Small Business Marketing Strategies

Let’s face it, starting your own small business is not an easy thing to do, especially amidst tight budget, limited manpower resources, steep learning curves. That said, many others have thrived under such limiting constraints and they have built sustaining businesses both the traditional way as well as leveraging online, by way of leveraging on smart small business marketing strategies.

In the realm of small business, there are unspoken rules that form an invisible framework, one that you will function within which you will thrive if you thread with caution and perseverance, cleverly working around financial as well as operational constraints.

Below are some key action tips you should adopt when starting your own small business.

Does Your Product Solve A Real Problem?

Too many products out there in the marketing nowadays are created with hope that they will sell without doing proper demand and supply market needs analysis. In fact, most of them are created within the confines of the business offices behind closed doors where countless so-called product/market development managers simply conjure up the needs based on their own perception. The simple and better approach is to ask the man in the streets via face to face as well as online surveys and focus groups to ascertain real needs so that you can produce REAL products that help solve REAL problems. This is doing justice to your consumers as well as your business.

No or Little Competition May Not Indicate A Lucrative Business

Do not rush to jump onto the bandwagon when you are investing into new business. Evaluating your potential competition should be key to your decision-making. Never assume that since there is little competition, the business will be lucrative. In fact, check out the potential demand using the afore-mentioned survey methods and you might just realised that there is just not enough demand or real problems which warrants a product or business.

Branding Vs The Me-Too Mentality

How your brand stands up to the perception of value and quality depends greatly on how you position your company, brands, and of course, your products. And it all starts at the onset with the conception of your business plan and marketing plan. If you adopt a differentiation approach to your products, then steer clear from the me-too mindset else your branding might eventually lose its identity.

Ensure that your branding is unique with the right unique selling points targeted at the right market segments. Remember that in order to achieve your brand positioning, your unique selling points must have derived from the product’s sustainable competitive advantage. And do take note that service support can make or break the market reputation of a business.

Know Your Numbers

To embark upon any project at all, you need money, plain and simple. Any business will have an operating budget, whether it is a few hundred dollars for a new start-up or a few million dollars for huge businesses. Ensure that you manage the finances astutely, and plough back your profits to enhance your cash flow for expansion purposes. If you in dire need of cash to fund a potentially lucrative venture, you may wish to check out for grants or financing support from the related institutions.

Stay tuned for part 2 of this series of Starting Your Own Small Business. For other business information, check out customer retention vs customer acquisition, business plans, and small business marketing strategies.

Just How Big Is The Mobile Marketing Pie?

The Internet Marketing era has been reigning supreme and that it did for about 20 years. These days though, there is no denying that Mobile Marketing or otherwise known as mobile media marketing is the new kid on the block, with the potential to overshadow its cyber predecessor by five folds. What with the fact that there are already 5 billion people who possess mobile phones, which is 5 times larger than the size of the Internet.

More recently in April 2010, Apple sold its 50 millionth Iphone globally since its debut two years ago. And Google is forging alliances with other phone giant makers like Asian behemoths Samsung, LG, and selling 160,000 Droid smart phones on a daily basis.

With a global market that huge, it is difficult to visualize how one can actually ignore the fast growing influence of this key channel of communication and potential advertising medium. Such is the mobile marketing trends and this mobile marketing platform has given the small and medium enterprises a brand new avenue to connect with and market to their defined target segments in a very organised, effective and affordable approach.

Your Mobile Marketing Strategy

Understanding the nature of how one uses his or her mobile or cell phone is critical to your mobile marketing strategy. Firstly, a cell phone is a very personal item for communication between friends, colleagues and business associates. Almost 80 percent of the adult population own a cell phone for the key purpose of communicating with one another, mainly via voice calls, SMS and MMS texting, and Bluetooth data transferences. It is also exactly via these means that you are an new age entrepreneur will tap on as mobile marketing tools as a brand new sales channel.

Here, you do need to note that the nature of mobile marketing is personal and hence you will need to adopt a slightly different marketing approach in the process. Adopt a push strategy but subtle in tone in the form of updates, exclusive offers, or offering mobile coupons for redemption. Offer real benefits that meet the needs of your target audience. Avoid hard-selling and bombarding them with endless and senseless advertisements or you will lose your clientele base very quickly.

Your Mobile marketing strategy should work just like your internet marketing or traditional marketing approaches. Your customers provide you with the contact, in this case it is a cell phone number, and indicate willingness to receive your marketing messages by opting in. Thereafter, you will broadcast your offers and discounts schemes to them.

