Ask a Small Business Marketing Question - Answers
Q: How do I prepare my business to purchase advertising? - Local Portland Meet-up Event January 2008
A: Determine your target market. What geographic, demographic and psychographics are you trying to reach? Determining your target market is immensely important to the success of your advertising buy. If you are an established business, looking at your own data may surprise you. You may find that your top 20 clients are all upper income women, living in Lake Oswego, Oregon. These top 20 women represent your most lucrative segment and you want your advertising to specifically reach more of this ideal client.
Informally interview your ideal customers. Ask what types of local publications they read, what local TV channels and radio stations they listen to. Take it a step further and query for co-marketing promotional ideas and find out your ideal customer's favorite restaurant and retail shops. Be sure to collect all of this information and add to an electronic spreadsheet to query and quantify your data in an on-going fashion. I recommend that my clients add newly acquired data to their spreadsheet daily, but once or twice a week should suffice if you keep very careful handwritten notes. Be sure to back-up all of your customer and business data often!
Determine how to position your business's product or service in the mind of the consumer. Are you less expensive than your competitors (Winco)? Is your service or product more dependable than you competitors (Honda)? Is your product safer than your competitors (Volvo)? Be sure your positioning statement is honest and a statement of value to the target audience. In 2007, I wrote a brief article on positioning; visit http://www.spritemarketing.com/positioning.html for your reading pleasure. Remember, your market position is always evolving.
Determine your marketing message. Based off of your business's positioning statement, address how your unique product or service fits into your target audience's problems, desires, hopes, and fears. How can your product or service benefit the prospect?
Determine your marketing budget. After working in the corporate world and writing annual marketing plans and budgets, I found that writing budgets and marketing plans quarterly to be more realistic. So much changes in a year and your business needs to remain agile. If a quarter is too long of a period for your small business; take stock of your marketing budget at least monthly. Why? You must allocate enough of your budget to each chosen advertising vehicle for the most impact. If you only have $400 to spend on advertising this month, it may be wise to stick with just one or two paid advertising vehicles just to be sure that your two vehicles are properly funded. Your advertising budget must be large enough to meet the growth goals of your company.
Q: Do you think websites are an effective way of marketing products? AZ Company 1/21/08
A: Absolutely. Creating a website is one of the best marketing tools for any small business with a product or service. There are several reasons why you should entertain a website for your small business right away:
1) The Telephone Book argument. Several demographics are naturally shifting to the web for the solution to their problem. So instead of looking through telephone books for landscaping or plumbing services, keywords are now searched online. You want to work with a marketing company familiar with search engine marketing to optimize your placement within the search engines. Feeding into the telephone book argument is the use of Google AdWords and other PPC platforms that enable you to bid for higher advertisement placement within search engines. With several demographics abandoning the telephone book for search engines, having a website is a must.
2) Enhance your marketing distribution vehicles. With a website, you now have a much broader market. Let's say you have a very niche product such as organic parrot food and you are a small business in Portland, Oregon. Without a website, you really can only serve the Portland metro area; but an eCommerce website for your products will allow you to expand your market to throughout the U.S and maybe even the world. Yes, mail order catalogs enable you to sell your product to the world as well, but this involves customer service costs; discussed below:
3) Lower administrative, sales and customer service costs. With a website, you can showcase your business hours, products and even a map to your location. Showcasing all of this will result in fewer time consuming informational calls. With an eCommerce site, your website platform will act on behalf of customer service staff and take orders from your customers. In fact, your eCommerce site is running 24 hours a day; allowing for order placement when your customer service staff is off. You'll save money with your sales staff as well; your website will better educate and qualify leads on your product and service.
4) Turn prospects into warm leads. Even with Google Analytics you still are rather blind as to who is visiting your site. Utilize your website to drive visitors to call you or at least join your monthly or quarterly newsletter. Customer and prospect relationship management is the best way to convert prospects to customers, increase sale frequency and sales volume. The only way you can include prospects into a relationship campaign is if you somehow capture their contact information; online works very well for this.
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