Small Business Marketing
Protect Your Brand: Register a Trademark
- Have you come up with a great name for your business or a service you offer?
- Did you have a great logo designed that is unique and memorable?
- Did you know that your name and logo are valuable assets of your business?
Many businesses don’t understand the value of registering a trademark for your identifiable assets, but doing so allows you to protect your brand in the event someone infringes on your mark.
The definition of a trademark from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is a word, phrase, symbol or design, or a combination thereof, that identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods of one party from those of others. Trademarks identify a product, service, person or thing from others in the same field to avoid confusion and to separate your business from all the others.
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Tags: brand identity, brand image, trademark
Why Your Business Needs a Marketing General Contractor
Marketing your business is a process similar to a home renovation: you need a general contractor to call the shots and make everything fit together.
I made this statement on my Facebook page and now will explain why this is an important analogy. I come in contact with many small business owners that hire different companies that “specialize” in one particular online marketing task. The result: no consistency and ineffective activities that counteract the effectiveness of one another. In fact, a couple clients of mine ended up with two websites (with two different designs) because each of these online marketing companies had to create their own website to guarantee first page placement on Google!
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Small Business Marketing – Where to Focus?
Focus, focus, focus
It’s the mantra of many involved in small business marketing and is important to those of us who need to deliver client projects while continuing to market our businesses. What marketing should your small business consistently execute that will deliver proven results? Here are my recommendations for where you should focus over the next year.
Online Presence
Make sure your online presence is the best it can be. Don’t take short cuts in this important area as people still judge your business by what they see online. Consider some or all of the following depending on your business and how much time you can spend.
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Tags: online local marketing, word of mouth marketing
10 Marketing Blunders Many Small Businesses Still Make!
Marketing people love to write about marketing blunders and mistakes and we all have our opinion on what should be included in the top mistakes every small business must avoid. However, even though we continue to make these blunders visible, I still see these mistakes made, costing small businesses dearly in terms of dollars and results. Solid marketing efforts take a combination of planning, creativity and patience. As you review your plan and adjust for the upcoming year, make sure you are not unknowingly committing the following.
Not Developing a Marketing Plan
Jumping right into activities without assessing your target market needs and desires and understanding how best to reach them sets you up for inefficient marketing with little to no results. By not establishing a solid plan before you being your communication results in ineffective programs that waste your budget. Read more on 10 Marketing Blunders Many Small Businesses Still Make!…
Tags: marketing mistakes, small business owner
5 Personality Traits of Successful Small Business Owners
The Guardian Life Small Business Research Institute published a report in June 2010 called Six Dimensions That Characterize Success-Oriented Small Business Owners. The survey is based on analysis of a survey of 1,100 small businesses with between 2 and 99 employees. These 6 dimensions include collaborative, self-fulfilled, future focused, curious, tech savvy and action oriented.
Although I agree that these are important, I have identified 5 more dimensions, or personality traits, that contribute to their success.
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Tags: marketing traits, personality traits, small business owner
Do Small Businesses Need a Brand?
The answer, of course, is yes. And even if you don’t have a logo, your business still has a brand.
However, few small businesses really understand what a brand is and why it is important to their overall marketing strategy.
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5 Things You Need to Know to Market Your Small Business
In conversations with small business owners, I have realized that my conversation with them takes the following structure.
- Business owner: I want to add viral marketing / social media / Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn (pick your favorite platform) to my marketing efforts.
- Me: Of course, great idea but first who are your ideal customers as that will determine which platform may make the most sense?
- Business owner: I just want to add social media to the marketing activities.
- Me: Great, but what are you trying to accomplish so we can determine the type of results you will get?
- Business owner: I’ve heard that social media marketing gets great results for very little money!
- Me: Yes, it can, however, although it may not cost dollars, you do need to budget time to ensure you are consistent with your social media effort.
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Tags: differentiation, ideal client, marketing goals
Passion Simplifies the Sales Process
I’ve never been a great sales person. Heck I don’t even think I’m a good sales person. As a matter of fact, I hate selling. However this weekend at my golf club, people thought I was a great sales person (which I found rather humorous) because I was easily selling raffle tickets to raise money for the Susan G. Komen Foundation.
On August 5th, we are holding our annual Rally for the Cure Charity Golf Tournament. We instituted a member-only raffle to raise money. I had no trouble working the Player’s Lounge this weekend to sell tickets because I am passionate about this cause. I didn’t feel like I was selling something but rather offering people a chance to get something valuable and help our cause. People readily took out their wallets to buy their raffle ticket.
What made this an easy sell?
- We were giving them something of value (a $20 raffle ticket could win their annual dues)
- We could relate to everyone because many of us have experienced the effects of this disease either themselves, through a friend or a family member
- We were passionate about this effort and want to beat our donation from 2009.
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Tags: marketing mindset, selling your passion
Marketing – Always On 24×7
As many of us get into summer activities, one thing we need to remember is that as a small business owner, we are always creating an impression of our business, affecting our brand and reputation. Whether we are out to dinner with family and friends, socializing at the golf course, tennis courts or beaches, how we behave at all events, whether fun or business oriented, is something we need to recognize as part of our marketing activities.
What encouraged me to write this post was something that happened at a business golf outing I recently attended. All the people at this function were either small business owners or people who worked for small businesses. The group of men playing behind us became loud, rude and somewhat obnoxious. Their behavior was not something that encouraged me to want to get to know them and their businesses. My reaction was:
“What is your business? I don’t think I want to do business with you.”
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Power of Three in Marketing
I was asked an interesting question during one of my coaching sessions:
As a small business owner, if you were to focus on only three marketing activities over the next six months, what would they be?
That made me stop and think for a bit. Putting the gears in motion and applying the power of threes, I realized that this question and its answer would help other small business owners focus on what is important for them to be found. My recommendation for three marketing activities include:
#1 Building a first-class Web presence to develop your expert reputation
Today’s small business needs to have a solid presence on the Internet to help build your expert reputation. Building a first-class presence includes:
- Building a website and blog on WordPress
- Creating compelling profiles on Google, Facebook and LinkedIn
- Establishing local business listings on Google, Yahoo, Bing and Best of the Web
- Launching a Facebook Business Page
- Setting up a Twitter account with a custom, branded background
- Syndicating your content out to relevant sites
In order for this to all work, all the gears need to be moving in unison in order for all the pieces to create one unified image.
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