You started your own small business with a lovely product or service ready to sell, and you are waiting for your clients or customers to knock on the door. Which they don’t do. This is the point where many small business owners, entrepreneurs and freelancers realize they need to do some marketing and start to become headless. They get the top ten tips how to market your business from Google and start to do them all – hoping they will bring some prospects.

This is like going fishing without knowing whether you are looking for salt or sweet water, which fish you can eat, where to find them, which baits to use, which kind of equipment you will need to catch them and so on. You get the point.

You can waste a lot of money, time and energy by just trying out everything that comes along Google or helpful hubbers. What you really need is a marketing strategy with a clear direction to go, and a plan that nails down the essentials like water quality, type of fish, the free worms to use, and the appropriate equipment for the type and quantity of fish you are looking for.

Your marketing strategy needs two parts: First you need to do market research to find out about water quality, type of fish, how they look like, where they live, what they like, what they don’t like. Then you will a marketing mix of things to do, a plan to catch your fish.

Market research means no more than finding out about your fishing grounds. You can use two approaches for doing this: You can start from your product look for a target group you can persuade to buy it. Or you start with a group of customers, find out what they need and design your product to satisfy the demand. The former is called push approach, the latter is a pull approach. Both ways have their advantages and you will use both. It will depend on you, your business and the development stage of your product whether you will pull more or push more. If you are an expert in one field or if you sell a product with long development times and high investments you will operate more on the push side, whereas if you trade items that are easy to get or to customize your will pull more.

No matter whether you start with your product or with your customer, you will need to research both.

Your product or service

Which products or services are you selling? Which ones are you not selling? It is important to make this distinction, otherwise you might end up selling worms to your fish, which you find difficult to produce or which you don’t want to deal with. Describe the benefits your customers will get from your product, how it works, what it does, what it does not do. What is the competitive advantage? How can you enhance the advantage? How much can you customize your product or service? How do you make it, where do you get it from? What is its value for the customer, what is the value for you? Which product range do you want to offer in the short, medium or long term?

Who is your target group? Who should buy from you? Why should they buy from you? How big is your target group? Where can you find your target group? How can you address your target group? Note that not everyone is an online junkie, and that group may be becoming an interesting niche.

Next make a profile of your ideal customers. What kind of persons or companies do you like to work with? Try to describe them in as much detail as possible. Most likely those will be the customers you can attract once you address them specifically. Why? Firstly because you can look for them and ask for them when you know what you are looking for, and secondly, because you will have a good reason for describing your ideal customer the way you do: there may be shared values, and we do tend to like what is like us and vice versa.

Then identify your potential customers in the real world and describe them. For companies look at geography, size, duration, line of business, size, business culture, buying behavior and organization etc, for your individual customers or clients make sure you know something about geography, demography, social, culture, lifestyle, family status, income, buying behavior etc. How will you approach your customers and when? What will you do to attract them?

Who are your competitors?

Who are the other fishers in your pond or the other players in your market? How many are there? What qualification do they have, what are their methods, sales strategies, pricing? Which groups are they targeting, what are their products, the quality of their products, their strengths and their weaknesses? Look for best practices, buy their products and services, visit their websites, read their brochures, blogs, hubs, twitters and what else there is. Learn form them to improve yourself. Learn abut them to find potential partners to cooperate with, to create a forum or initiative for knowledge exchange and transfer.

Knowing about your competitors can help you to define your niche more sharply. Their strengths may be your not so strong side and vice versa. If the pond is big enough here is fish for everyone, if not you may need to improve your fishing methods or your baits, or look for another pond or another inhabitant of the pond, that has not been addressed so far, because everyone has been looking for fish, not seeing the rich flora and fauna, which can be used for different purposes (not everything has to be eaten).

What is your environment like?

Check out the legal aspects, tax rules, common ground rules, social, political and economic and social trends as well as the infrastructure you will be operating in and the technical developments in your area of business. Make sure you don’t get into trouble with tax or insurance issues. For example, your private liability insurance may not cover your business or product liability. How much will the state support your business, what restrictions are there? What are the cultural issues, what is the attitude towards your product. I heard people say “this is something you can only sell in the US, but never in Europe”. You may need to operate globally, which is possible with an internet business. You can have your products sourced from everywhere and shipped or downloaded anywhere, you can deliver services online, you can coach or consult via Skype, you can train via webinars or tele-classes. Even virtual assistants can be hired virtual.

