Marketing Strategy

Facebook tagging links a person, page or place to something you post, like a status update, photo or app activity. Facebook tagging is a useful feature because it enables you to notify a person or a business when you post something that pertains to them, letting them know that they were mentioned and it makes the post more visible in the news feed to friends or fans of the person or business you tagged if the person has set the post to be visible to friends or public.

Your value proposition is the value a client gains from working with you. If you have trouble explaining to people what you do and why you are the best to help them solve their most challenging problems, it’s time to identify the one thing that really makes you different from your competitors. Then you can be crystal clear about why you are uniquely different and will be able to communicate it with confidence.

There are many people who offer online marketing services. There are also many people who call themselves online marketing experts because they know how to: Build a WordPress website, implement search engine optimization (SEO), set up your Google Places page and other local business listings, develop an AdWords campaign, send out an email marketing campaign or create a Facebook Business Page with the new iFrames landing tabs. All good stuff and important. But do these experts know marketing?

Planning Your Road to Success

One of the things I do for my clients is simplify marketing so it eliminates confusion and enables the business owner to focus on what is important. But there is always a part of marketing that stresses many small business owners – i.e. determining their mission, goals, strategies and tactics.

We just returned from our vacation in Aruba. We’ve been there many times and own a timeshare at the Marriott Surf Club. We go to just get away and relax – no site seeing, no golf – just reading, sunning, swimming and oh, yes a bit of gambling at night for entertainment.

You search the web for “marketing plan small business” and you get terrifying results ranging from marketing plan templates that are too cumbersome for small business owners to articles such as the one from Microsoft called 5 easy steps to create a marketing plan where the 5 steps they list are 1) position your product; 2) tap your braintrust; 3) listen to your customers; 4) draft the plan and 5) track results.

Why are business owners gun shy about selecting a target market?

Photo courtesy of viZZZual.com on Flickr

You can’t appeal to everyone, so why do business owners continually drive themselves crazy trying to work with clients they just don’t connect with? When you identify people or businesses that you just love to work with, you enjoy your work more and you can focus on providing greater value.

Will the Change Help or Hurt?

A former client of mine that I’ve worked with for quite a while decided to update their brand. They had talked with me about it while I was there helping them out as they looked to hire a VP of Marketing. They had recently received VC funding and they were planning some much needed expansion of the marketing organization.

We’re two weeks into the New Year and I bet many people have already broken one of their New Year’s resolutions! Personally I stopped “resolving” to do things a long a time ago because for me, resolutions only resulted in some type of failure.

However, setting proper goals and aligning them with where you want your business to be in 3 – 5 years can help you achieve things you probably never thought you could.

Marketing your business has four stages: plan, execute, track and measure.

If you haven’t had a marketing plan in the past, we’ll start with a review of last year so we can see how you did. Can you directly attribute revenue to your marketing activities? If so, which ones gave you the highest return?