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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.