As a small business owner, you have lots of big decisions to make everyday and have a lot of time and money invested in your business venture.  You may not have a marketing degree or have anyone on staff with any formal marketing training, but it is still vital for you to create and implement a marketing plan and set a realistic budget for your business to ultimately achieve your goals and be successful.  There are several steps you can take to develop and implement an effective marketing strategy while staying within your limited marketing budget. 

Step 1: Define your target market and positioning statement

Who is your target customer?
Where are they located? 
What are their defining characteristics? 
What are their needs? 
How do we want to be positioned in the mind of your target customer? 

You need to answer these basic questions before you can develop or implement any of your marketing objectives and strategies. 

Step 2: Develop a SWOT Analysis

It is important to know what you do well, and what you still need to work on.  You also need to identify factors that are within your control and those that are external to your business.  A SWOT Analysis breaks down a company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. 

• Strengths are the internal attributes of the organization that are helpful in achieving objectives and can be used as a basis in determining your competitive advantage.
• Weaknesses are the internal attributes that are harmful or unfavorable to achieving objectives.
• Opportunities are external conditions that are helpful to achieving the objective.
• Threats are changes to the external environment that may damage your business’ performance. 

Once you have completed your SWOT analysis, you need to evaluate each component individually.  You should decide how you can use each strength, how you can improve upon each weakness, how to exploit every opportunity, and mitigate each threat. 

Step 3: Know your competition

After you have determined who your target market is and evaluated your SWOTs, you need to know the ins and outs of your competition. 

Where is the competition located relative to you-local vs. national vs. global competitive landscape?
How do their products/services compare to yours?
What is their competitive advantage and how does it compare to yours?
How does their product/service offering compare to yours?
Do they utilize the web?

Answering these types of questions will help you learn what your competition does right and adopt some of these practices, while also learning what your competitive advantages are and learning how to leverage these. 

Step 4: Define your marketing objectives

You need to determine what you want to accomplish from your marketing plan and set goals and objectives to measure your success.  Marketing objectives establish the goals and standards of marketing efforts pertaining to products, sales, and marketing that must be achieved in order to fulfill the overall objectives of the company.  These objectives will help measure marketing success and gain insight into underlying conditions facing the company that cannot be seen with financial measures. 

What are your target market objectives?

You need to determine how many new customers you expect to gain with respect to your marketing efforts.  This could be defined by an increase of 100 new customers this year, or increase new customers by 25% over last year. 

What are your objectives for existing customers?

Everyone always says it’s cheaper to keep an existing customer than gaining a new one.  It is important to focus your marketing efforts towards your existing customers.  Upsell. Upsell. Upsell.  Your objectives could be defined by an increase in existing customer spending by 20%, or increase existing customer spending by $10,000 this year. 

What are your promotion objectives?

Examples of promotional objectives could be to build brand awareness in a certain area or among a specific target market, increase website traffic, increase traffic to your store, to differentiate your product or service, etc.  Promotion is just one aspect of the Marketing Mix, which is also known as the 4 P’s (Product, Price, Promotion, and Place).  Make sure that your promotional objectives are clearly stated and measureable.  To achieve these promotion objectives, keep in mind that there are four main ways to promote your business: advertising, publicity, sales promotion, and personal selling.   

What are your research and development objectives?

Do you plan on developing new products or services in the future?  It is important that you continue to conduct market research to make sure that you are coming up with the products and services that meet the needs of tomorrow’s customers.  Consumer preferences are constantly changing so it is imperative that you stay on top of consumer trends and continue to create better products, and improve your overall operational processes.
 
Step 5: Implement your marketing strategies

In order to achieve your marketing objectives, you need to determine the programs and methods that will be the most effective while still staying within your budget.  Some inexpensive suggestions include:

• Direct Mail
• E-newsletters
• Contests
• Sponsorships
• Trade Shows
• Development or Redesign of your Website
• Publicity
• Networking
• Distribution of Marketing Materials (Brochures, Business Cards, Flyers)
• Product Demos
• Search Engine Optimization
• E-promotion
• Develop Programs to retain existing customers (preferred customer programs, referral programs, etc.)

