Small Business Marketing Strategies

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.

Check here for more information on Small Business Marketing Strategies

Today we embark upon the process of exploring with keywords or keyword phrases, the supply of your pre-defined niche market, which is equivalent to your competition.

A recap of the last segment, we discussed the process of Finding Demand of Niche Markets via the following steps :

• Collate the Functional list of your niche using Google Adwords Keyword Tools
• Measure the Profitability of your Niche Market via a 2-step process of firstly measuring the volume of your Niche Market via Google Adwords Kywords Tool. Thereafter, evaluating the number of ads in SpyFu for profitability analysis
• Search for Profitable Affiliate Programs related to your Niche Market to sell

Notice a simple natural reaction whenever you need to run a quick research on a topic. You would remind yourself to “Google” the topic. When evaluating supply/competition, we do exactly that. Let’s run through the process.

Evaluating Supply = Competition

• “Google” your selected niche by inputting the keyword or keyword phrase.
• On the top right corner of the bar separating your search bar and search returns, you will find the total number of search returns and this number becomes the Supply or your competition. Do this in “Quotes”.

Note that the total number of search returns ie. the supply/competition will give you an idea of how much information or providers are out there competing to win over the potential niche customers.

However, that is not to say that when Supply runs into the millions the niche is too competitive. We must evaluate the supply against the demand before we derive our conclusion. Go for any number less than 20,000 to 50,000 competing pages.

No one has ever definitively set a benchmark figure for this formula, and neither will I here. The reason being that different niche markets behave and yield different results. There have been instances, albeit rare, when I entered more than usual competitive niches, thinking that the survival rate would be akin to nil, but surprisingly, I managed to pull through with interesting results. And the vice versa is true.

And more importantly, do share the results with all our readers out here. I would really appreciate it.

Next Stop brings us to to investigating Key SEO ideas at 6 Steps to Effective SEO for Online Niche Marketing Domination.

And for a recap of Part 1 of this series, check out Finding Demand of Niche Markets.

Based on the BusinessFast4ward Marketing Plan, or any other business plan for that matter, the first step is to set SMART goals, goals which are measurable.

Measurable goals help to guide you along the right track, allowing you tweak your campaigns and marketing plan along the way as you phase your campaigns. Measurable goals not only help you to track your spending, profit and loss but also operational efficiencies such as lead generation rates, leads-to-sales conversion rates etc.

The ROI or Return on Investment is the measurement of your business’ success or failure. There is need to benchmark your direct marketing campaign with your respective industry standards and then set internal benchmarks as measurements.

A general rule of thumb is that for traditional mode of postal direct mailer to new potential databases, a 3% – 5% response rate & 30% leads-to-sales conversion rate is considered above average achievements. That said, it is not uncommon to find conversion rates of as high as 10% in very successful new campaigns. And of course, direct mailers to existing databases could yield greater conversion, with the assumption that you have loyal customers and products that continuously meet their needs.

The BusinessFast4ward Direct Marketing Campaign ROI Guide & Checklist

We have put together a simple guide to help you measure your ROI specific to your physical Direct Mailing campaigns. Let us explore the list of guiding questions below:

How many Postal Direct Mailers/ emails/ text ad messages (sms) have you sent out?

How much is the per unit cost and hence the total cost of your direct mailer?

Note that for emails you should still factor in your production cost, and manpower cost if applicable.

How much business revenue is generated from this campaign?

This is assuming that you have set a monitoring system for incoming revenues. Note that it is critical to set up an easy to manage revenue monitoring system which enables you to have timely and real=time information on specific campaigns as this gives you’re the nimbleness to make changes to your marketing strategies and tactics during the campaign period.

What is my ROI of this campaign?

The ROI of any campaign or marketing activity is calculated as [Total Revenue to date – Total Cost to date]/Total Cost to Date.

Note that the ROI is represented in a decimal form of which you may convert to percentages for easier reference.

How does my ROI compare to my Industry ROI? Or my greatest competitor’s ROI?

Now that you have your ROI on hand, you should first compare that to the industry ROI. If you are above it, do not let off and keep up the push for better improvements.

How does my ROI compare to my competitor’s ROI?

More importantly, should you be privy to your greatest competitor’s ROI, compare and make adjustments to exceed that of your competitor. This should serve as a continuous activity whenever you are doing your marketing campaigns. That said, when comparing your competitor’s campaign ROI, take note of the similarities and differences in their direct marketing mix and channels adopted. You should compare “apples to apples”. Too many diverging factors would make your competitor comparison meaningless.