Mobile Media Marketing Campaigns

From the consumer perspective, you only allow retailers to send you mobile marketing campaigns messages and information when you opt into their programs. The advertising and marketing messages comes in several forms, namely, announcements of launch of new items, special events, sale of gift cards, mobile discount coupons etc. Like the internet, mobile marketing encompasses hard as well as soft products, that is, selling services.

Restaurants, bars, departmental stores and other retail outlets can utilise MMS and SMS campaign to announce their product offers in the form of special weekly sale offers and exclusive deals. Spa services, baby or pet sitting services, home-cleaning services, or even home chef services can easily be marketed with mobile marketing campaigns.

Although sending mass SMS text marketing has become a very common marketing approach in the saturated world of cell phones users, MMS is also enjoying a steady climb in popularity in recent years.

While traditional marketing lays the groundwork as your broad small business marketing strategies game plan, mobile marketing or rather mobile media marketing should be one of the key tactic and tools to sell and re-sell to customers, just like your internet marketing strategy. You can start small by setting aside a budget to test the receptiveness of your client list.

Food For Thought – Rationalize This

>> Any product or service that has commercial value which is sold in the market can be marketed via mobile marketing… Such is the Power and Potential of Mobile Media Marketing.

You are starting your own small business and since this is something that you can call your very own, you truly believe that you must be doing everything yourself in order that things go smoothly according to plan, right? Often enough, in accordance to the concepts of small business marketing strategies and business planning, this fact is quite unjustified.

Indeed, one of the most difficult things for an entrepreneur to master throughout the entire course of his business is the art of delegation. The sheer desire to want to ensure that all matters will end up smoothly means that you will need to attended to each and every small and large issue personally. Believing that when you do everything yourself you are in control of every detail of the execution inclusive of quality and deadlines can pose a great toil on oneself. Yet, if you pass some of the tasks onto someone else, you leave a potentially great margin of error and much uncertainty in the hands of others. This is a paradox that most entrepreneurs have to face, especially in the infancy of the business life cycle.

Sadly, it is often true that you cannot build a real business alone. You would soon see that there are such extensive amounts of things to attend, such that are beyond the means of one single person, regardless of how diligent you can be.

Understanding that delegation not only serves to lighten your load to enable more time for your higher level planning but also empower your staff with important tasks. Hence, delegation is essentially part and parcel of the growth of your business.

Classifying which type of tasks can be delegated is key to your business management success. Routine and regular tasks which are time consuming should be delegated out. However, there is an alternative which many businesses are trending towards these days, that is, outsourcing.

Unlike delegation which means that you need to have staff to delegate your tasks, outsourcing is more appropriate for those who are lone entrepreneurs and need help with routine tasks that are time consuming. Outsourcing will take more effort on you the sole owner, as you are still the person to brief the outsourcing company, confirming the tasks and results. Outsourcing is a viable approach for those who are growing the business and is in transition before employing full time employees or for those who prefer to remain a sole entrepreneur.

Hence, there are quite a few approaches you can adopt with starting your own small business and two key methods to grow it is delegation as well as outsourcing. In line with the philosophies of business planning and small business marketing strategies, there is more benefits to adopting either of the small business growth strategies than simply taking on the endless routine tasks on a daily basis. You as the boss of your business, should be planning for its growth, not betting stuck in the mundane repetitive tasks.

Driving web traffic to your site should be your greatest objective after having set up your website with at least about 10 to 20 quality posts. Breathe life into your site with this list of proven website traffic generators and traffic ideas.

Submit Articles To The Top Article Directories

Optimize your main keywords in your title, keep your keyword density to 3%, include main keywords within the first 50 words of the article and use the resource box as you would use a sales caption with anchor links back to your sales page.

Leverage on Quality Forum Participation

Value add with your expertise. Do it correctly and wholeheartedly to help others by helping them to solve problems and people will want to visit your site for more information and advice. Instead of having links in the content of the post, you should Include a link in your signature as backlink to your site as many blog owners regard links within the post as spam.

Participate In Forums Of Your Niches

Find relevant niche forums by doing a Google search of forums of your niche. Be seen as an authority when participating. Value add with your expertise. Do it correctly and wholeheartedly to help others by helping them to solve problems and people will want to visit your site for more information and advice. Instead of having links in the content of the post, you should iclude a link in your signature as backlink to your site as many forum administrators view links within the post as spam.

Submit Your Posts To Social Networking Sites

While social bookmarking is no longer as effective as it used to be when it just started, you will still generate a fair amount of exposure for your site. Focus on Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit, Propeller. And create social bookmarking icons on your blog for your readers’ convenience.

