Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Tips For a Successful Small Business: Marketing

By Annabelle Brownell, Owner of Santa Barbara Baby Company

1. Image is Everything – Take Branding Seriously
Customers feel more comfortable buying from a company perceived as legitimate and professional. Your brand is your face. Your logo and associated marketing collateral should be designed professionally. This is especially true of your web site!

2. Word of mouth is strong marketing tool
You don’t work for yourself, you work for your customer…or else you won’t be working for yourself very long. A customer that has a great experience will recommend your business to others. Alternatively, a customer that has an unpleasant experience will not return or repurchase… and will usually communicate the experience with peers.

3. Cross promote through Partnerships
Find businesses that compliment your business and proactively seek cross-marketing programs. Hand out each others’ collateral to customers, package your products together, link to each others web sites, market at events together at the same table, recommend each other, share advertising space and so on. In many cases, your marketing costs will be fewer and customers plentiful.

4. Use the Internet to your advantage and employ Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques for your web site
A web site is your virtual store front. Many customers make their purchasing decisions solely based on web sites found via search engines such as Google and Yahoo!. If you have a product or service that can be sold online, then take full advantage of this marketing channel. Whether your customers are local or nationwide, their ability to find your web site is vital.

5. Do Your Own PR – It’s easy!
Take advantage of your local, regional, and national media by writing interesting press releases at least a couple of times a year. You can write about a grand opening, a story about how yourself and your new business, an event that you are sponsoring, a product you invented, etc. Pick up any publication that you believe would find your “news� interesting and simply email your press release (and photos if possible) to the editors - you can find their names and email addresses in the publication or on their web site. Any article written about your business is free advertising.

           

Posted on Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Marketing, Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.