What variable components in my ROI can I tweak to improve my returns?

This is the million dollar question. Timing is of essence, and having access to real time campaign results gives you the edge to start making adjustments to your direct marketing mix.

The key components you can tweak are your promotional mix in terms of the push factors. These are namely creating additional personal selling or telemarketing in support of your direct mailers, distribution of flyers at critical locations applicable to your business.

If you are strapped of funds, you could consider free press write ups, or subtly market your business via social networking sites. You might also forge alliance with other renown internet marketers in joint ventures to market your product over the internet, provided of course that your product offerings are suitable for the internet in terms of target audiences as well as delivery channels. And should you have excess funds, you may consider leveraging on TV ads or sponsor a radio talk show.

Check out the BusinessFast4ward Marketing Plan Template here for more details.

Leads are a key component to the Small Business Marketing Strategy. Today we share actual work experiences of the approach on how to capture the leads generated from traditional as well as internet advertising & promotions activities. These are proven approaches in both small businesses as well as large corporations.

After all the hard work you have put into road-mapping your marketing plan, now is the time to implement and test the authenticity of your marketing skills.

So, you launch your marketing campaign as planned. You start to get responses from various marketing tactics or tools. These are essentially responses or leads, which eventually if you do the right things, are converted into sales. Every single touch point or contact that you receive is a potential sale.

Obviously as you read this, you would realize the importance of leads and more significantly, leads management. Hence, learning how to manage leads is critical to your marketing activities.

Many entrepreneurs make the common mistakes of running incessant marketing campaigns but do not have the resources to follow up with their responses or leads. Eventually, the leads become “cold” and useless after a period of time. Experience has it that newly generated responses or leads must be attended to within a month from the point they are generated. Efficient marketers attend to the leads the moment they are generated, so as to keep the touch point warm. If first attempt to convert fails, they revisit the lead may within one month or a given time period, based on the type of business they are in.

Another major myth is that there is no way to track ad responses or leads. Many marketers are hesitant to advertise in TV, radio, newspapers and magazines by the sheer myth that such advertisements cannot be effectively tracked for response. In truth, it can be achieved very easily using simple routing approaches effectively for leads and sales tracking.

The Illustration for lead tracking system below:

You have a need to run marketing campaigns and advertise the business in order generate more leads with the objective of converting them into sales. Advertising channels broadly encompass television commercials (TVCs), press advertisements, email & website marketing & marketing collaterals. You will need to train one telemarketer (depending on scale) to run this process.

Tracking Your Traditional Advertising Channels – TVCs, Press Advertisements, Writeups as well as Marketing Collaterals

What you need to do:

• Design Ad copies and emails with Hotline (Loop-Back) feature & website address prominently placed.
• Prepare a Lead Tracking Schedule which will be tabulated at the end of each day.
• Prepare a telemarketing script to lead generate effectively

Managing the Process

• Ensure that the Hotline and email responses are attended to immediately.
• At inception, the telemarketer will check the source of ad channel, ie. From where did the caller find out about the campaign.
• Your email campaign system must be able to track how many of your emails are opened or read.
• It should also track how many email readers visit your website via the links in your email. (this could be tracked from your website) At best, allow half a day turn around time. The longer you wait on the lead, the colder the lead gets. Route the lead to sales person.
• Sales person to revert on status of leads after attending the lead via email or call update. If your email system has the capabilities, configure the consolidated reports will be routed to your system on a daily basis

Tracking Your Website

• Capture your prospects’ details by installing an auto-responder.
• Ensure that there is a response or “shy yes” page which allows your website visitors to leave their details or enquiries.
• Use analytics tracking systems to track your website traffic flow.
• If you have installed Google Adsense or affiliate marketing on your website, analyze your leads and sales analytics from respective programs.
• Analyze from comprehensive analytic reports where & who your visitors are as well as whether they are repeat visitors. You can also track the backlinks from where your traffic is generated. This will help you to further hone your channel marketing tactics.

The above lead tracking model works well for traditional & internet marketing mix, from advertising to sponsorship, to event management and of course the ever-green marketing campaigns.

To reiterate, Leads are the essence of your Small Business Marketing Strategy, hence, you need to grow the process over time and track accordingly.

For more information, check out Small Business Marketing Strategie here.