Submit A Press Release

This is a much ignored tool to generate website traffic. The reason could be that many find it very challenging to write a good piece of press release. But if you do it right, it is a very good website traffic generator, as the Big G loves to crawl them. And you need not have to wait to have new site to submit a press release. Create a short ebook, make it a product launch and you have a talking point to excite your readers. PRWeb and PRlog are a few authority sites.

Do Joint Ventures With Partners

There are countless situations when you could leverage on Joint Ventures for driving web traffic. You can JV for product launches, giveaway events, ad hoc soliciting and more. Sometimes, it may not seem possible that gurus of certain status might wish to JV with you, but you never know until you have asked. Times a hard and everyone don’t want to miss the chance to earn good income.

Twitter and Facebook Lead Generation

The endless potential of Twitter can give you a good amount of website traffic if you do it right and not infringe their rules, especially when you can hone your traffic with targeted precision. You can also reap good rewards by growing your following with the not so new kid on the block, Facebook, despite the fact that the buyer’s mindset is less obvious than here.

Other Tactics to Generate Website Traffic

Other tactics to generate website traffic include pinging your blog and blog posts, submitting your sites to RSS feed aggregators easily increasing your backlinks, buying advertising space or guest authoring on JV sites and more.

Note that these approaches may seem common and it is exactly the fact that they have been tried and tested, proven to be effective that you should apply to your business. I can assure you that perseverance in applying some of the activities mentioned here would catapult your sites up the Google search ranking in time.

Stay tuned for more traffic strategies. For more online marketing ideas, check out Internet Marketing for Small Business.

What exactly is Branding ?

It is the strategic utilization of ready marketing tools on the internet to further your product or your good name. Be creative. To do a good job, you will need to fully utilize existing online channels to strengthen your branding.

Most of us would like to be branded as the Internet Marketing For Small Business Expert. But this requires picking the right niche, building your site, establishing yourself as an expert, sell good products which meet your customers’ needs. Indeed, there are a lot to do before you rightly brand You.

Throughout this process, you should be mindful of constantly branding your products and even yourself to expound on being the expert in your niche and offerings.

Check out the following online marketing tactics open to you:

• Learn how to build a good website for your niche offerings. Fill it with traffic
• Participate in relevant forums, such as Twitter, Facebook, Forums etc. Then create a strong following.
• Extend your main website with a forum, chat or blog
• Host online contests about your product offerings to gain exposure
• Conduct JVs with Gurus in the market to build up your name and following
• Do active SEO – Search Engine Optimization to further drive traffic to your site
• Write educational articles with “How Tos” and submit to ezines platforms. This gives you branding exposure.
• Take it off-line. Apply your offline marketing strategies to support your online niche marketing efforts, budget permitting.

Food for thought – test every new type of channels in internet marketing for small business. And btw, have you heard of Mobile Marketing?

Search engine optimization or SEO is the granddaddy of internet traffic and even Google’s algorithms fashions after the basic principles of SEO. Ensuring that the website is SEO optimized is every webmaster’s objective. But this could often set you back by tens of thousands of dollars if you are not apt the SEO skills. Hence, it is no secret that all internet marketing for small business hinges on your SEO abilities as a business owner.

The main purpose of this post today is to cut through the maze and lead you directly to the key drives of Search Engine Optimization or SEO, thereby providing you with a toolkit of Low Cost High Impact tactics for your website.

Tapping on Authority Sites

One low cost SEO approach which gets you results is through link exchanges or linking to and from other web sites. Certain links exchange activities cost next to nothing, if you know how to do it correctly. Before you even contact the webmaster of the website you wish to exchange link with, use a few key criteria to evaluate whether the link exchange will benefit both of you mutually.

Check the Alexa Ranking, the Google Page Rank, Links, Search Ranking, Authority Level of the target website. Alexa Ranking tells of traffic, the lower the number the better the traffic, although some would rebut that this benchmark is useful more for the internet marketing fraternity and that page rank is less critical nowadays. Google Page Rank is defines the importance Google places on the web page or site. Search Ranking of the target site should be in first page for the main keywords that both your sites share, hence allowing leverage for your site. Inbound Links of the target site is key to indicating the Authority and traffic, and the greater number of links the better exposure the site has seen. Finally, whether the site is an Authority site depends much on all the above factors combined. Successfully Linking to a high PR and Alexa Authority site is could eventually help you gain improvements to your page ranking and hence, traffic optimizing your site.

Article Marketing For Backlinks, Exposure Over Prolong Periods
Article Writing with keyword rich great content should be a key approach of all webmasters. You may choose to write your own articles or outsource the writing. But key to the concept of article writing is to ensure that you optimize each and every article for maximum SEO leverage. Take additional care to optimize your title, meta, keyword tags, anchor tags, resource box. Take heed never to keyword stuff your articles as this has become taboo in the white hat SEO fraternity.

