Small Business Marketing Strategies All-in-One For Dummies

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• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119236931
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Small Business
• Index: Business

Transform your small business into arevenue-generating machine with this step-by-stepmarketing resource

Running a small business is a funand rewarding experience.It'seven more fun and rewarding when clients and customers areclamoringto get a handonyour 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 Commercewalk you throughevery single step ofdesigning, launching, running, measuring, and improving your company's next marketing campaign.Butdon'tworry—with Dummies, it's all aboutlearning made easy.

You'lldiscovertechniques that work in any kind of small business, fromfull-time trades to brick-and-mortar shopsandonline side-hustles.Starting at thebeginningof the marketing process, you'llmoveon tolearn howto blend different marketing methods, such ascontent, social, search, and traditional, to generate massive customer interest.

In this book, you will:

• Pour the foundationof your marketing strategy by defining your ideal customers, sizing up your market, and settingyour goals
• Kick off a successful campaign the right wayby picking the best software, platforms, and techniques to power your marketing
• Combine content marketing, social media, and traditional strategies to generate the perfectmarketing and advertising mix
• Evolve pastgut instincts and measureyour results with hard dataand reliablemetrics

Moving beyondindividualstrategiesandtechniques, Small Business Marketing Strategies All-in-One For Dummies shows you how toblend every tool at your disposal into one effective marketing strategy.It'sa must-read foranysmall business owner trying to grow their company.

Book 1

Setting Up Your Marketing Foundation

Contents at a Glance

1. Chapter 1: Framing the Marketing Process
   1. Seeing the Big Picture
   2. Jump-Starting Your Marketing Program
   3. How Small Business Marketing Is Different
   4. Making Marketing Your Key to Success
2. Chapter 2: Defining Your Customers
   1. Anatomy of a Customer: Knowing Who Your Customers Are
   2. Determining Which Customers Buy What
   3. Getting to Know Your Product: Seeing It through Your Customer’s Eyes
   4. Illogical, Irrational, and Real Reasons People Buy What You Sell
   5. Buying Decisions: Rarely about Price, Always about Value
   6. The Care and Feeding of a Product Line
3. Chapter 3: Sizing Up the Market
   1. Playing the Competitive Field
   2. Winning Your Share of the Market
   3. Calculating Your Market Share
   4. Increasing Your Market Share
4. Chapter 4: Setting Your Goals
   1. Where Are You Going, Anyway?
   2. Defining Goals and Objectives Simply
   3. Budgeting to Reach Your Goals

Chapter 1

Framing the Marketing Process

IN THIS CHAPTER

Taking the necessary marketing steps that lead to sales

Getting your marketing program started

Understanding how small business marketing is different

You’re not alone if you opened this book looking for an answer to the question, “What is marketing, anyway?” Everyone seems to know that marketing is an essential ingredient for business success, but when it comes time to say exactly what it is, certainty disappears from the scene.

People aren’t sure if marketing, advertising, and sales are the same or different things. And they’re even less sure about what marketing involves and how to do it well.

To settle the matter right up-front, here’s a plain-language description of what marketing — and this book — is all about.

Marketing is the process through which you win and keep customers.

• Marketing is the matchmaker between what your business is selling and what your customers are buying.
• Marketing covers all the steps involved in tailoring your products, messages, online and off-line communications, distribution, customer service, and all other business actions to meet the desires of your most important business asset: your customer.
• Marketing is a win-win partnership between your business and its market.

Marketing isn’t about talking to your customers; it’s about talking with them. Marketing relies on two-way communication between your business and your buyers. This chapter gives you a clearer idea of what the marketing process is.

Seeing the Big Picture

Marketing is a nonstop cycle. It begins with customer knowledge and goes around to customer service before it begins all over again. Along the way, it involves product development, pricing, packaging, distribution, advertising and promotion, and all the steps involved in making the sale and serving the customer well.

Following the marketing wheel of fortune

Every successful marketing program — whether for a billion-dollar business or a solo entrepreneur — follows the marketing cycle illustrated in Figure 1-1. 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.

© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

FIGURE 1-1: The marketing wheel of fortune.

Just start at the top of the wheel and circle around clockwise in a never-ending process to win and keep customers and to build a strong business in the process.

As you loop around the marketing wheel, here are the marketing actions you take:

1. Conduct research to gain knowledge about your customers, product, market area, and competitors.
2. Tailor your product, pricing, packaging, and distribution strategies to address your customers’ needs, your market environment, and your competitive realities.
3. Create and project marketing messages to reach your prospective customers, inspire their interest, and move them toward buying decisions.
4. Go for and close the sale — but don’t stop there.
5. After you make the sale, begin the customer service phase.
   Work to develop relationships and ensure high levels of customer satisfaction so that you convert the initial sale into repeat business, loyalty, and word-of-mouth advertising for your business.
6. Interact with customers to gain insight about their wants and needs and their use of and opinions about your products and services.
   Combine customer knowledge with ongoing research about your market area and competitive environment. Then use your findings to fine-tune your product, pricing, packaging, distribution, promotional messages, sales, and service.

And so the marketing process goes around and around.

Successful marketing has no shortcuts — you can’t just jump to the sale. To build a successful business, you need to follow every step in the marketing cycle, and that’s what the rest of this book is all about.

MARKETING: THE WHOLE IS GREATER THAN THE PARTS

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.
• If you put the sign on the back of an elephant and walk it into town, that’s promotion.
• If the elephant walks through the mayor’s flower bed, that’s publicity.
• And if you get the mayor to laugh about it, that’s public relations.
• If the town’s citizens go to the circus and you show them the many entertainment booths, explain how much fun they’ll have spending money there, and answer their questions — and they ultimately spend a lot of money at the circus — that’s sales.

Because marketing involves far more than marketing communications, a second part to this circus analogy shows how the story might continue if it went on to demonstrate where research, product development, and other components of the marketing process fit in:

• If, before painting the sign that says, “Circus Coming to the Fairgrounds Saturday,” you check community calendars to see whether conflicting ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Book 1: Setting Up Your Marketing Foundation
• Book 2: Getting Started with Your Campaign
• Book 3: Content Is King: Content Marketing
• Book 4: Using Social Media
• Book 5: Incorporating Traditional Marketing
• Book 6: Measuring Results
• About the Authors
• Advertisement Page
• Connect with Dummies
• End User License Agreement