This article takes a different approach to small business marketing. How to do small business marketing is the subject of several Web pages and blog posts across the Internet, but most approach small business marketing by providing lists of marketing ideas that work for small businesses.

This article takes a different approach. Rather than providing a list of ideas or marketing tactics that may or may not be appropriate for your business, it provides an overview of what you should do in planning your marketing activities to assure that your marketing strategies and tactics work for and are relevant to your specific business.

To make the most of your small business marketing, how to do information on market planning is vital. Good market planning requires four steps:

• Research
• Goals and Objectives
• Strategies and Tactics
• Evaluation

1. Small Business Marketing: How To Do Research

If you’ve been in business a while and have kept good records on your marketing efforts and results, these records provide great research. They reveal which marketing efforts worked well and which ones bombed. Of course you want to model you new marketing activities after the successful ones and avoid repeating anything like the unsuccessful ones.

Sometimes though results were based more on how you conducted the marketing rather than just the marketing activities. For instance, if you did a single direct mail campaign to a target market and never followed up, it’s likely that direct mail may work with your target market if repeated and followed by other marketing activities. You should plan at least seven contacts with a target market within an 18 month period.

So take a critical and evaluative look at your records. Put your information in a program like Microsoft Excel and run some statistics. Do just a simple average of return on investments and look for commonalities among marketing activities, frequency, target market, etc. This can reveal much about what works best for you small business marketing.

You should also conduct marketing research to learn about your target market. The best way to do this is with market segmentation. You can learn about market segmentation and a simple way that you can do it yourself on my blog at http://StrategicMarketSegmentation.com/blog.

2. Small Business Marketing: How To Do Goals And Objectives

Think of what you most want to accomplish in your business in the long term (like five years) and the short term (like 6 months or a year). Make a list of these, group them and prioritize each group by importance to your business’ success.

The highest priority desired accomplishments are your business goals. You may have already established your business goals for your business plan. If so, you can use them.

Next, separate you long-term goals from your short-term goals in each group. Your short-term goals should support your long-term goals.

Now think about what you have to do to accomplish to reach each goal. These are your objectives. They may be goals for a certain time period like a month, or for a particular activity like a launch or a big sale.

For example, if you plan a big sale, your business goal for that sale may be to increase your gross sales by $60,000 and net profit by $20,000.

Now think about what you have to accomplish to reach each business goal. These are your objectives. For the big sale, your objectives may be:

• to get 50 percent of your customers to buy a promotional product during the sale, and
• to increase your customers by 20 percent.

3. Small Business Marketing: How To Do Marketing Strategies And Tactics

Your overall plan to reach each objective becomes your marketing strategy for that objective. In the big sale example, we have two major objectives and two marketing strategies.

It takes more marketing effort to get a new customer than to get a present customer to purchase again. So it will take more marketing for the one strategy than for the other.

So for your big sale, your marketing strategy to get new customers may be to reach them with seven marketing messages that provide an incentive to visit your store during a one-week period.

Your marketing strategy for your present customers may include in-store marketing messages and three marketing messages delivered directly to them during the sale and the week prior to the sale.

What these messages are and how they will be delivered are marketing tactics that will be used to reach the marketing strategies. For example the marketing strategy to get new customers may include:

• 4 postcard mailings to a list of potential customers with the same demographic and psychographic characteristics as the majority of present customers.
• 1 advertisement that will run the week of the sale in the local “thrifty nickel” type newspaper placed in a section for the promotional product.
• 1 special event promoted through the postcards for an additional 10 percent off for new customers who visit the store on one day and provide their contact information. Door prices and special “blue-light” type sales will run throughout the day.
• 1 word-of-mouth campaign to get present customers to bring new customers to the store. The present customers also get the additional 10 percent off if they bring a new customer friend who provides contact information on the special event day.

4. Small Business Marketing: How To Do Marketing Evaluation

The first thing you have to do in order to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing is to keep detailed records. Not only do good records help you to evaluate the marketing campaign that you just finished, but they also provide research to guide future marketing campaigns.

In the big sale example, you would want to keep records on all of the information below:

• the total cost of each tactic,
• the day of the week each tactic was implemented,
• sales for each day of the sale compared to that day a year earlier,
• the number of the promotional product sold,
• the number of new customers who provided contact information,
• the total number of new and repeat customers attending the special event,
• how each customer learned about the sale (collected through survey with contact information for new customers and separately for repeat customers)

You will get most of this information through the contact information form and your sales records. For those not completing the contact information and days of the sale other than the special event day, you can just ask each customer how they heard about the sale and provide a function for it to be recorded with each sale.

Then you put all this information into an Excel, or accounting program that can provide:

• your return on investment for each marketing tactic,
• the best day of the week for the sale,
• how much the sale increased gross and net profit.

In fact you can gather information to answer nearly any question you want answered about your marketing. Then the next time you have a big sale, you can repeat what worked well, eliminate what didn’t, and test new tactics against your best performing ones.

By using these four steps for small business marketing, how to do marketing becomes a system of constantly improving your marketing. It takes more work and planning than just unassociated marketing tactics, but the impact on your business is greater and more positive.

To read more about marketing by this author, see

http://StrategicMarketSegmentation.com/blog

Copyright - Linda P. Morton – Best Books Plus - Inc, 2008:

Small business marketing how to do