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Small Business Marketing Ideas and Advice
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The Importance of Small Business Marketing
by Howard Brule
If you could run your own business, would you want to keep going to work everyday for someone else? All it takes is your imagination and one good idea
to start a business. Yep, one idea and YOU can be your own boss. We all have ideas running through our heads.
So what is keeping most of us from making our own business dreams come true? In a word (three words actually) it comes down to the difficulty of
small business marketing.
Regardless of what venture you start, you will need to attract clients. They need to know that your product or service exists to meet their needs.
They also need to know how what you are selling differentiates itself from competitors in the market. You also need to let them know about special
products, promotions and discounts as they come available.
The phrase small business marketing encompasses all of these activities. Marketing demands knowing the essence of your product or service and
identifying your customer base. Next, customer behavior and preferences need to be identified. And then some consideration of what your
competitors are offering. What comes out of all this analysis is the foundation upon which you build your small business marketing strategy.
Once you have decided on a general marketing strategy, you need to select the proper media for implementation. Many small businesses are often
strapped for cash and unable to consider expensive media options such as advertising on television, glossy newspaper ads, or direct mailings. Whatever
your constraints, make the most of whatever is available and affordable. Fortunately, new innovations in small business online marketing and small
business offline marketing give you excellent and affordable solutions to your marketing needs.
To begin, let's consider a few online promotional strategies. It is essential that you establish an online presence even if the web does not interest
you and it seems unrelated to your business. In other words, you need a company website or blog to define your company's products or services and
provide potential customers with information about what your business offers.
Having a web presence also allows you to focus on techniques like search engine marketing, pay per click advertising, email advertising and placing
ads in free classified sites like usfreeads.com or craigslist. You can even create short informational videos and place them on Youtube, Google Video
and other video sharing sites to get traffic to your small business website.
Offline strategies for small business marketing can be quite original and inventive. Use classified ads in local newspapers or selective direct mail
campaigns to different areas of your city. You can also contract with people to do door-to-door marketing and use students to hand out promotional
materials. Events sponsored at colleges and nightclubs also attract a high volume of customers and are helpful if you are targeting young adults.
Creative thinking knows no bounds. Take the time to brainstorm some ideas for your small business marketing, using some of these ideas and others
gleaned from other free internet sources. Then come up with a small business promotional program customized to your unique requirements.
Small Business Marketing using Web 2.0
by Rick Hendershot
Since the term came into wide usage in 2004, after being coined by new media
guru Tim O'Reilly, web 2.0 promised a new way of doing things. What
distinguishes "Web 2.0" sites is that they tend to
put site visitors or members in charge of creating content and interacting with
each other. The website itself focuses mostly on the tools used to
help people communicate and collaborate rather than trying to push any messages of
their own out into the community.
Classic examples of this are web forums where users ask questions of each
other, and provide answers, with just a bit of oversight from a small group of
moderators. Another more current example is wikipedia.org where all content is
created by users. If you create an article at wikipedia on a topic such as
"green crystalline rock formations" other users can come along an make
modifications to your original article. The end result is a collaborative
effort. The question for marketers is how this new type of website might be
used for small business marketing purposes. The answer to this question is a
complicated on. But the simple version lies in the fact that Web 2.0 sites have a constant need
for new content for both the Web 2.0 sites themselves and their users. In a site
such as Youtube, for instance, where there are millions of actual users, and the
demand for new content is constant. And since the interests of these users are
so broad there is room for the creation of content in virtually any category you
can think of. The challenge for small business marketing is to create content
that users of these sites find interesting, and also promotes the product or
service you are attempting to market. This requires imagination and creativity,
because pitches that are too blatantly commercial will get panned by the
ever-critical membership. Youtube might be a difficult place to start your Web
2.0 small business marketing efforts. It is well worth studying the types of
submissions made to Youtube (and other video sites) by small businesses similar
to yours.
A simpler place to start might be craigslist.org - a classified ad site where
you can place ads in cities across North America and around the world. You can
place ads for virtually any type of item, product or service. But be careful to
follow the rules, because true to the tradition of Web 2.0, your ads will be
flagged if they don't adhere to the rules. Usually the rules for Web 2.0 sites
are not clearly spelled out. The acceptable ways of doing things are established
by users. If they don't like the way you do things they will let you know fairly
quickly. That's because Web 2.0 sites generally address fairly specific groups
of people and these communities have certain expectations that you
must be familiar with to market to them. It is simple to market to these
communities as long as you understand their frame of mind. These strategies are
the ones that will bring the results that you expect.
Above all, make sure that
the content that you submit adds value to the other users. Try to educate and
entertain. If the users decide that your contributions are useless, then you've
wasted your time.
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