Small Business Marketing Strategies, All-in-One For Dummies®
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Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016936125
ISBN 978-1-119-23691-7 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-23693-1 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-23692-4 (ebk)
Welcome to Small Business Marketing Strategies All-In-One For Dummies!
Because you picked up this book, it’s a good bet that you’re a small business owner or marketer who works with small businesses. You likely want to find out as much as you can about how small businesses are marketing themselves in today’s fast-changing world of social media, websites, blogs, mobile phones, and other platforms, media, and post-modern doohickeys. You want to know how you can turn tweets, likes, shares, comments, photos, blogs, profiles, apps, and so forth into dollars. Well, if that’s the case, you’ve come to the right place.
This book presents and explains a wide variety of information, all aimed at enlightening you on what you need to know to achieve success. Whether you need know-how and advice on the basics of current marketing practices, discovering and defining your clients, using Facebook or Twitter to promote your business, leveraging content marketing to draw in customers and potential customers, launching a campaign, optimizing your content for search engines — or kick it old school with broadcast, print, and outdoor ads, you’ll find the help you need here.
The aim of this book is to provide you with the very best ideas, concepts, and tools for marketing small businesses. Using the info here, you should be able to create marketing campaigns that speak to real people in the language they use day in and day out. And you should be able to avoid many common mistakes that end up turning your customers off or wasting your time. Marketing is a tricky business. But you probably already knew that.
This book is a generous conglomeration of material from a number of Dummies marketing and social media books, carefully selected with an eye toward getting you going with an overall marketing program.
For a tiny fraction of the amount you’d pay to get a marketing MBA, this book delivers an easily understandable road map to today’s most innovative and effective marketing techniques and strategies. The information you find here is firmly grounded in the real world. This book isn’t an abstract collection of theoretical, pie-in-the-sky mumbo-jumbo that sounds good but doesn’t work when you put it to the test. Instead, you’ll find only the best information, the best strategies, and the best techniques that are working on today’s business environment, both online and off.
This book is also meant to be at least a little fun. Marketing doesn’t have to be a bore — especially nowadays, when it seems to be merging with entertainment and interpersonal communication in ways that wouldn’t have been dreamt of even a decade ago. At any rate, maintaining a sense of humor can be vital when facing the challenges that all small business folk face from time to time.
Within this book, you may note that some web addresses (URLs) break across two lines of text. If you’re reading this book in print and want to visit one of these web pages, simply key in the web address exactly as it’s noted in the text, pretending as though the line break doesn’t exist. If you’re reading this as an ebook, you’ve got it easy — just tap the web address to be taken directly to the web page.
This book makes a few assumptions about you. For example, you are interested in marketing (duh). You own or work for or with a small business (also duh). Maybe you’ve already started or at least conceived of a marketing campaign and are looking for tips to refine the techniques you’re already developing. Or perhaps it’s something you think may want to try, to boost your income and enlarge your customer base, and are looking to read up on it before you make your move. You’ll find a lot to like in these pages.
If you have little or no experience in marketing so far, no worries. There’s plenty of fundamental information here as well. The early chapters will get you up and running on the core concepts.
It’s also safe to assume that you can — or believe you can — use a computer, a smartphone, and the web and other services of the all-powerful Internet. You may not be a gearhead, but you can tap, click, and search with the best of them.
Finally, this book assumes you’re eager to scoop up and implement new tips and tricks and that you’re willing to acquire some new perspectives on the topic.
Icons are handy little graphic images that are meant to point out particularly important information about starting your own business. Throughout this book, you find the following icons, conveniently located along the left margins:
In addition to the material in the print or ebook you’re reading right now, this product also comes with some access-anywhere goodies on the web. No matter how hard you work at marketing, you’ll likely come across a few questions where you frankly don’t have a clue. To view this book’s Cheat Sheet, simply go to www.dummies.com
and search for “Small Business Marketing Strategies Cheat Sheet” in the Search box.
