Marketing success is never guaranteed. But one thing is guaranteed – if you don’t market your business, your competition will step in and take business away from you. Marketing must become a regular daily activity if you want your business to grow and thrive.
If you want your marketing to be effective, you need to treat marketing as a process – a series of actions to achieve your particular marketing goal. But unless you create a marketing system, your marketing process could be inefficient and inconsistent, producing results that are less than you had hoped.
Selecting the best target market for your business is the most important but difficult part of the marketing plan. Business owners will make many excuses when asked why they have not chosen a target because they believe that targeting limits their opportunities.
Business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing is different. Understand the differences and develop marketing programs that are appropriate for your audience.
If someone is willing to invest in your business, what do you promise to do that provides value to them that matters? This promise, or value proposition, needs to be based on something you do that is uniquely different from your competition.
How well do you communicate your value to your ideal client? What is needed to create a powerful marketing message that helps your target know exactly how you can help them and why they should work with you and not your competition.
Small businesses have many marketing challenges, but one of the hardest things small business owners need to do is determine what makes their business stand out from the competition and present it in a way that attracts their ideal client. Being able to differentiate your business by communicating your unique capabilities that your competition does not have is paramount to attracting your ideal client.
Everyone likes to talk about creating a marketing plan. It’s the fun part of marketing, the creative aspect of your planning process. But strategy without execution won’t help your business succeed. In fact, marketing execution is how you achieve results.
Marketing a small business has become overwhelming with all the online platforms, tools and strategies. There is so much complexity with all of your choices, how do you simplify marketing so it eliminates confusion and enables you to focus on what is important? What’s the secret to choosing the right platforms, tools and strategies to maximize your web presence and drive qualified inbound leads?
The best way to improve your marketing results is to set marketing goals. Without goals that can be tracked and measured, how will you know if you are successful?
We spend a lot of time discussing how to select your target audience as part of creating an inbound marketing plan. Hopefully you know who your target audience is for your small business. But have you taken the time to further divide that target audience into smaller market segments?
Choosing the right marketing communications channel strategy to distribute your messages to your target audience and create a stronger relationship with them is now more complicated. With all of these choices, what’s important is to focus on selecting the right media channels for your business, both online and traditional.