This is also the place to research and address threats and opportunities on the market and through the environment, like potential subsidies, economic development, financial crisis, legal and fiscal developments. What do these developments mean for your business? You will need to deal with the threats, or grab the opportunities as they come along. What exactly are you going to do? Which opportunities will you realize, how will you react to your threats?

And what about Yourself?

You are the boss of your starting business, and its biggest asset. What are your strengths? What is your competitive advantage? What are your unique contributions and selling propositions, skills, abilities, traits, flexibility, financial means? Continue the list. Equally become aware of your shortcomings, points for improvement or aspects you will not be able to deliver, missing skills and competencies, missing flexibility and financial means. Write down your strengths and weaknesses, and plan to review this list on a regular basis. How can you build on your strengths? Make a plan as to what you will do when. How important are your weaknesses? What can you do about them? Which tasks can you delegate and to whom? Include these actions into your plan.

How to do this research?

Some of your work will be desk research and research on the internet and other resources. Other bits and pieces you will need to gather through fieldwork, doing networking, interviews and going to places. Most if the information needed you will get through interaction with others, or like in hubpages by reading the interaction between others with similar questions. Still, these insights may just not be what you need to serve your niche. Don’t rely too much on the learnings of others. Make your own plan: What do you need to know? How and where will you get the information? What will you do? When will you do this? How will you know how much of the market your information pool can explain?

The classic marketing strategy will require you to define your marketing mix, which consists of the six Ps

Product and service:

What is your product? Which variety do you offer? Which is the quality? Which features does it contain and how is it designed? What is the size-pack form? How is your service packaged? What kind of customer service is attached to it like e.g. advice, information and how do you deal with complaints? Often the little extras make all the difference. What will you change regarding existing products or services? Which new products or variants will you offer? What will you do to achieve this? How and when will you do it? How will you know, whether a product or service is (more) successful?

Place:

Where is your product or service available? Do you find them in a certain location, via the internet, via Skype, in person? What is the coverage? How easy is it to find your service? How will you transport your product to the customer? How accessible is it? How can you remove all potential barriers to access and make it easy for your clients to buy your product? Which places will you offer, and how will you make them accessible and attractive? What are you going to do about it? How are you going to do this? When will you do this? How will you know your products are accessible?

Price:

Do you position your product on the high priced or low priced end? What kind of discounts will you apply? What is your payment period and credit terms? How do you ensure your product will not be too expensive or perceived as being too cheap? Check other products or services in your niche for price elasticity: how sensitive will they react to price differences? How can you test whether your prices are working for you?

Presentation:

How will your product and business be presented in the shop, or in brochures, folders, websites, business cards etc? Do you have a logo or a brand? This is especially challenging for services, take a look at banks, insurances, travel agencies: how do they present their services? What do you want your customers to feel or think when they are confronted with your product or its presentation? How can you achieve this? What will you do? When will you do it? How will you know it works?

Promotion:

Promotion tools fall in the range of sales promotion and sales force, advertising and public relations. Out of all the promotion tools choose the ones that fit your product, style and personality as well as your customers and make sure you choose the ones you can do on a consistent basis. It is better to do one thing right than to send many balloons in the air without following them up. Do what works best for you. Surprisingly for many people this is “just” word of mouth. List the things you want to do, how, when and how often you will do them. How will you notice how successful they were and which results they delivered? If a promotion does not deliver results, stop doing it and concentrate on the ones that work, or make changes that promise more success.

Person:

As a small business owner your business is You! You do and you are. While we learn to become human doings, we should not forget that the being within us can be just as powerful. Your friendliness, enthusiasm, credibility, reliability and personal charm will be your major asset. Think about how you present yourself to the outside world. What kind of impression do you want to create? You don’t want to be the stressed out and overworked doer who has just put too much on his plate, and who does not have time left to be there for his clients, to listen to them and to answer their questions. Build on your distinction and expertise: don’t try to be the nice girl who is doing everything for everybody but rather give yourself a clear profile and authority in your area of business. What are you going to do about you as a person? When will you do this? How will you know you got it right?

Now you are ready to pull all this together to a strategy. Start by describing your current situation and market, and where you want to get within the next two years. For each heading summarize your work from above and describe

-          where you want to go

-          what you are going to do to get there

-          how you plan to do this

-          when you will do this (activity plan)

-          how you will know it has been successful

Marketing professionals call that a rolling marketing activity plan, rolling plan, because you review it  and add on to it each quarter. The better your plan, the easier to carry it through or to delegate tasks from it to other people.