Here's 12 ideas on small business marketing
strategy that you can use from Michael Senoff.
Nine Strategic Marketing Information Tips To Explode Your Business
1) Create a Formal Marketing Strategy- start out by
creating a formal marketing strategy, determine what your going to market,
how your going to market, what promotions you will use, how much you will
spend on marketing and what percent of revenue will you reinvest in
marketing.
2) Develop a USP - Create a Unique Selling Proposition to set
yourself apart from the competition and establish yourself as the leader for
your particular niche.
3) Integrate you USP - It's not enough to just have a USP, now
you need to let everyone know what it is. It needs to be in your web site,
on your letterhead. You people who answer the phone need to say it. Your
buying customers need to hear it before and after the sale is made. It needs
to be in your e-mail marketing, in your print advertising, in the mind of
your sales people. If you have one and it's not out there, you may was well
just not have a USP at all.
4) Establish a Referral Program - OMG . . . referrals are the
bomb. They are as close to free money as I've ever know. First you need to
come up with 3-5 different referral type programs, actively engage clients
in the referral programs, and track the results. Get just one or two clients
or non competitive folks referring your business it like opening presents on
Christmas and Chanukah morning. Get referrals working for you. And don't
forget, by offering a financial incentive really makes this work better.
There has got to be something tangible in it for the other person who is
referring you business to make this work the best.
5) Do a Competitive Analysis - Check out you competition, what
nee products or services are they coming out with, find out what their
customers like best about them. Find out what they hate. Look on yelp to see
what others say about them. Find out if they are old, cheaper, better, have
a unique aspect, and find out if they have any add-on or additional
services.
6) Test, Test Test - You need to test everything - try testing
different variables within your business, your web site, your open rates,
your click through rates. Test your price, different offers, different
guarantees, different packages, hours of operation. You can try a new logos
and ad design too. The point here is that if you are not testing all the
time, you may be missing out of something that can really out perform what
you are doing currently.
7) Use Only Direct Response Advertising Strategy - Stay away
from branding type advertising until you have a number of direct response
locations that work.
8) Forget the Branding Image Advertising for now. Branding
type advertising is often a shot in the dark and you have really no way of
know whether its working or not. With direct response advertising you will
know exactly how much you are spending to get a lead and/or sale.
9) Establish Joint Ventures - There is no better way to grow
your business that this. This about the famous talk show host Oprah Winfrey.
When she has an expert come on her show, all of her credibility move to that
expert. These guest become famous from her endorsement. You need to partner
with other businesses who offer a related product or service. Partner with
others that can offer better or cheaper, or that you just don't have time
for. It's tough to offer a number of different products and services, so why
not have someone else do most of the work, and you just take a portion of
the profits.
10) Create a New Employee Training System - An important
aspect of being successful is having great employees. Establish an intense
and preset of training and testing methods to ensure consistency across all
your employees.
11) Setup Regular Employee Workshops - don't stop with the
initial training of your employees, have regular workshops to improve upon,
expand on their skills and abilities.
12) Review your Small Business Strategy at Least Annually -
the above 12 components make up a good chunk of your marketing strategy but
unlike the Ronco products you can't "set it and forget it" when it comes to
a great strategy, at least once a year go over your strategy, look at what
worked, what didn't work, what you should change, what you should at and
what you should omit.
If you like these ideas on Marketing Strategy, you'll love these related business marketing strategies sites:
Go to Strategic Business Management and also great articles on business strategy can be found here
at Marketing Strategy
.
