Business Counselor News Brief

Marketing Tips & Tools

Thanks to technology, the Internet and social media these days, there can be significant marketing advantages to being a small business, particularly where they can act faster, innovate and are more closely involved with the selling process. Below are 5 Tips that can make a BIG difference! Click on the tip that interests you to learn more.

Test Marketing: Leverage cost-effective and convenient ways to test what you sell in the marketplace before investing in extensive business development or inventory production.

For many small businesses, there are local and online opportunities for connecting with prospective new customers to learning if and why they might purchase your goods and services. This includes:

Prospect Surveys: Compile a list of questions to ask people about whether they would buy your product or service and if so, at what price, place or promotional circumstance. This may be done in person or online...

Face-to-Face Surveys: Identify a place where your prospective customers go, such as a mall, public event or other gathering spot. Learn if and what you might need for permission, and then approach people in a friendly manner to obtain their input. Aside from your time, this can be an excellent technique when you have a product or service to sell in the local area.

On-line Surveys: SurveyMonkey is a no-cost online survey tool that can be very useful for querying prospective and existing customer input when you have permission to send them an email. You may either use email addresses that you already have or take advantage of a cost-effective email list provider like MySalesHero to obtain email addresses of prospective new customers. Like face-to-face surveys, the information you collect can be very useful in terms of refining your offerings accordingly and ensuring profitable sales levels.

Product/Service Samples: Depending upon what your product or service is, offering a product sample can be another great way to test the salability of your idea. This is a common practice in the food industry and so look for local eateries where your offering may represent a complement and ask if making tasty morsels available for customers along with gaining feedback is something they'd collaborate with you on. Food products are also subject to certain licensing requirements, so be sure to check these out in advance as well.

Sample offerings may also apply to services, such as yoga, dance and other types of instructive lessons, wellness training, massage therapy, and professional consultation. If the service lends itself to a brief demonstration of value offered, offering a limited but real experience of that value can lead to a sale. This is a common practice with consultation-type services where a 1-hour no-cost, initial customer consultation is offered.

The objective with product/service samples is to minimize cost and maximize return on investment or ROI. ROI represents both increased sales as well as potentially valuable prospect feedback that leads to refining your offerings in ways that increase sales. Where increasing sales is the ultimate objective, be sure to offer prospective customers the option to buy, place and order, or make an appointment/reservation at the time that they receive the sample or experience the service. As with surveys, also be sure to have a way to capture and document for later review, what people are saying as they sample your goods.

Product Demonstrations: As with product sampling, product demonstrations can be a good way to test market potential sales volumes depending upon what you offer or are planning to offer. For higher-priced items, demonstrations offer particular value because you only need to produce and demonstrate one item to then solicit orders for producing more. This approach can be great for small business or self-employed ventures that do custom framing, publishing, photography, crafts, recreational sporting goods and other forms of locally produced portable items. Farmers markets, fairs and other local public events can be low-cost venues for implementing this form of test marketing.

Publicity; A no-to-low cost, creative channel for building buzz.

Publicity is all about thinking outside of the box. There is almost no limit to using this form of marketing to build brand awareness and drive sales. Publicity is about getting someone's attention. Think about who your target market is, where they go and what they like and then come up with innovative ways to capture their interest.

Forms of publicity include kids who stand out with a car wash sign on the side of the road to get you to stop and have your car washed, and getting a person who is well-known in your community to wear a t-shirt, button or other form of attire that advertises your business. Writing an article, report, reply to the editor, white paper, blog commentary or other published piece is a form of publicity. Making a presentation, staging a debate, issuing an award, organizing a tour, and announcing an appointment are also forms of publicity.

The more appeal your approach has to your target audience, the more likely you will gain their attention. Keep in mind that once you capture that attention, you want to also provide a convenient way for prospects to act upon what they've experienced. For example, be sure to provide contact information such as your web site, telephone and email address. If you operate a brick and mortar establishment, include your physical address. For other ideas on generating publicity, visit How to Get Free Publicity for Your Small Business.

Social Media; A no-cost platform where highly targeted outreach can return highly profitable results!

As with all forms of marketing, the more you know about who your target market is, the more likely your marketing outreach strategies will yield sales. This is particularly true with social media. Social media represents different types of Internet-based applications that allow you to connect with other people to engage, influence and ideally, motivate to buy from you.

There are different types of social media channels including applications that serve to facilitate communication, build collaboration and validate credibility, share multimedia messaging, entertain and monitor brand positioning. All of these channels are accessible to small businesses at no or low-cost and most provide step-by-step instructions that make it easy for a non-techie or non-programmer to use. The most important point to keep in mind is that while social media offers cost-effective access to many individuals, you want to be sure that these individuals represent your type of prospective customer. Otherwise, you can waste a lot of time creating and publishing messaging that yeilds limited to no increase in sales.

SEO; How common sense relationship-building techniques can improve SEO (search engine optimization).

SEO, or search engine optimization, is all about having a web site and driving traffic to it through various techniques. One of these techniques is getting other web sites to include a link on their web site to your web site. For small business, this is all about collaboration.

If your business is local, think about other local businesses you can exchange web site links with. If your business reaches a larger population beyond the local area, think about other industries where adding a link to your web site may represent a complement. For example, the travel and tourism industry represents many different kinds of businesses including restaurants, hotels, gift shops, health clubs, theme parks, etc. When each of the businesses promotes the others in a local area, everyone stands to benefit. For other ideas, visit Secrets of Reciprocal Linking Strategies Revealed.

Loyalty Programs; Let prospective customers know that you care about doing business with them.

Offer different forms of incentives to prospective customers that lead to their wanting to do business with you. Loyalty programs are also referred to as customer retention programs. Different types of loyalty programs include:

Buy, join, or sign up today and receive "what benefit?"

Refer three friends and receive what "gift, discount or other value?"

To learn more about developing and managing loyalty programs, visit Guide to Launching Loyalty Program.