Small Business Marketing — Best Practices

Marketing 101 —Review of The Basics

To succeed, entrepreneurs must attract and retain a growing base of satisfied customers. Marketing programs, though widely varied, are all aimed at convincing people to try out or keep using particular products or services. Business owners should carefully plan their marketing strategies and performance to keep their market presence strong.

Effective marketing is focused on the importance of customers to a business and has two important principles:

• All company policies and activities should be directed toward satisfying customer needs.
• Profitable sales volume is more important than maximum sales volume

Small Business Marketing Best Practices

A Small Business’ Market Research Goals

• Determine the needs of their customers
• Analyze their competitive advantages to develop a market strategy
• Select specific markets to serve by target marketing
• Determine how to satisfy customer needs by identifying a market mix

Principles of Effective Market Research

Successful marketing requires timely and relevant market information. An inexpensive research program, based on questionnaires given to current or prospective customers, can often uncover dissatisfaction or possible new products or services.

Market research will also identify trends that affect sales and profitability. Population shifts, legal developments, and the local economic situation should be monitored to quickly identify problems and opportunities. It is also important to keep up with competitors’ market strategies.

Marketing Strategy

A marketing strategy identifies specific customer groups, which a particular business can better serve than its target competitors. They can then tailor product offerings, prices, distribution, promotional efforts, and services toward those segments. Ideally, the strategy should address unmet customer needs that offer adequate potential profitability. A good strategy helps a business focus on the target markets it can serve best.

Target Marketing

Owners of small businesses usually have limited resources to spend on marketing. Concentrating their efforts on one or a few key market segments – target marketing – gets the most return from small investments.

There are two methods used to segment a market:

• Geographical segmentation: Specializing in serving the needs of customers in a particular geographical area. For example, a neighborhood convenience store may send advertisements only to people living within one-half mile of the store.
• Customer segmentation: Identifying those people most likely to buy the product or service and targeting those groups.

I’m a very capable marketing technician. I’ve been trained to know what to do, and why, to what probable result. Over the years, as both a content developer for Pleiades’ clients and as a SBDC counselor, I’ve had lots of practice and plenty of lessons learned. Joe Vitale, however is a “Guru status, marketing maven. He knows all of the above and executes with panache. Any marketing book by Joe is a good business investment.

As a retired SBDC counselor, I know where to find business-related information — both online and IRL. In this case my marketing source is a SBA publication (Ohio Women’s Business Network, Columbus, OH, 6/97). For individual business support with any aspect of your business contact the nearest SBA-sponsored Small Business Development Center.