Marketing Your Small Business

One of the puzzle pieces in a small business owner’s puzzle is marketing. From our experiences at Comprehensive Consulting Solutions for Small Businesses, we have noticed that the term “marketing” is usually used in a broad sense to cover all areas of making a sale including attracting, on boarding, and retaining customers.

Some examples of marketing (strategies and tactics) include advertising, selling and sales process, community involvement, customer retention, lead follow-up, mailers, telemarketing, social media, website, referrals, networking, customer touches, and talk paths. Depending on the business, target customers, goals, size, and budget – some types of marketing will be more beneficial than others.

This is why it is important for small businesses to define their target customer, so they can determine what marketing strategies and tactics should be utilized to reach the customer, convert the customer, and retain the customer. The better the business owner understands what their target customer looks like, the better – not just know the target customers’ demographics, but also know where they go, where they like to spend time or money, where they communicate and engage, etc.

Once the target customer is known, the small business should allocate funds to a monthly marketing budget to acquire and retain them based on marketing strategies. There are several free things that a business can do to get the word out about their business, but depending on the business and goals, the free methods of marketing may not reach the business’ target customer or might not be engaging enough to get the target customer to act – and therefore buy.

From our experiences, when a business invests in the right marketing/messaging with the right spend (business backs into their marketing spend by sales by tactic using contact rates, close rates, average sale amount, and past trends) over a 6 month to 12 month period - the growth impact or increased revenue was significant. Once the allocation for marketing strategies are completed – the small business can create tactics for each strategy.

The tactics include the specifics of achieving the overall strategy – the why, when, what, how and where. For example, to increase online sales by 20% – the tactics could include Facebook ads, affiliate marketing, promotions, SEO, and paid google ads. Within each, specifics are stated – such as for Facebook ads, $300 weekly budget for targeted ads to a specific target, ran on specific intervals, and completed by a specific person.

Each tactic should also include measurement – what are the benchmarks, how will they be measured, and by whom? A small business owner must know where to allocate or pull back on marketing dollars because each dollar is very precious to the business. Without measurement and tracking, the small business may be wasting dollars on tactics that don’t provide a return. We believe that the right marketing is a huge part of a small business accelerating growth – to help, we have provided some resources below on marketing your small business.