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?

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.

This is the second post in a series that discusses your year end marketing review to help you get ready for the new year.

Your goals can deal with many different elements of your business. You can have goals to drive more business from information products, generate better quality inbound leads, increase the awareness of your brand, drive more visitors to your web site or get more repeat clients.

I’m getting a lot of queries from my clients in the form of “What do you think of this?” where “this” is a proposal from a niche marketing company for them to buy a plethora of services from PPC Advertising to social media marketing services.

I appreciate that these companies need to sell their services to survive, but as marketing companies they should do a better job at targeting their offerings.

If you haven’t put together your 2008 marketing plan, it’s not too late. In a post from the Vista Consulting library, Year End Marketing Planning, we talk about a few tips on how to use what happened this past year to help you plan for the next 12 month.

But if you haven’t done a lot of marketing in your business or are starting a new business, you will need to spend some time on developing your purpose, vision and goals.