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Published:
May 23, 2016

Small Business Marketing Strategies All-in-One For Dummies

Overview

Transform your small business into a revenue-generating machine with this step-by-step marketing resource

Running a small business is a fun and rewarding experience. It’s even more fun and rewarding when clients and customers are clamoring to get a hand on your latest product or service. And effective marketing is the key to making that happen.

In Small Business Marketing Strategies All-in-One For Dummies, small business experts from the United States Chamber of Commerce walk you through every single step of designing, launching, running, measuring, and improving your company’s next marketing campaign. But don’t worry—with Dummies, it’s all about learning made easy.

You’ll discover techniques that work in any kind of small business, from full-time trades to brick-and-mortar shops and online side-hustles. Starting at the beginning of the marketing process, you’ll move on to learn how to blend different

marketing methods, such as content, social, search, and traditional, to generate massive customer interest.

In this book, you will:

  • Pour the foundation of your marketing strategy by defining your ideal customers, sizing up your market, and setting your goals
  • Kick off a successful campaign the right way by picking the best software, platforms, and techniques to power your marketing
  • Combine content marketing, social media, and traditional strategies to generate the perfect marketing and advertising mix
  • Evolve past gut instincts and measure your results with hard data and reliable metrics

Moving beyond individual strategies and techniques, Small Business Marketing Strategies All-in-One For Dummies shows you how to blend every tool at your disposal into one effective marketing strategy. It’s a must-read for any small business owner trying to grow their company.

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About The Author

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the world's largest business organization representing the interests of more than 3 million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions. Join Small Business Nation today, at uschamber.com/joinsbn.

Sample Chapters

small business marketing strategies all-in-one for dummies

CHEAT SHEET

All customers are not alike. Knowing how they differ — what their individual and group needs and preferences are — is key to successful marketing efforts nowadays.Marketing strategy involves segmenting your customers into groups and researching and studying those groups to tailor your messages specifically to them.