Linking the Compensation component with Talent Management is a major challenge in today’s business environment. Global economic conditions have taken a dive and according to a new WorldatWork survey predicts employee pay raises will more or less stay put in 2008, a departure from the nearly 4 percent average increase in 2007.

The immediate issue businesses need to contend with is achieving business results and targeted growth given the lack of sufficient budget. Amidst a budget crunch in employee compensation programs and an impending need to spend on salaries and incentives, one solution would be to look to creative talent management strategies.

With the economy taking a breather, management should start leveraging on other platforms to motivate and compensate staff. One such method is to explore the concept of Total Rewards, an all inclusive package which encompasses income, health benefits, development as well as work-life balance. This presents a holistic value-add to the meaning of compensation, be it specifically for talent or staff alike.

Human Resource managers could position Total Rewards as a comprehensive compensation package applicable for Talent Management by offering varying levels development and health benefits as well as different quantum of incentives at different corporate echelon. Total Rewards should be sculptured to encompass both monetary and non-monetary employee benefits. There is equal appeal for new entrants of the workforce or to the company. It serves as an attraction for those in search of balance in compensation, lifestyle as well as provides a sense of stability. However, having said that, these are the criteria which Talents also value at the workplace.

Compensation and performance must be aligned for parity. The leveraging platform here is learning and development which is a process which Learning ROI is evaluated with KPIs or key performance indicators to measure work achievements.

Communication is of utmost importance to the successful acceptance of any Human Resource or Talent Management strategy and tying in the expectations of business outlook going forward, in tandem with the Total Rewards package is critical. Understand that the best rewards system will fail if they are not communicated appropriately to employees.

Leverage on internal communication via actively organizing relevant activities, staff benefit tie-ups and benefit offerings thereby creating positive talking point amongst staff. Get Top management involved in the change activities as well.

For more on this topic, check out Talent Management – How To Measure Performance of Your Staff here.

Tools of performance measurements abound the Talent Management arena. KPIs or Key Performance Indicators are the most realistic performance indicators linked to talent management and your business bottom line. KPIs are linked to business activities for accountability and periodically reviewed.

An additional value-add would probably for to build in a Business Ethics Barometer which tracks the business ethics compliance of the talent. We suggest that the Business Ethics Barometer be measured by generating response from the 360 degree performance review, hence providing a more holistic picture of the talent. If the company is not utilizing the 360 degree performance review, one alternative is to incorporate into the performance evaluation views of other peers and colleagues. This helps you set a more comprehensive perspective and benchmark for the talent.

Talent Management – Enhancing Performance with Learning & Knowledge Management Tools

With Globalization and technology advancement in the recent 10 years, the approaches of learning and knowledge management in terms of systems and processes have changed greatly. From the traditional classroom and one-on-one learning approaches, the learning process has morphed into online learning or e-learning and collaborative in nature. This has impacted how knowledge information is managed as well.

Learning Management System or LMS is software for delivering, tracking and managing training. Knowledge Management or KM comprises a range of practices used by organizations to identify, create, represent, distribute and enable adoption of what it knows, and how it knows it. Hence, if an organization uses an e-learning or online learning platform, the knowledge management uses online access of shareware for the transference of expertise. Often than not, e-learning or online learning platforms are better leveraged in areas where learning technical knowledge is critical.

One drawback for e-learning or online learning is that it lacks human interaction in the transference of knowledge which is critical in the transference of a wholesome learning experience in the social and emotional intelligence context of it.

A recommended approach to holistic learning is blended learning concept have become very well accepted in today’s high tech high touch learning environment. Essentially, blended learning concepts evolve around both components of online learning as well as instructor-led learning, effectively enhancing the learning experience with the “human touch”.

Online learning or E-learning is most effective for access of static information which the learner previews the background and foundation of the topic in discussion. Having learnt the “basics”, it greatly expedites the instructor-led segment of the learning process whereby the instructor or facilitator transfers the intrinsic value of the topics to the learner.

Soft skills such as business knowledge and business skills require more physical transference. Physical transference tends to elevate the learning experience to a different level.

Some companies which adopt cohesive and centralized organizational structures tend to leverage on this strength via mentoring, coaching or buddy system . This too could form part of the high touch segment of the learning process whereby the mentor, buddy or coach transfers knowledge and skills to the talent.

And remember that all learning activities must translate into contribution in your business growth, either in monetary forms or otherwise.

Interested to learn more, check out Talent Management here