Concept of Marketing

“Marketing” is an instructive business domain that serves to inform and educate target markets about the value and competitive advantage of a company and its products. “Value” is worth derived by the customer from owning and using the product. “Competitive Advantage” is a depiction that the company or its products are each doing something better than their competition in a way that could benefit the customer.

Marketing is focused on the task of conveying pertinent company and product related information to specific customers, and there are a multitude of decisions (strategies) to be made within the marketing domain regarding what information to deliver, how much information to deliver, to whom to deliver, how to deliver, when to deliver, and where to deliver. Once the decisions are made, there are numerous ways (tactics) and processes that could be employed in support of the selected strategies.

As Marketing is often misinterpreted as just advertising or sales, Chris Newton, in What is marketing? (Marketing Help Online, 2008), defined marketing as every strategy and decision made in the following twelve areas:

* Identifying and quantifying the need in the marketplace
* Identifying and quantifying the target markets
* Identifying the optimum cost effective media – online and offline – to reach the target markets
* Reviewing the priorities of the product offering in your overall product mix ‘matrix’
* Identifying and developing the most effective distribution channels, be they wholesaler networks, partnering alliances, franchising, or any number of conduits to the market.
* Testing different ways of packaging the concepts or products to find their most ‘easy-to-sell’ form
* Testing to find the optimum pricing strategies
* Developing effective promotional strategies and effective advertising and supporting collateral, offers, and launch strategies
* Developing and documenting the sales process
* Finding the optimum execution of the sales process – through testing of selling scripts, people selection, supporting collateral, skills and attitudinal training, tracking, measuring and refining
* Ensuring that sales projections reflect realistic production capacities
* Developing nurture programs to optimise the lifetime value of the customer

Marketing Your Business Online

Explore strategies and techniques that you can use on the Internet that will enhance and support your business’s overall marketing objectives. Learn how to use search engine marketing, affiliate marketing, and generate targeted online traffic that will increase sales and brand awareness.

Small Business Marketing Tips and Ideas

Writing is critical to effectively marketing a professional service business.

Everything you do starts with writing, or at least it should. There’s really no way around it. You write your marketing materials, web site copy, articles, special reports, tip sheets, talks and presentations, sales letters, ezines or newsletters, post card mailers, proposals, etc. It all starts with writing.

Don’t panic – we’re not talking about Pulitzer Prize winning literature here. It’s about writing in a way that informs and educates your target market of the value you offer. It’s about writing in a compelling way that gets your target market to take action.

When you write about your business and the services you offer, you will actually gain clarity that hasn’t existed before. Writing about what you do for clients and what they get from your services strengthens your marketing message. You’re able to begin conveying your message more authentically and persuasively.

Just the other day a client asked me about writing. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Why should I bother with things like a newsletter or a blog? Have you ever gotten anything from it?”

Good question. The answer is most definitely yes, I do get something from it. Let me give you a couple of recent examples as to why I think you should bother.

Example #1: One of my ezine subscribers has her own monthly email newsletter and has picked up a few of my articles to include in her publication. Within a few days of her last ezine being sent out, I was getting traffic to my web site and new subscribers to my ezine as a result of the articles they were reading. Experience shows me that it’s just a matter of time before a certain percentage of ezine subscribers find something that they are willing to buy – a TeleClass, a marketing audio, a special report, an affiliate product, etc.

Example #2: I just received an email this morning from someone who had been reading some of my articles online. Turns out it is the editor of an online, magazine style web site that would like me to consider submitting articles to include in their weekly e-newsletter. Their subscription base just happens to be 32,000 service business professionals who fit my target niche quite nicely. How long would it take your business to get in front of 32,000 suspects in your target market potentially on a weekly basis?

You see your knowledge and expertise is valuable. It’s what your prospects are looking for when they seeking out information regarding your services. Writing is one of the best ways to express some of that knowledge and expertise in small, manageable quantities. It helps build authority and credibility so prospects will want to know more.

So you tell me – do you get it now? Do you see why small business marketers need to write?