If you’re new to marketing, you may want to start at the beginning of this book and work your way through to the end. What a radical concept. A clear path of information and practical advice leading to success awaits you. Simply turn the page and you’re on your way. But you can start anywhere. If you’ve already studied or done some real-world marketing and are short of time (and who isn’t?), feel free to use the table of contents and index to zero in on particular topics of interest to you right now, whether that’s creating a board on Pinterest, upping your visibility in online directories, or working with direct mail.
Regardless of how you find your way around this book, the sincere hope of this endeavor is that you’ll not just amp up your marketing prowess, but enjoy the journey as well. Good luck!
Book 1
Contents at a Glance
Chapter 1
IN THIS CHAPTER
Taking the necessary marketing steps that lead to sales
Getting your marketing program started
Understanding how small business marketing is different
You’re not alone if you opened this book looking for an answer to the question, “What is marketing, anyway?” Everyone seems to know that marketing is an essential ingredient for business success, but when it comes time to say exactly what it is, certainty disappears from the scene.
People aren’t sure if marketing, advertising, and sales are the same or different things. And they’re even less sure about what marketing involves and how to do it well.
To settle the matter right up-front, here’s a plain-language description of what marketing — and this book — is all about.
Marketing is a nonstop cycle. It begins with customer knowledge and goes around to customer service before it begins all over again. Along the way, it involves product development, pricing, packaging, distribution, advertising and promotion, and all the steps involved in making the sale and serving the customer well.
Every successful marketing program — whether for a billion-dollar business or a solo entrepreneur — follows the marketing cycle illustrated in Figure 1-1. The process is exactly the same whether yours is a start-up or an existing business, whether your budget is large or small, whether your market is local or global, and whether you sell through the Internet, via direct mail, or through a bricks-and-mortar location.
Just start at the top of the wheel and circle around clockwise in a never-ending process to win and keep customers and to build a strong business in the process.
As you loop around the marketing wheel, here are the marketing actions you take:
After you make the sale, begin the customer service phase.
Work to develop relationships and ensure high levels of customer satisfaction so that you convert the initial sale into repeat business, loyalty, and word-of-mouth advertising for your business.
Interact with customers to gain insight about their wants and needs and their use of and opinions about your products and services.
Combine customer knowledge with ongoing research about your market area and competitive environment. Then use your findings to fine-tune your product, pricing, packaging, distribution, promotional messages, sales, and service.
And so the marketing process goes around and around.
People make the mistake of thinking marketing is a high-powered or dressed-up way to say sales. Or they treat marketing and sales as two independent functions that they mesh together under the label marketing and sales.
Small business leaders are most likely to clear their calendars and make marketing a priority at three predictable moments:
You may have opened this book because your business is in the midst of one of those three situations right now. As you prepare to kick your marketing efforts into high gear, remember that marketing isn’t just about selling. It’s about attracting customers with great products and strong marketing communications, winning them over, and then retaining their business by exceeding their expectations. As part of the reward, you achieve repeat business, loyalty, new customer referrals, and a better shot at long-term business success.
The following sections can help you get a leg up on beginning your marketing program.
If your business is just starting, your marketing plan needs to address a set of decisions that existing businesses have already made. Existing companies have images to build upon, whereas your start-up business has a clean slate upon which to write exactly the right story.
If you’re marketing a start-up business, pay special attention to these first few chapters. They can help you identify your customers, make pricing decisions, present your product, size up your competition, and set your goals and objectives.
Most established businesses grow their revenues by following one of the following routes:
Small business owners often feel overwhelmed by the marketing task. They aren’t sure how much money they should dedicate to the effort, whether they need to hire marketing professionals, how to weight efforts between traditional media and online communications, and whether they need to create new ads, brochures, and websites to get the job done.
Do those uncertainties sound familiar? If so, detour around the questions and get into forward motion by first putting your marketing task in perspective. Ask these questions:
Whether you’re launching a new business or accelerating the growth of an existing enterprise, defining what you’re trying to achieve makes everything easier.
By setting your goal first (more on this important step in Book 1, Chapter 4), the process of creating your marketing plan becomes a focused, goal-oriented, and vastly easier activity.
All marketing programs follow the same set of steps in the marketing process (refer to Figure 1-1 earlier in this chapter), but the similarities between big business marketing and small business marketing stop there. Budgets, staffing, creative approaches, and communication techniques vary hugely between an international mega-marketer and a comparatively micro-budget marketer like, well, you.
