Small Business Marketing Must Do List

Small Business Marketing Must Do List

Here's a list of the twelve most important priorities for small business marketing to help you get the best return on your time and money, along with how-to guides to get this done!

You don't have to do all this yourself. The best return on your time (and money) may be to find a reputable marketing freelancer or small business agency who will set things up for you and then you, or your team, can manage it. That's like hiring a landscape firm to do the hard work to set up your sprinkler system.

The reality of owning and running your own business and being responsible for marketing:

"I find time to be my biggest challenge. Yes, you can pay people to do some of the necessary work but you still have to do the planning and thinking to guide these people. You are the one who understands your business and niche best -so whatever you delegate, you still have to know the content and processes."

If you're a start-up business, then you'll want to read this

The 12 most important things to do for success in Small Business Marketing

Find the 20% of the things that deliver 80% of the value and do that 20% extremely well. This is our list of what we believe will have the most return on your time and money for marketing your small business. Focus on being brilliant at the basics and then expand from there.

Listed in priority order!

1. Collect the names and contact information from your customers and prospective customers. Then keep it up-to-date.

It's expensive to get a new customer. It's much less expensive to market to an existing customer. When you get a new customer, be sure to get their contact information and their permission to contact them.

2. Get found online when people are searching for what you sell or offer

If you're selling locally, claim your Google Places listing. Google Places is what Google calls their free listings for local businesses. Make sure your listing is set up properly so you get the most visibility.

Google Places How To Guide

Get your business listed with all the reputable online directories. There are a lot of scams and companies that will try to charge you money for a listing.

We've consolidated a list of the reputable directories here: Free Listings

Make sure people on mobile phones can find your business! With so many people buying web-enabled phones, the Internet has become the new Yellow Pages. You need to make sure that anyone with a phone that has web access can find your company (you don't need to have a website to do this).

Mobile Marketing How-to Guides

If you're selling to other businesses, market yourself and your business on LinkedIn. That's free.

How to Market Yourself & Your Company on LinkedIn

3. Set up a customer contact plan and use it to contact your customers at least six times during the year with a relevant message

A customer contact plan is a proactive 12-month plan to ensure your customers and prospects are hearing from you at least six times during the year.

From our experience: Most small businesses either under-communicate (never send anything) or send everyone the same generic (irrelevant) information. It's important to send customers and prospects relevant information frequently enough to keep your business or product (or yourself) top-of-mind. That's generally at least six "touch points" (communications) a year. Those could be three email newsletters, an invitation to an event, a direct mail postcard, and a personal call, text message or email.

4. Describe your business (or the products or services you sell) in a compelling way that will persuade someone to buy

In marketing that's called positioning. Learn about how to position your company, product, service or yourself as a person. Define your business and what it stands for, then build your marketing program around that.

Positioning
Personal Branding
Messaging Research is a very good investment because your messaging (how you describe your company, products or services) is the foundation for all your sales and marketing. You have to nail this!
How to create an effective sales presentation

TIP: Creating a WINNING Marketing Strategy for your Small Business This is a must read how-to guide!

5. Perfect Your Branding and "First Impressions"

If you've been in business for a while you may need to update your brand look. This is just like how you buy a new suit or briefcase to look current when you are making a sales presentation or at a business networking event.

How to create a brand (it's more than a logo!)

How to create and print business cards

TIP: In addition to personal business cards, create marketing cards that are like mini ads for your business. They can be two-sided or folded cards. One side should have a description of your business along with your website address, business address and phone number. The other side of the card can have whatever makes the most sense for your business: a map, a special offer, a list of benefits, hours of operation. Hand these out at trade shows, events and give them to people to refer business to you. Here's an example

Tip to save money:

How to Use Templates in Marketing

6. Get visibility online beyond the free listings

50% of small businesses don't have a website. A website has become like "brochureware" and may be an important tool to send prospective customers to. There are a lot of templates and services that make it relatively easy, fast and inexpensive to create a professional-looking website. How to create a website

A blog is a mini website. There is great easy-to-use software to create blogs. If you plan to have a website and blog, do you need both? Could you use your blog as your website? Learn more about Blogs and blogging

From our experience: Most small businesses could get a lot more website visitors for free if they learned how to set up their website and individual web pages within their site to be found by the search engines. Learn how to do this so you'll be attracting as many people as possible to your website.

7. Segment (cluster) your customers so your marketing will be more focused and relevant

TIP: Doing this type of analysis and segmentation will help you in your marketing, customer service and sales. You don't want to treat all customers the same. They're not. Some are valuable, some are vulnerable, some need to be nurtured to be more valuable and some customers you should try to fire.

8. Keep your most profitable customers very happy

For most businesses, 80% of profits come from 20% of the customers. These people should be treated like VIPs. Everyone who interacts with customers should know who they are.

9. Create an excellent customer experience so people will positively recommend your business or products/services to others

TIP: Before you invest in attracting new customers, focus on solidifying and improving customer satisfaction among the customers you have. This has two benefits: It reduces the risk of losing customers who have to be replaced (at an expense) and it increases the likelihood that these people will refer others and spread positive word-of-mouth (which is free and far more effective than any advertising).

How to get more referrals
How to improve customer satisfaction
How to improve patient satisfaction - if you're in health care
Customer satisfaction surveys
How to manage your reputation on Yelp
Social media monitoring - this is eavesdropping on public conversations. There are amazing tools that gather and capture the relevant information you want on your company, your brands, your competitors and even individual people.

10. Focus on attracting new customers/clients who are most like your most profitable customers

TIP: You want to attract new customers/clients who are like your most profitable customers. It's very easy to attract new customers through coupons, sales and special deals but will these people be switchers (buy only when something is on sale) or will they become your most profitable and pleasant-to-serve customers/clients? Referrals are the best way to generate profitable new business leads, especially if those referrals come from your best customers and "respected recommenders" (other professionals, bloggers, the press).

11. Be great at networking in person and online

Advice from a small business owner: "What I've discovered that is that not one dollar spent advertising ever works as effectively as networking and getting out and meeting people."

How-to guide on Business Networking- Meeting and networking with other business professionals is a great way to get referrals and meet prospective new clients and customers.

Trade shows and events - People go to trade shows and seminars to learn about new products/services and to reconnect with companies and people they know.

Social Media Marketing How-to Guide for Small Business - Focus on the "big 4" for social media: Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter.

12. Create the best marketing mix

Evaluate whether advertising will provide the best ROI (return on investment) or if other marketing approaches will be more effective.

From our experience: Most companies spend far too much money on advertising. Why? It's often the easiest and fastest way (people think) to generate sales. But notice that it's last on our list of marketing basics. Before you spend a dime on advertising, have you exhausted all the ways you could generate new business through your existing customers by asking them for referrals? Word-of-mouth is far more effective than an ad or special deal to attract profitable new customers.

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