My advice is to go ahead and start writing something at least a couple of times per week. Don’t worry if your writing is not great because it will get better with practice. Just focus on sharing bits and pieces of your knowledge and expertise regarding topics your target market will care about. You’ll end up building up a great little arsenal for promoting your business with tremendous impact.

Create Your Own Business Cards in 15 Minutes

In Staples stores you can now design a business card and print out a supply in about a half hour. It’s called Business Cards in Minutes. I saw it in action when I was out in San Diego a few weeks back.

I was speaking at an HP marketing workshop held in a local Staples store there. Some of us arrived early and to kill time we wandered around the store. One of the people, Noelle, pointed out the terminal and said, “Need some business cards? You can get some before you leave today.” I thought she was kidding, but she sat right down at the terminal and started working on a business card.

Business Cards in Minutes consists of a special computer kiosk provided by Logoworks by HP, where you can design a business card on the spot. You can then get the cards printed right there at the print center inside the Staples store. Here is the photo we took of the kiosk while Noelle was in the midst of creating a business card: Read the rest of this entry »

How You Use Document Templates – Survey Results

A few weeks ago we did a survey here at Small Business Trends to find out what kinds of documents you typically print and which document templates you use.

Just over 170 of you gave us some insights and a lot of good sources of templates and tools for printing.

We’d like to share the results with you. Here is a summary of the questions and the results.

THE MOST CRITICAL DOCUMENTS YOU PRINT

First we wanted to know about the materials that are most critical to your business (that you can’t live without).

Nearly half of you print primarily documents, invoices and flyers (47%) followed by a series of other promotional types of items like business cards, photos and brochures.

Market Research Using the Google Playground

You’ve heard of Google’s search engine. You’ve heard of Google AdWords (pay-per-click ads). You’ve heard of GMail.

But have you explored Google’s technology playground, called Google Labs? “Technology playground” is the term that Google uses to describe Labs. Labs showcases new applications that Google is playing around with. One of those is Google Trends.

Using Google Trends in Marketing

Google Trends shows trends in searches. For instance, it will show whether a particular search term is becoming more or less popular over time.

Over at The App Gap I recently wrote about using Google Trends to test the growth in the phrase “cloud computing.“ Here is what I discovered. The term seemingly came out of nowhere in late 2007.

Best Sites to Find Business and Marketing Templates

If you’re a small business owner without a killer marketing kit — shame on you!

Vow, this very moment, that you will carve out an hour to explore the sites we are going to go over today and get professional looking documents, forms and marketing materials — without busting your budget to shreds. With what I’m going to show you here today, there is absolutely no excuse not to look and present your best.

Recently we conducted a survey here at Small Business Trends and asked where you go to find templates to create marketing materials and business documents.

Small Business Marketing Tips

Selling to the to the Federal Government
A 105 page, step-by-step guide to the world of federal contracting that was developed to assist women entrepreneurs in overcoming the barriers that may be limiting their success in procurement. Written by a taskforce of Women-owned Business Advocates and SBA’s Office of Government Contracting, the guide is chock full of useful information that provides a comprehensive overview of Federal contracting. It contains chapters on How the Government Buys, Selling to the Government, Federal Agency Resources, Resource Bibliography and a rich supply of Websites of Interest.
Small Business Resource Guide. (Version 2 – June 2001)
A 425 page document that provides a compendium of practical business information on national, state and local small business resources and, also information on existing small business programs, contracting with the federal government and contracting with HUD and HUD’s grantees.

Small Business Marketing Strategies

Back to the dreaded PowerPoint again which I discussed in January – I am presently taking a short course in Political theory – My Tutor Peter Ryley, who has an excellent blog (Fat Man on a Keyboard), pointed me to a recent article in the Telegraph which reports that there is now scientific evidence that our brains are unable to effectivley process information if it is spoken to us while we are reading.

So now when you fall asleep in a seminar you have scientific evidence to validate your behaviour – I shall feel much more comfortable in future when I nod off to the droning sound of a speaker reading their PowerPoint slides. However I have noted that even professional speakers are prone to using too many words on a slide.

PowerPoint is an excellent AV tool – if you need to show images that support a presentation but if you are using it to display words you really should question that. Presenting words both auditorily and visually it seems does not reinforce the message, it actually confuses the brain which starts to switch off.

