Masterful Marketing
Marketing in the New Media World
Marketing your small business is very much like playing golf. In golf, the goal is to play each hole to get the ball from the tee into the hole on the green in the fewest number of strokes possible. To achieve that goal, you need a strategy for each hole such that you get to your destination successfully. Your action plan is to execute each shot as planned, resulting in the par score.
“If you don’t know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.” Yogi Berra had a humorous way of stating the obvious but when it comes to your business, winding up somewhere unknown is not funny. Most business owners understand the value of having marketing goals, but many never take the time to set them, evaluate progress and adjust them as necessary.
Customer service is more important to your marketing strategy today than many business owners realize. Because of brand exposure via social media, marketing needs to be concerned with the entire customer experience. Companies that provide excellent customer service strengthen their marketing by simplifying the task of tracking and managing the perception of your brand.
Recently I wrote about the true value in your value proposition because small businesses need to understand what it is they offer and why their market needs it. And you really need to define your mission statement is so you can communicate it to your target audience. Now we need to turn our attention to creating a strong brand, one of your most valuable business assets.
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. Of course, no [...]
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; [...]
Why are business owners gun shy about selecting a target market? 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 [...]