Be creative.  Every business is different so test out different methods and figure out what works best for you.  If your business is really limited on budget, but are willing to put in the time, energy, and imagination, you can also use a more unconventional approach toward promotion called guerrilla marketing.  Guerilla marketing involves targeting customers in an unexpected way that is memorable, generates buzz, and is in turn spread virally.  Guerrilla marketing has also been referred to as buzz marketing and viral marketing.  Check out this blog for a list of 50 guerrilla marketing tactics you can try. 

Step 6: Set your marketing budget

Setting your marketing budget can be difficult, especially as a small business with a limited amount of money available to allocate toward marketing in the first place.  One of the biggest mistakes a small business can make is to cut back on the marketing budget first when money is tight, or neglect to establish a budget and play it by ear.  How do you expect to grow your business if your target market doesn’t know you exist?  Many businesses will set their marketing budget as a percentage of net sales, typically ranging from 1 percent up to about 10 percent of net sales.  Here are a few factors to consider when determining your budget:

• Are you a new competitor in the marketplace?  If so, you will have to spend more to establish market share.  Likewise, if you have an established market share, you may need to spend more to maintain your share. 
• If you are competing in a fast-growing market, you will need to spend more on marketing.
• Are you competing on price?  Both very high-priced and low-priced products and services require higher marketing expenditures to convince your target market that your product is a good value.
• If product quality is one of your main selling points, you will need to spend more to convince customers that your product is unique.

Step 7: Measure your success

In order to track the progress of your marketing plan, you need to establish a set of controls to measure success.  Some measureable controls include customer surveys, monitoring website traffic, performance of promotional activities, budget analysis, sales analysis, etc.  Setting controls will allow you to monitor your proposed plans as they proceed and make adjustments as needed to get back on track.

A press release is an outlet for your business to get free, yes free, publicity that attracts favorable media attention and extensive coverage. In plain terms, a press release is a news story written in third person that communicates something newsworthy about a person or a business and is submitted to the media.

Press Releases can benefit everyone

Every business needs to promote themselves and gain brand recognition among the desired target market.  Whether you are a small local business with less than 5 employees or a multi-million dollar national corporation, writing press releases to generate publicity can benefit your business tremendously. The key is to know what to write your press release about, how to write and format is correctly, and who to send the press release to.

If done correctly, a press release can improve your business’s visibility, improve name recognition, increase traffic to your website, and build rapport with important media contacts. Not to mention, submitting online press releases can improve search engine optimization (SEO), which means increasing the number of links to your site which will improve your site’s ranking on search engines like Google and Yahoo. Online press release optimization is only as good as the presentation, position, and performance of the release, however.

What do I write a press release about?

Your press release should be interesting and newsworthy. It should also be timely which means it is relative to the events happening at large as well as relative to a publication’s editorial calendar. If it’s not then no one will want to read it and the news media won’t publish it. Press releases can be written about new products or services that you recently introduced, the addition of new employees, partnerships or acquisitions, announcing the opening or relocation of your business, sponsorship of charitable events, gaining important contracts with other companies, awards and community recognition, or any other news that is a story - not an advertisement. Virtually anything can be a story as long as you put the right spin on it and give it the angle it needs to generate interest.

Remember to K.I.S.S. - Keep It Simple, Stupid. Your press release should answer all the “W” questions: who, what, where, when, and why. Keep in mind you’re not writing for your target market like you would with advertising copy; you are writing to appeal to journalists and fulfill their requirements by answering the question “Why would readers care?”. Your headline should not boast your product or service benefits, but rather proclaim your story’s newsworthiness. You only have a few seconds to capture the reader’s attention, so make your headline count.

How to write a press release correctly in 8 simple steps

Once you have determined what you will write your press release about, you need to make sure that you format is correctly.

Step 1 - You need to include release instructions, whether it is for “immediate release” or “for release on some future date.” Make sure you include this at the top of your release.

Step 2 - It is important to list contact information including a contact person, company name, phone, fax, website URL, and e-mail address.