This book is for you. Here’s why.
As a small business marketer, you already know one difference between your marketing program and those of the corporate behemoths that loom over you in all directions: The big guys have the big budgets. They talk about a couple hundred thousand dollars as a discretionary line-item issue. You talk about a couple hundred dollars as an amount worthy of careful consideration. The advice in this book is scaled to your budget, not to the million-dollar jackpots you see referenced in most other marketing books.
Look at the organization chart of any major corporation. Nearly always, you find a marketing vice president. Under that position you see a bunch of other professionals, including advertising directors, sales managers, online and social-media marketing managers, research directors, customer service specialists, and so on. In contrast, strong small businesses blend marketing with the leadership function. The small business organization chart often puts responsibility for marketing in the very top box, the one with the owner’s name, which likely puts you in the essential role of overseeing marketing as a hands-on task.
The top-name marketers routinely spend six figures to create ads with the sole purpose of building name recognition and market preference for their brands, often without a single word about a specific product or price.
Small businesses take a dramatically different approach. They want to develop name recognition just like the biggest advertisers, but their ads have to do double duty. You know firsthand that each and every small business marketing investment has to deliver immediate and measurable market action. Each effort has to stir enough purchasing activity to offset the marketing cost involved. The balancing act — and the focus of the chapters in Book 5 — is to create marketing communications that build a clear brand identity while also inspiring the necessary consumer action to deliver inquiries, generate leads, and prompt sales — now.
In big businesses, bound copies of business plans are considered part of the furnishings, whereas in many small businesses, the very term marketing plan provokes a pang of guilt.
As a small business owner, you may envy the dollars, people, and organizations of your big business counterparts, but you have some advantages they envy as well.
The heads of Fortune 500 firms allocate budgets equal to the gross national products of small countries to fund the research required to get to know and understand their customers. Meanwhile, you can talk with your customers face to face, day after day, at virtually no additional cost.
Because the whole point of marketing is to build and maintain customer relationships, no business is better configured to excel at the marketing task than the small business.
What’s more, today’s customers don’t just crave interactive communication with the businesses they buy from — they demand it. In the biggest of big businesses, shifting from one-way communication to two-way, interactive communication involves monumental shifts in how the business markets. Meanwhile, for your small business, shifting toward interactive marketing is simply a matter of making the choice to get online, get social, get talking, and get involved in two-way communications that give your business a marketing edge.
It’s the simple truth that without customers, a business is out of business.
Marketing is the key to achieving customer interest, winning customer purchases, earning customer satisfaction and loyalty, and keeping your small business in business.
Put in terms like that, marketing is the single most important activity in any business — including yours. The fact that you’re holding this book means you’ve made a commitment, and that gives you an edge over many of your competitors. Go for it!
Chapter 2
IN THIS CHAPTER
Targeting and reaching prospective customers
Examining your product line
Understanding the reasons why people buy products
Recognizing the importance of value
Extending and diversifying your product line
Every marketer mulls the same questions: Who are my customers? How did they hear about me? Why do they buy from me? How can I reach more people like them?
Successful businesses use the answers to these questions to influence every product-design, pricing, distribution, and communication decision they make. This chapter focuses on the only boss that really matters in business: the person with an interest in your product or service and an open billfold. Whether your business is starting up, running at full pace, or in need of a turnaround, you can use the information in this chapter to get in tune with the customers who will make or break your bottom line.
The best products aren’t sold — they’re bought. You never hear a customer say he bought a lemon at the used car lot. Nope, someone sold him that lemon — but hopefully not you or your business. If you’re a good marketer, you aren’t selling anyone anything. Instead, you’re helping customers select the right products to solve their problems, address their needs, or fulfill their desires. You’re helping them buy.
As a result, you can devote the bulk of your marketing efforts to the steps that take place long before and after money changes hands. These efforts involve targeting customers, designing the right product line, communicating your offerings in terms that address customers’ wants and needs, and interacting after the sale in a way that builds loyalty and repeat business. This chapter spotlights everything you need to know about your products and the reasons your customers want to buy those products from you.