Small Business Marketing

If you have a small business marketing is an essential activity to ensure:

• people know that your product or service exists
• the benefits you offer to your potential customers are clear
• and that your product or service is appropriately priced and distributed.

Without investing at least some time and money on marketing, your business is unlikely to grow and remain competitive.

However your challenge as a small business with limited budgets is to ensure that any investment in time and money is carefully spent and gets the results you want.

What is ‘marketing?’

There are many definitions and can be taken broadly to mean the processes involved in promoting and selling and distributing your product or services. A marketing strategy is in effect a plan which helps to ensure that you maximise the resources you have in order to increase sales and remain competitive.

So, this is about deciding what your product or service offering should be and working out where and to whom you should sell it, what price is should be sold at and how best to promote it. (If you want some jargon these are known as elements of the ‘marketing mix ‘– product, price, place, promotion.)

However, we are not going to go into the technical theory of marketing here instead give you some basic information to so you can begin to understand what options you have to promote your business.

Opportunities for small business marketing:-

• Branding
• Advertising
• Direct mail
• Cold calling
• Telephone Cold Calling
• Telesales
• Public relations (PR)
• Networking
• Email marketing
• Your website
• Internet marketing
• Guerrilla marketing
• Promotional gifts and clothing
• Viral marketing

Some of these such as guerrilla marketing cover a number of the other areas. Gain an understanding of these methods, how they work and what sort of business they suit. If any strike a chord read more about them and how you can implement them in your business. For in depth knowledge then check out the recommended reading below.

See Also:-

Advertising Tips
Constructing An Advert
Public Relations Methods
Public Relations Tips
Tips For Buying Promotional Gifts
Business Website Tips For Promoting Yourself On The Internet
Guerrilla Marketing Ideas

Recommended Reading;

Low-Budget Online Marketing for Small Business (101 for Small Business) by Holly Berkley (Paperback - 25 May 2006)

The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly by David Meerman Scott (paperback - 2008)

101 Ways to Market Your Business (101 . . .) by Andrew Griffiths (Paperback - 1 Aug 2006)

Duct Tape Marketing: The World's Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide by Michael Gerber, Guy Kawasaki, and John Jantsch (Paperback - 30 May 2008)

Powerful Marketing On A Shoestring Budget: For Small Businesses by Dee Blick (Paperback - 8 Dec 2008)

Ultimate Small Business Marketing Guide by James Stephenson (Paperback - 1 Feb 2007)

Small Business Marketing for Dummies by Barbara Findlay Schenck (Paperback - 4 Feb 2005)

Guerrilla Marketing, 4th edition: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from Your SmallBusiness by Jay Conrad Levinson (Paperback - 3 May 2007)

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