Step 3 - The headline should be short (aim for less than 10 words) and attention-grabbing. DO NOT WRITE IN ALL CAPS or use exclamation marks!!!

Step 4 - Write a summary of a few sentences which summarizes what your press release is about and acts as an extenstion to your headline.

Step 5 - The body of your press release should always begin with: City, State, Month, Day, Year- Then you can begin your story.  Aim to keep the body within 400-500 words maximum. Make sure your story is relevant, and give it a sense of urgency.

Step 6 - Don’t forget to include an about section which should summarize your company. Include your product or service offering and where the business is located and conducts business. Do not forget to include a link to your website at the end of this section. This gives you an opportunity to drive potential customers to your website who otherwise might not have stumbled upon it.

Step 7 - You should always include a section that lets readers know where they can go for additional information. Make sure you include a contact person, their position, the name of the company, a phone number, and an e-mail address where this person can be reached.

Step 8 - When you are finished with your press release, end it with ### centered at the bottom. The three #’s signal the end of the press release.

You can view some cample press release formats at the following sites:
Example 1, Example #2

Where should you send your press release?

When submitting a press release to the media, there are a variety of different sources to distribute the release including print, television, and online sites. If you are submitting your press release to a print or television source, make sure to send it to the most relevant contact person available and that the source you send it to makes sense for your business.

For example, if your press release is about the grand opening of a local restaurant, then you would want to send the release to a local newspaper that is read by your target market, or a local television station. Make sure that the contact person is the most relevant person to your story. You shouldn’t just default to sending the release to the editor-in-chief or the publisher. Do your research and send it to the person in charge of press releases, or someone who handles local news coverage. This will give your story a better chance of getting published.

In addition to submitting your press release to print and television media, you should take advantage of the press release sites that the web has to offer, both free and paid are available. There are many free press release websites for you to take advantage of. They create free backlinks to your website which helps with search engine optimization (SEO). Just make sure you follow each site’s guidelines for submission carefully, or else your press release will be rejected by the editor. A few good free press release websites are www.24-7pressrelease.com, www.1888pressrelease.com, www.PRlog.org, www.newswiretoday.com, and www.PRcompass.com. You can also try to Google ‘free press release websites’ for a list of more sites.

If you want to gain more exposure for your press release whether it’s for SEO purposes or to try to get your story picked up by more news media, you can also utilize paid press release sites. Some good ones to try are www.PRweb.com (better for SEO purposes), www.PRnewswire.com (best for getting your story picked up by the media), and www.PRleap.com. Remember: You get what you pay for.  Free press release sites are good if you are trying to create more links for SEO purposes, but if you are looking for something more than you might want to consider spending some money.

I hope that this gives you some insight into writing press releases and welcome additional questions and comments.

Where is most of your site’s traffic coming from and why?

Mostly Direct Traffic: This means that your traffic is coming from your print advertising, word of mouth, and existing customers.

Direct Traffic is the one kind of traffic that refers to real-world sources. Potential customers who get your web address from your brochures/signage or heard of you from other people/businesses are typing your address in their browser to directly access your site. Depending on the percentage of your marketing you have reserved for print advertising or how long you company has been using print advertising, this number may overshadow other traffic sources. If your company has a website that isn’t very popular, but your company has been around for a while (including pre-internet), you may have a very large base of print advertising patrons and a lot of word of mouth. Including your web address on this print media and mentioning that you have a website causes more customers to actually go directly to your site for more information.

Existing customers can be tricky. Depending on your site’s setup, tools, and deployment on the web, your existing customers may be coming to your site to get information like a phone number, product pictures and data, or get caught up on your business’s up-to-date company info. The distinction between existing customers is whether they are coming again and again or just once to get contact information. Either way, they know your web address and do a b-line to your site. 

Mostly Referring Sites: This means that links to your site from other sites (whether you know about them or not) are directing customers to your site.

