Small Business Marketing For Dummies

Paul Lancaster

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781118730775
• eBook ISBN: 9781118730805
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Small Business
• Index: Business

Small Business Marketing For Dummies helps you promote your business. It is designed specifically for the busy small business owner, giving you simple but powerful ways to spread your message - all at little or no cost.  It shows you how to build your company's profile, attract new customers and keep them coming back for more.

Inside you will learn how to:

• Create an achievable marketing plan
• Use social media and the web to attract and keep customers
• Communicate with your customers through winning emails, newsletters, blogs and more
• Make use of affordable advertising solutions in print and other media
• Get great PR for your business

Part I

Getting Started with Small Business Marketing

For Dummies can help you get started with a huge range of subjects. Visit www.dummies.com/extras/smallbusinessmarketing for free bonus content, including forms designed to help your marketing efforts.

In this part . . .

Get the big marketing picture for the small business.

Rev up your business and jump-start your marketing programme.

Analyse and define your customers, your product and your competitors.

Set your marketing goals, objectives, strategies and budgets.

Shape your business’s future.

Chapter 1

Framing the Marketing Process

In This Chapter

Taking the necessary marketing steps that lead to sales

Getting your marketing programme 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 to saying exactly what it is, they’re not so sure.

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 upfront, 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 offline 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 your market.

Marketing isn’t about talking to your customers; on the contrary, marketing is about talking with them. Marketing relies on two-way communication between your business and your buyers.

Seeing the Big Picture

Marketing is a non-stop 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 programme – whether for a billion-pound 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.

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.

Figure 1-1: The marketing wheel of fortune.

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 plus 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.

Understanding the relationship between marketing and sales

People make the mistake of thinking marketing is a high-powered or dressed-up way to say sales. Or they treat marketing and sale...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Getting Started with Small Business Marketing
• Part II: Laying the Foundation for Marketing Success
• Part III: Marketing in a Screen-Connected World
• Part IV: Getting the Word Out with Ads, Mailers, Promotions and Publicity
• Part V: Winning and Keeping Customers
• Part VI: The Part of Tens
• About the Authors
• Cheat Sheet
• Connect with Dummies