Marketing and small business

Marketing is an important aspect of any small business. Your marketing efforts could be something big like state-wide commercials and roadside advertisements or it could be a smaller marketing campaign like ads in the county newspaper. The purpose of marketing is to find your customers and to find a way to suit their needs. Marketing helps you grow your business by expanding your customer base and gaining more exposure for your company. There are 4 basic steps with marketing:

1. Acquisition of new customers
2. Persuading your existing customers to buy more products
3. Persuading new customers to buy expensive products
4. Persuading all your customers to buy the products that are more profitable

As you can see, the overall goal of marketing is to increase your customers and to increase your profit. Before you get more profits, you need to start with the acquisition of more customers. This is because the customers are the people that bring in your revenue, even if it is only your break-even revenue costs.

In order to attract new customers, you must start with a marketing plan. You must spend time researching your target market to make sure you can figure out exactly who your customers are. Once you have your target audience identified, find the best way to reach them. Do they respond to email marketing campaigns? How about direct-mail pieces? When you go the online marketing route, your costs will be a lot cheaper. The bad part about direct-mail is that it only has a 5 percent ROI (return on investment). You can easily waste $2,000 or more on printing and mailing costs, only to receive $600 in sales. If this sounds like a familiar tail, it's time to move on from the printed mailers and move to internet marketing.

Customers will come if you have an attractive price. Your products also need to carry some value (high quality) if you want to stay competitive. If you price your products too high, you will be pricing yourself out of the market. If you price them too low, you may also be pricing out the market because this indicates that the products carry low value. Take a look at your customer's prices and make sure you justify why your prices are lower or higher from your competitors.

When it comes to marketing for a small business, you need to make sure the messages you are sending your customers are clear. Develop your products toward the needs of your customers. If you tried something and it didn't sell, move on to a new product or service.

Small business owners need to remember that they are just a small business. It is easy to get caught up in the larger businesses and start marketing against them. Small business owners have a limited budget and they are unable to compete against the large marketing budgets of the big companies. If you start spending more money on marketing to beat the bigger corporations, your sales may start to decrease because you are no longer connecting with your customers. You are instead obsessed with the idea of stealing the customers from the big company and you neglect the customers you already have. Even though you have a smaller budget and it is not advisable to go against the bigger companies, you can still compete against them. You can do this by introducing your small business to the media. Send out press releases to your local media members. National exposure starts with local exposure in your hometown. Send your current customers buying incentives and referrals. Customer referrals are a great way to build your customer base and steal some of the customers away from the bigger companies.

More Small Business Info Articles:

• What you need to know about starting a small business
• Using your competition to your advantage
• Using the past to help the future
• Using social media to your advantage
• Understanding best practice
• Tips for small business owners
• The basics of writing a great business plan
• The basic requirements of running your own business
• Surviving in difficult times
• Staying in business for another year