Referring sites are actually one of the main ranking philosophies behind search engines today. The more links on other sites to your site can help boost your rankings on search engines. However, if this is your biggest source for customers, you should be looking into where those links are coming from. Links to your site from sites that are part of your industry, refer to news about your company, or are on very trusted/popular sites, will provide you with customers and better search engine optimization. If links to your site are on spammer sites, unrelated industry sites, or use misleading text to link, the wrong customers are coming to your site and jumping back out (bounce rate) and your search engine optimization based on linking from other sites can sag.

Referring sites leave a lot out of your hands. The buying potential for anybody who comes to your site this way can vary greatly. Be sure to see where your links end up and what you can do to get your link on good sites and avoid linking with bad sites. Analyzing your bounce rate compared to your referring site percentage can help you understand who ended up at your site by accident and who is actually looking for your business.

Mostly Search Engines: This means that customers are coming to your site by search engine ranked links. This usually denotes good standing in search engines.

Most customers (approximately 84%) start their browsing at a search engine. Customers who have never heard of your business can find you based on keyword searching. New customers from around the world and regionally can find you through this traffic source. However, search engines hold all of the cards here and can change their search algorithms overnight, destroying your rankings.

To understand customers coming from search engines to your site, you must be aware of the keyword phrases they are using that lead them to your site. If they are using your company’s name to find you, then that search engine traffic is no different than direct traffic. If they are using keywords and find you, this is true search engine traffic.

Where should your site’s traffic be coming from and why?

Older (well-known) businesses: Usually, your business will have a strong base of print media from the pre-internet period. Adding your web address to that print media connects your print media customers to your website through direct traffic.

Newer (unknown) businesses: Newer businesses need all the exposure they can get. Using business connections, practical industry information, and popular social aspects of the web, your business should rack up referring site links – which will subsequently increase your site’s search engine rankings.

Service-based (regional) businesses: This type of business usually requires that its customers remain relatively local or regional. Using local business connections to create word of mouth and possibly links from their local sites can create direct and referral traffic.

Product-based (worldwide) businesses: As shipping has become easier and cheaper, products can effortlessly be shipped around the world. Getting more traffic from worldwide search engines is your best bet to get your business’s products out to your neighbor or a customer in Asia.

Information-based (n/a location) businesses: Information is only as good as its source. To become the best source for information, you need to be seen as reliable. The best way to do this is getting articles and information out into the web creating referral traffic. More referral traffic means that more people trust your information and that can build upon itself.

Traditional Media is So Last Season

Alternative media is any media falling outside the mainstreams of corporate communication. Traditional media like television, newspapers, magazines, and radio will always be classic styles. However, many forward-thinking marketers know that alternative media is not just the latest fad in marketing and is beginning to supersede these classic styles.

Many businesses are moving their advertising dollars to alternative media like online and interactive media to support or even replace their traditional media campaigns. A recent study found that by 2010 internet advertising spending is expected to grow from $8 billion in 2005 to over $25 billion. As businesses increase their spending on alternative media, their investment and conviction in traditional media continues to flatten.

So your business spent thousands of dollars on a television campaign to spark a potential customers’ interest. As many customers rely heavily on a business’s website for additional product information, they decide to research your business online.

But, what if you don’t have a quality website?

A quality website gives your business more credibility in the mind of a consumer, and a lack of quality could be a serious marketing faux pas. The key is to utilize the right balance between traditional and alternative media to optimize your investment.

Accessorize Your Return on Investment (ROI) - Much More Than a Website

If you only have a website, you are missing out on other great online marketing opportunities, such as e-mail marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and social media that can increase your business’s ROI.

An e-mail campaign based on your customer database can save you all the direct mailing costs of a print publication and allows more money to reach the bottom line. Print publications are very time-consuming and incur higher staffing costs, while online publications are much simpler and can be automated. Online publications have no time or space restraints, and can easily be written, edited, and launched in a matter of hours- not days.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can lead potential customers directly to your website from search engines – no traditional advertising required. Generating organic customer leads directly from the web is priceless when approximately 78-84% of all web traffic is coming from search engines and 41% of online browsers rely heavily on search engine results in their decision making process. The fact is that many people are using search engines to perform preliminary research for learning about a company, specific products, or even certain people. It’s important to make sure your site is organically optimized and browsers can find your site and increase your exposure. The top three search engine results get 60% of web searchers to click them and that means more business for sites that are organically optimized.