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Articles from
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You may have written an overall marketing plan when you last updated your business plan and an online marketing plan when you first created your website. If not, it's never too late. For business planning resources, see this Starting a Business page.You can further refine a marketing plan for social media marketing purposes.
The following rules apply to all ads and all marketing campaigns, regardless of the medium, the message, the mood, the size of the business, or the creative direction: Know your objective and stay on strategy. Be honest. Be specific. Be original. Be clear and concise. Don't overpromise or exaggerate. Don't be self-centered or, worse, arrogant.
You can select from several content-distribution services to syndicate (copy) your content from one social media service to another. All the services work roughly the same way, but each has its own peculiarities. Choose the one that's the best fit for you. Some free plugins are available for WordPress for this purpose.
Clickstream analysis is a fancy name for tracking users' successive mouse clicks (the clickstream) to see how they surf the web. Clickstream analytics are usually monitored on an aggregate basis.Server-based clickstream analysis provides valuable insight into visitor behavior. For instance, by figuring out which paths users most frequently take on a site and which routes lead to sales, you can make changes in content and calls to action, as well as identify ways to simplify navigation and paths to check out.
Regardless of any other online marketing techniques you use, you can combine links with source tags, analytics program results, and advertising metrics to compare social media results to results from other online techniques. Well-segmented, targeted lists result in better reach. If you rent lists, be sure to include the acquisition CPM names, as well as the transmission cost, in your total cost for CPM comparison.
Demographic segmentation, the most common type of market differentiation, covers such standard categories as gender, age, ethnicity, marital status, family size, household income, occupation, social class, and education.Sites such as Quantcast and Alexa provide basic demographic information compared to the overall Internet population, as shown here.
Put on your business hat when you detect a problem in your social media marketing campaign. Some techniques may be worth modifying and trying again, but others should be dropped. Ultimately, it's a business decision, not a technological one.Be patient when assessing cost of customer acquisition and ROI, although a few trend lines in your metrics might give you pause: Traffic to a social media service never picks up or falls and remains low after an initial burst.
The most important items to measure — the ones that reflect your business goals and objectives — are key performance indicators (KPIs). They may vary by type of business, but after they're established, they should remain consistent over time.An e-retailer, for instance, may be more interested in sales by product category or at different price points, though a business-to-business (B2B) service company might want to look at which sources produce the most qualified prospects.
Marketing by country, region, state, city, zip code, or even neighborhood is the key for location-based social media outlets, such as Foursquare, or any other form of online marketing that involves local search.Geographic segmentation also makes sense if your business draws its primary target audience from within a certain distance from your brick-and-mortar storefront.
All marketing programs follow the same set of steps in the marketing process, but the similarities between big business marketing and small business marketing stop there. Budgets, staffing, creative approaches, and communication techniques vary hugely between an international mega-marketer and a comparatively micro-budget marketer like, well, you.
Whether you have a business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) company, you gain valuable insight by reviewing the comments of influencers (companies or individuals that drive the conversation within your industry sector). For example, to see the most popular posters on Twitter, use Twitaholic to view by number of updates or number of followers, as shown here.
You can still identify traffic arriving at your site from social media services simply by looking at All Referrers under Acquisition in your Google Analytics account. However, Google's Social Media Analytics makes it much easier to integrate statistical results from social media services into your reports and to assess the business value of social media.
Market research and social media choices for business-to-business (B2B) markets are somewhat different from business-to-consumer (B2C) markets because the sales cycle is different. Usually, B2B companies have a longer sales cycle, high-ticket purchases, and multiple people who play a role in closing a sale; consequently, B2B marketing requires a different social media presence.
You can dive into social media marketing headfirst and see what happens. Or you can take the time to research, plan, execute, and evaluate your approach. The Social Media Marketing Plan, shown here, is for people taking the latter approach. Build a social media marketing plan for your company. This is the first of four pages.
When deploying small-business marketing strategies, n addition to creating your hub website, you may have developed sites either as subdomains within your primary domain name or with auxiliary domain names. These sites may take several forms: Microsites: These small, dedicated sites that have their own domain names are usually developed for a specific event, product or product line, service, or another promotion, or as specialized landing pages for an advertising campaign.
The most important items to measure in your small-business marketing campaign — the ones that reflect your business goals and objectives — are key performance indicators (KPIs). They may vary by type of business, but after they're established, they should remain consistent over time.An e-retailer, for instance, may be more interested in sales by product category or at different price points, though a business-to-business (B2B) service company might want to look at which sources produce the most qualified prospects.
Knowing who's who among your customers is called market segmentation. It's the process of breaking down your customers into segments that share distinct similarities.Here are some common market segmentation terms and what they mean: Geographics: Organizing customers by their physical locations to determine the regions, counties, states, countries, zip codes, and census tracts where current and likely prospective customers live.
Rather than look at a target market solely in terms of demographics, life stage analysis considers what people are doing with their lives, recognizing that it may affect media behavior and spending patterns.Usage may also differ by life stages, as shown in the table. Note that the set of life stages described in the table may not accurately reflect the wider range of today's lifestyles.
If your business is just starting, your marketing plan needs to address a set of decisions that existing businesses have already made. Existing companies have images to build upon, whereas your start-up business has a clean slate upon which to write exactly the right story. Before sending messages into the marketplace, answer these questions: What kind of customer do you want to serve?
Advertising. Marketing. Sales. Promotions. What are the differences? The following story has circulated the marketing world for decades and offers some good answers for what's what in the field of marketing communications: If the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign that says, "Circus Coming to the Fairgrounds Saturday," that's advertising.
A headline is a print ad's major introductory statement. It's the large-type sentence or question that aims to stop readers in their tracks, target the right prospects, and pull them inside the ad to read more.Four out of every five people who see your ad will read only the headline. Here's where they go: One reader sees your headline and moves on because he doesn't have time to study the details at the moment.
You need to strategize and include measurement to your Social Media Marketing Plan. The basic principle "You can't manage what you don't measure" applies doubly to the online universe.Do you know whether Facebook or LinkedIn drives more traffic to your site? Whether more people buy after reading a blog post about pets than after reading a blog post about plants?
Psychographic segmentation divides a market by social class, lifestyle, or the shared activities, interests, and opinions of prospective customers. It helps identify groups within a social networking service or other, smaller, social networks that attract users who meet your desired profile.Behavioral segmentation, which is closely related, divides potential buyers based on their uses, responses, or attitudes toward a product or service.
All customers are not alike. Knowing how they differ — what their individual and group needs and preferences are — is key to successful marketing efforts nowadays.Marketing strategy involves segmenting your customers into groups and researching and studying those groups to tailor your messages specifically to them.
Tagging your links with identifying code is especially helpful for tracking clicks that arrive from e-newsletters, email, widgets, banner ads, and links from a mobile phone because they otherwise aren’t distinguishable in the referrer list. Tagging links offers one other advantage: the ability to track the impact of dark social media traffic.
There are hundreds of websites that would qualify as social media. The phrase social media marketing generally refers to using these online services for relationship selling — selling based on developing rapport with customers. Social media services make innovative use of new online technologies to accomplish the familiar communication and marketing goals of this form of selling.
Product, price, placement or position (distribution), and promotion — the four Ps — are considered the basic elements of traditional marketing. These terms apply to social media and other forms of online marketing, as well. Product Your product is whatever good or service you sell, regardless of whether the transaction takes place online or off.
Each genre of social media services has its own arcane measurements, from hashtags to comments, from posts to ratings, from membership numbers to sentiment. In most cases, these metrics become some of the key performance indicators (KPIs) on your list: Traffic (visits): The overall measure of the number of visits (not visitors) made to your site or to a particular social media presence over a set period.
Whether delivered in person, through promotions, or via traditional media, direct mail, or email, all marketing communications, regardless of the size of the business, need to accomplish the same tasks: Grab attention. Impart information the prospect wants to know. Present offers that are sensitive to how and when the prospect wants to take action.
Every successful marketing program — whether for a billion-dollar business or a solo entrepreneur — follows the marketing cycle illustrated. The process is exactly the same whether yours is a start-up or an existing business, whether your budget is large or small, whether your market is local or global, and whether you sell through the Internet, via direct mail, or through a bricks-and-mortar location.
People make the mistake of thinking marketing is a high-powered or dressed-up way to say sales. Or they treat marketing and sales as two independent functions that they mesh together under the label marketing and sales. In fact, sales is an essential part of marketing, but it's not and never can be a replacement for the full marketing process.
Content marketing includes all forms of content that both add value to consumers and that directly or indirectly promote a business, brand, products, or services. It's the content aspect that sets it apart from other marketing. Content marketing occurs online and in the real world, but the tools of the social Web allow companies of all sizes to compete alongside one another, not for market share but for voice and influence.
The expectation that people gravitate toward different types of social media to meet different needs seems reasonable. The challenge, of course, is to match what people seek with particular social sites. The advertising network Chitika surveyed its own clients, sorting downstream referrals from social networks to websites by vertical industry type, as shown here for Facebook and Twitter.
Word-of-mouth is, without a doubt, the most cost-effective form of advertising. Ultimately, that force powers all social media, with its peer-to-peer recommendations and referrals. Recent research on the impact of social media as a form of word-of-mouth is both intriguing and contradictory: Mention found that 76 percent of more than 1 billion brand mentions on the web and social media were basically "meh" — neither positive nor negative.
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