Article Marketing, the next step after having written your articles helps to generate extend and long term exposure and visibility for your Internet business sites which is also an excellent effective approach to generate back links for your website too. Essentially, Article Marketing is article submission to the major article directories. This is rather manual and you may consider getting someone to assist you in submission, hence freeing up your time to do more critical activities.

Navigate The Reader To Your Destination, Subtly
Key to a good navigation system is ease of use. Navigation must be simple, your website should be clean and easy to read, not cluttered. Never use dark or black background with reverse white as it is very taxing on the eyes. Include a site map in your tabs for the human readers and for the cyber search bots, install a sitemap plug in.

For better control and routing of traffic, there are also tactics which subtly guides the reader through to where you wish to lead them. This is done by intelligent navigation, utilizing routing buttons and prominent anchor texts.

Now that you know, off page optimization such as making slight adjustments to your website or some research on potential authority site linkages and more hard work on great article marketing could all contribute to your enhanced net traffic. It is however, critical to note that SEO tactics are not limited to the above but entails much more.

Low Cost High Impact SEO is in fact not simply for the low budget internet marketer or internet marketing for small business, but also utilized for business or corporate sites as well.

Aggressive internet marketing means taking full action in marketing and promotions that exceeds the normal marketing tactics of most internet markets. In drastic times like this, we need to adopt drastic measures. But how do you achieve low cost and high impact? Some internet marketing aggressive tactics need not be push strategies in order to be successful. You need adopt tactics that put off your customers.

Look hard enough and you will find out that you too can improve the conversion rate of your website, be it selling a service or product. Understand that web marketing is different from physical selling and the aggressive tactics that I will be showing you will help you achieve higher sales conversion in time to come. You may not see the real effects immediately but like all businesses, you need to harness and leverage on what you have and what you can do to the maximum before you see the results.

So let us start right here.

How Search Engine-Compatible Is Your Website?
There are about 10 major search engines online and the top 3 are Google, Yahoo and MSN. Some sites rank well in SEO with Google but not MSN and some better with Yahoo than Google. You need to fully tap the potential of at least all three in order to ensure SEO. Some webmasters tap on the loopholes that MSN has and fully optimize their sites with this trick, but understand that the algorithm that each major search sites differ slightly and you need to be able to strike a balance for all major search sites for optimization. Never risk swaying to one and ignoring the other, this could be detrimental to your SEO strategy.

If you have little or no money to spend and are simply starting out, sign up for Google Analytics. It is free and it tells you tons of information on visitors, referrals, search keywords and much more. Armed with these information, you could run a “diagnostic” on your site and zero in on what needs to be improved. Learn to analyze deep into meaning of the figures.

Do You Have Strong Enough Keywords In Your Website For Search Engine Optimization?
Note the operative “do you have strong enough keywords” and Not “do you have enough keywords”. There is huge difference between strong keywords vs the number of keywords” you have on your website. If your website talks about everything under the sun, and if you populate it with any keyword that you can find, how then do you expect to rank with SEO? Focus is the key. Zero in on what your website theme is all about. Then write articles and posts focusing on a selected appropriate keywords or keyword phrases that describe what your website offers. This will make a vast difference to for searches and search engines picking your site up when people search for related keywords.

To perfect your skills on keywords strategies, there are great tools out there for you to analyze and plan your next steps. Work on how to optimize long tail keywords, not simply broad ones as they would be very competitive to rank for SEO.

Micro Niche Finder 4.0 A Great Keyword Research Tool
One great keyword tool I have been utilizing from the start is Micro Niche Finder, a very unique keyword research tool which reduces my research time by almost 70% with its unique SOC.

The Micro Niche Finder not only helps you research to optimize keywords, it makes it very easy to create Adsense Content pages in a jiff, teaches you how to fully utilize PLR materials for quick profits, helps you set up Squidoo Lenses fast, lets you create eBay feeder pages and much more.

Check out the Micro Niche Finder & Free Videos Here for more information. The 5 Free Videos will run you by step by step how to do all the above.

Know Who Your Competitors Are

How many times do you simply run searches only to find many websites ranked high above yours? Wonder how they do it? Mystery Shopping is one very common activity webmasters do nowadays to find out what their competitors are selling, advertising and keywords they use. Analysis and evaluation of the competition is critical to figure out your shortcomings and it will help you get that advantage over them. Here again, you will find that Micro Niche Finder is the tool to use.

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