10 Marketing Tips for Gaining Online Visibility
Here are my top 10 marketing tips for small businesses that will help you gain more visibility with your target customer.
- Create a vision and set realistic goals for your business. What’s that have to do with marketing, you ask? Knowing your vision will help you make decisions on what types of activities you will need to get where you’d like to go. Goals break the process into smaller pieces to allow you to get there one step at a time. Without a vision and a set of goals, you may make some decisions that lead you nowhere.
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Mission, Vision, Goals, Strategies and Tactics
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. These concepts are important in order to develop a plan that focuses you on what is important to help you succeed.
Mission vs. Vision
Mission (purpose) = defines why you are in business and what you are doing now.
Example:
Masterful Marketing partners with small business owners as their trusted marketing advisor to help them achieve success by learning, incorporating and executing marketing strategies and programs that take their business from mediocre to marvelous.
Vision = defines what you want your business to be or be known for. It’s useful to develop a 1, 3 and 5 year vision to ensure you can progress to where you want to be through well defined measurable steps:
Example:
One year: By December 30, 2010, Masterful Marketing will be offering quality information products in addition to coaching services that make up 20% of the overall revenue for the company.Three year: By December 30, 2013, Masterful Marketing will be recognized as one of the top three marketing brands for small businesses in the United States.
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Tags: business vision, marketing goals, marketing tactics
Don’t Wait for Perfection
Striving for perfection is a nice goal, but sometimes waiting for perfection can hold you back.
The beauty of marketing on the Internet is that, in most cases, you can test, change, modify and update your campaigns once they go live. Having everything completely perfect prior to getting out there and being seen is no longer a necessity. It is more important to take action and become visible, even if it’s not perfect, than sit around and wait.
Recently, I’ve noticed this trend of waiting for perfection with some small business owners. The problem with this strategy is:
- The longer you wait, the more chance you give your competition to be found before you, potentially stealing the thunder from something you thought was unique;
- The Web changes too quickly to worry about finding small imperfections that can be fixed quickly once they are discovered;
- Marketing takes time to work and waiting just lengthens the time before you will see results.
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Tags: internet presence, marketing tactics, web marketing, web presence
Marketing Activities – What Worked?
Whoo-hoo! Seven down and two to go in our year end marketing review so we’re ready to hit the ground running! Hope you’ve found these useful so far!
Do you regularly review the results of your marketing efforts? Is your marketing plan a living document that ebbs and flows with what is happening in your business? As a small business owner, you should try to stay aware of how your marketing is working throughout the year so you can make adjustments as the need requires.
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Tags: marketing results, marketing review, marketing tactics
Small Business Marketing Plan
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.
Hm, thanks for the help.
Then you wonder why small business owners run for the hills when they hear the term “marketing plan” and never really grasp what they need to do to attract new customers and clients and grow their businesses. And although I’d love to give you a magic 5 steps to a winning marketing plan, it just doesn’t work that way.
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Tags: marketing action plan, marketing tactics
Contractor Marketing Basics
Recently I have been working with a few contractors helping them market their businesses. Besides defining their brand and setting up their Internet presence, I work with them on how to decide what type of marketing will work for them. The following is a presentation that I gave to a group of contractors a few weeks ago and a brief transcript of the key points that I make when I give this presentation.
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Tags: construction marketing, marketing budget, marketing tactics
Social Media Marketing is Part of an Integrated Marketing Plan
I read a lot about social media marketing. I find this area of my discipline fascinating and I have a thirst to learn as much about how to use these tools to effectively market a business as I can absorb. But every so often, the information is presented in such a way that it implies that social media marketing is a replacement for the more “traditional” marketing activities. A “tug of war” between the two, so to speak. And this concerns me.
Tags: integrated marketing plan, marketing tactics
