you really do not need sophisticated software to work out a simple project time line, that is, unless you are very well versed and familiar with the software. Scale up your monitoring only when you need to scale up your project. Time management is critical your success, so use it wisely.

That said, small business marketing strategies must eventually synchronize well with your goals setting strategies, and your tactics to achieve them be realistic, budget wise and execution friendly. Note that proper goal setting strategies will benefit your business in the long run, given constant review and improvements to your plans.

The key to Small Business Marketing Strategies is to building customer loyalty for the purpose of future lead generation to future sales. Generating recurrent sales tactics is a much easier and cheaper approach than getting sales from new clients.

Today in part 2 of Customer Retention Small Business Marketing Strategies, we focus on sales tactics to foster growth in your business. The key to keeping great customer retention is to keep regular contact with your clientele and prospects via email, phone call and even twitter. Below are some tips for your reference.

Support Claims with Authentic Research and Real Examples

Making unsupported claims about your product is the fastest way to drive away your customers. You should back up your claims with research, case studies and real examples to highlight the USP or unique selling points of your products. Real examples are the most convincing testimonials to enhance sales.

Real Customer Testimonials As a Sale Lead Generation Tactic

Real Customer Testimonials is a very important tactic to lead generate for new sales. The credibility is much higher when other real customers speaks well of your product and allow you to quote them in your sales and publicity materials. Compared to making your own products claims, this is indeed more credible and convincing to the potential buyers, especially when they are return buyers who are familiar with your company and your customers. Work into your public relations and after sales feedback process to set up an easy process to generate testimonials. For every satisfied customer, request a testimonial for future use. Most will be willing to provide you with the information, especially when your public relations officer would be using them in your newsletter and giving your customers free publicity exposure. Get customers’ permission to use the testimonials in your small business marketing strategies and tactics like corporate website, sales brochures and direct mailers, email etc.

Dare To Ask … For Referrals, That Is

If you trust the company you keep and trust the customers you have, there should be no problem in asking for referrals from your existing customers. Again, work out a lead generation process to ask for referrals, preferably at the end of the sales process or together with the request for testimonials. You would be surprised how simply by asking, you will be rewarded handsomely financially.

100% Guaranteed or Your Money Back

The above phrase looks very familiar to most of us. But read it again, this time from the perspective of your customer – the buyer. Reading it from this whole new standpoint would give the phrase a whole new meaning too. Providing a money back refund guarantee is the best vouch for quality and helps to reduce buyer’s remorse, especially when you are selling high ticketed items. The key to good customer relationship is to ensure that you process refunds fast and hassle free, Remember that you build trust by standing by your words and keeping a good reputation within the industry and amongst your customers are critical to building long term relationships.

If you brainstorm deeper, you will be able to innovate even more into Small Business Marketing Strategies for customer retention. What is more critical is the implementation and follow through of your promise to deliver, exceed customer expectations, and WOW them into a long term business relationship.

Business Goal Setting strategies is a critical part of your Business Plan, requiring in depth understanding of your mission, vision, and your business objectives and directions. The essence of goal setting is to establish you objectives which are achievable, realistic, clear and measurable in terms of a timeline. Setting a time frame for achieving your goals is paramount to your success. For more sophisticated goals, you might wish to set milestones in phases to ensure that each stage of the objective is clearly traceable and achieved.

During implementation, you need to keep tab on each stage or milestone and evaluate the outcome to adjust your strategy accordingly. It is however not advisable to adjust your preset targets unless you are totally convinced that external stimuli have changed to negatively impact your performance.

If you are running your own business, you should know exactly where your business stands, and be able to met out small business marketing strategies in tandem with your goal setting strategies.

When working out your goal setting strategies, you need to adhere to the rules of S.M.A.R.T. system. Your goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. This is a timeless guide that most successful entrepreneurs and marketers alike follow to a tee. Corporate company staff learn them from their marketing and business management training 101 and have become a subconscious universal guide.

Although on paper, anything you plan seems viable, you have to a test and let practicality tell you whether your goal setting is realistic. The reason is probably you may have a unclear perspective of your situational analysis or lack of research into the markets. Small business marketing ideas must fully synchronize with your goal setting strategies realistically in order to be successful. Often, when your goal setting strategies fall short of your targets, you tend to feel de-motivated at the tail end of the process.

Setting realistic goals is critical to your eventual success. Take for instance, when embarking upon a new project, you start with setting bit size incremental goals like 10% on a monthly basis. Should you set goals based a lump sum amount over a given period, like an $X over a half year period, chances are you might not be able to achieve the latter or adjust the variables easily.

No business goal setting strategies can be achieved effectively without your small business marketing strategies and they must be worked out in tandem with each other.

The key objective of the Small Business Marketing Strategies is to build trust, loyalty and lasting good relationships with your clients with the main purpose of generating future sales. Statistics show that Customer Acquisition costs at least about 5 times more expensive than Customer Retention and it is no wonder that successful businesses go to lengths to foster engaging relationships with their existing customers.

As Trust is the Foundation and key to any sustaining relationship between two parties, and this is ever so true with business relationships. With trust comes confidence in your product and services, thereby meaning that you are more inclined to generate more future revenue from them over the long term. Below are the Customer Retention Small Business Marketing Strategies and tips on building trust for great long term customer relationships

Position Yourself and Your Business As The Must Have Resource

Information, be it generic or specific to your products and services can be critical to the final buying decision of the customer. Provide information which are accurate, timely and useful to your clients. For the less internet savvy clients, you may wish to set up a monthly newsletter to be sent to all by snail mail.

Whenever possible, include a blog section to your company and product websites and provide constant updates and useful information to clients. Email them whenever you have fresh content that you think they might be interested in. You can provide free physical or online training on how to use your products and services or conduct webinars.

Adopt A High Touch Strategy

Content can come in the form of articles, video or audio. When you write articles and publish them on your website, article directories as well as complementing product websites, you are establishing yourself as an expert who knows about the subject in depth and will to share pertinent information thereby helping you to build trust and loyalty.

Keeping constantly at the top of mind is very important to your business. Successful businesses often adopt a high touch strategy which embraces the concept of regular and consistent contact with potential and existing customers to facilitate interest and high mindshare. Your tools of communication include email, snail mail, phone, newsletters etc. You can even do surveys, polls, online or paper based focus groups to generate feedback for product and service enhancements.

To build trust and long term relationships with customers literally means that you whole heartedly avail yourself and your business to their needs, being accessible at most times and always listening to feedback for product and service improvements. This is essentially one of the key success factors of Customer Retention Small Business Marketing Strategies.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series.

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