10 Marketing tips for business owners
I am often asked by business owners what tips I have about marketing for small businesses. So here are my top 10 tips about marketing for small businesses:
1) Know what your brand stands for.
Work out how to describe your business/product or service in one succinct sentence that will motivate your potential customer to buy from you.
2) Get to know who your customers are.
Find some common attributes about your best customers – are they mostly women or men? Where do they live? What interests do they have? Paint a pen portrait of your customer; you’ll be able to work out where to look for more like them.
3) Encourage your customers to buy more from you.
It’s more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to get an existing one to buy from you. Find a reason for them to come back to you.
4) Get your customers to recommend you.
Get a few endorsements from customers and use simple tactics such as a “member-get-member” leaflet alongside any product or service you sell.
5) Test, refine and roll-out.
Use this principle to learn and understand how to improve your marketing effort.
6) Work out your marketing/sales ratio.
Set aside a percentage of the profit from your target number of sales for marketing activities – make sure you measure the return on your investment – building awareness takes time, don’t expect to achieve your sales target immediately. Consider coverage, reach and frequency, it can take at least five times for someone to see your advertisement or sales message before they decide to buy.
7) Use your social media channels.
You have a personal network of friends and colleagues, you can use your personal connections to extend the reach of your business. In addition to this, make sure you have a business profile for your business set-up too. Think about how you will use the social media channels for marketing to engage and attract people to your business.
9) Create a unique selling proposition.
Don’t promote on price – customers can and will shop around – find a way to create value which customers can’t find anywhere else, leverage on quality, experience or service instead.
10) Make sure your marketing effort is efficient.
If you’re spending a lot of time on marketing activity that doesn’t generate much in return, even if it hasn’t cost you anything – think about your labour in terms of cost. If you run your own business your time is precious – don’t waste it on work that isn’t effective. Get an expert to show you how – in the long run, it will save you time and money and help your business grow.
Finally, the last thing I would like to the list is to approach every marketing effort with the hope and tenacity, a bit like raising a family.
You’ll always be learning, gaining newfound knowledge and experience and when you finally feel you’ve gained enough experience, it’s great to be able to share your experience with other business owners.