I suspect that in addition to the problem with trying to assimilate the same information being received simultaneously via two senses, there is another issue. A speakers voice, I notice, tends to become more monotone when they are reading from slides and there is also far less storytelling to engage our interest.

All in all the evidence is clear that if you want to get a message across the best advice is to leave PowerPoint behind and rely on your oratory skills to get attention and be remembered.

6 Tips for Small Business Marketing Success

I met some great people and attended some awesome sessions at SES San Jose, but the highlight for me was keynote speaker Dan Heath. His concepts and thought processes were the perfect mesh for my quest to find a glimmer of small business marketing in a sea of corporate suits.

In many cases, keynote speakers don’t talk about anything I can apply to my life as a search engine marketer. I’m not looking to sell a company for $23 million. My clients aren’t on the Fortune 500 list. I work with small clients and small budgets.

That’s why Heath was much different. He and his brother, Chip, wrote a book called “Made to Stick.” I scored a free copy in my conference bag and I’m in the process of devouring it. The full video of the keynote is available in the SEW members section, while the audio version is at WebmasterRadio.fm. Give it a watch or listen.

Although “Made to Stick” wasn’t written for the SEM industry, the main tenets can be translated — and scaled — for use in campaigns that run from $100 to $1 million a month. The best part of the book: it’s entertaining, which alone makes the book “stick.” But how can the success of the sticky idea be analyzed, and repeated? For my small-business brain, the real inspiration came in Heath’s explanation of S.U.C.C.E.S.

Basically, there are six components of a sticky idea. They use a handy acronym to describe those components:

S: Simple
U: Unexpected
C: Concrete
C: Credible
E: Emotional
S: Stories

1. Simple

If you’re looking for a way to sell products that people will relate to, keep your Web site ideas (or content) simple. Crowding pages with text links, image links, Flash item photos, a zillion items, different colors, and animation can lead to “decision paralysis,” which means that the more choices a user is given, the less likely it is they’ll make a decision at all.

The natural tendency of a small business Web site owner is to cram every speck of information into every nook and cranny. However, this causes information overload, and you’re much less likely to achieve “conversion.”

2. Unexpected

Make your Web site visitors pay attention. Draw attention to your content by offering it in an unexpected fashion. What can you do with your site to make it unique from every other site that sells or offers the same thing? If you’re a brick and mortar, use your Web site to show how unique your product, service, and location are.

The Heaths’ solution for keeping people engaged over a period of time is to plant ideas that form questions, and then answer those questions. Does your shopper really need that product? Well, if you suggest they need the product to do “x” and “y” because no other product will do both “x” and “y,” then they know they need to buy that product from you. You’ve shown them the problem, and offered them a solution in one easy step.

3. Concrete

Use concrete images to describe your products. Avoid abstract descriptions, inane descriptions, and “buzzwords.” Instead, describe your services and products using concrete words. For example:

* Good: “Red, round apple”
* Bad: “Circular-shaped nutritionally significant food product”

4. Credibility

Add credibility to your content by appealing to what your visitors relate to. The Heaths contend that using numbers and statistics to lend credibility is the wrong approach. Sure, you’ll look smart, but you might alienate people who don’t relate to numbers. Instead, let your online guests decide for themselves: “Would I rather pay more for this product and higher shipping costs at a competitor’s Web site?”

5. Emotional

Most shoppers are emotional creatures. Once they need or want something, your Web site must fulfill that need better than the competition. Think about showing a cute little girl wearing the Easter bonnet you made for her, happy and smiling as she fills her little basket. This visual is much more effective than a picture of a hat sitting on a table.

6. Stories

Telling a story about your product, or using your product to tell a story, will endear the “idea” of buying from you. Using Web site content to tell a story is one of the most effective forms of selling online. Sell an experience, not just an item.

This is only a quick overview of the book. You’ll get so much more from reading it. Buy a copy, read it, and share it with everyone in your office, shop, or store. It will inspire you to think more deeply about how you sell to your visitors, and how you use your Web site as a tool to make your brand “stick” with them to encourage repeat business.