Social media has become increasingly popular and is another great outlet to get people talking about your business and increasing your exposure. Social media includes social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, writing blogs (just like this one), and video and picture sharing through sites like Flickr and YouTube.

Going Green is the New Black

The shift from traditional media to alternative media is also helping the environment. Advertising online instead of in the newspapers or magazines and sending e-newsletters instead of direct mail newsletters –everyone is going green. It is our business’s social obligation to create a sustainable future. By cutting the need for paper and printing, you save money, reach a wider audience, gain access to larger possibilities for advertising, and increase convenience and flexibility, all while eliminating a huge source of waste and drastically reducing the amount of natural resources your publication uses.

You can even get solar-powered hosting for your site, where solar panels are used to generate electricity to power offices, the data center, and the server as well. Some companies also use solar tubes to bring in natural lighting during the day. According to BP Solar, the use of this solar panel system eliminates 19,890 lbs. of Carbon Dioxide, 5.9 lbs. of Nitrous Oxide, and 0.45 lbs of Sulfer Dioxide per year.

Don’t wait for the competition to beat you to the punch and take advantage of these alternative media strategies, increase your ROI, and go green before they do. Be a trendsetter, not a follower.

You already know the answer – of course not. The web is full of small business sites and it’s actually a great way to level the playing field with larger competitors. Large companies can afford to spend thousands of dollars on gaining web presence, but they are unable to change the web’s conventions or the behavior of human beings. You have the same space and the same tools at your disposal to get your business online and capitalize on those millions of eyes out there looking for something… anything at all. If your business has something to sell – you can find customers on the web. That’s it. That’s the whole secret.

With knowledge, planning, and attention, you can develop a site that will perform marketing, sales, informative, documentary, and even entertainment functions. Presumably, your small business is developed from an idea or a passion, or maybe even just some practical experience. Whatever product or service you sell, there is a market for it.

In the future - do you think people will look for services/products in the yellow pages? By driving to the mall and shopping? Well, that’s a simple question; the statistics already prove the efficiency and ubiquity of the increase in web commerce.

So you’re worried about the cost or necessary expertise of setting up a site? Or you already have a site that doesn’t bring you any business? Well the bad news is that it’s not free or super easy - but the good news is that it’s not still 1999. You don’t need cadres of programmers or slick-suited advertising sharks to be able to compete on the web like you did back then. Hosting, video, blogging – all these things can be set up quickly and inexpensively by someone who knows what they are doing. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is nothing more than a few simple concepts, some practical common sense, and care and attention paid to your business. The pace of technology development on the web has slowed a bit – and the famous stories of people getting rich on the web are not prevalent or important (or long-term). They don’t represent the deeper, more democratic nature of the web. There’s no need to give up and think that “it’s all been done before.” Did people stop increasing their business through print media after a few years? No! – it’s a few hundred years later and printing is still going strong.

Look in your hometown for the little guys – they know what it’s like to do more for less and that’s the goal of your site right? I’m not saying to hire “Fred in the shed” – you know, the badly dressed, sulky techie that “does web sites”? There are many small web marketing and web development businesses that know their customers are in the small business market; they are comfortable in it and they rely on service and repeat customers in their cities/towns. The small professional web company isn’t trying to make a killing with each site – they are more interested in developing your business, because if your business doesn’t grow, neither does theirs. Look at sites they’ve done and talk to some of their customers. If you get attitude about a “small” job, you’re talking to the wrong person.

Small business web professionals are out there. Find them.

A “blog,” which is also known as a web log, is basically just an online journal. A blog allows you to tell the world about your business with no out-of-pocket expense, and unlimited amounts of space to talk about it.

So what do you talk about on your blog?

You can write just about anything on your blog. You can showcase your products/services, news releases, capabilities, thoughts, or just about anything that you want to share. Your blog is less formal than your website and is an outlet for your thoughts and ideas to share your passion for your work. Blogs have risen in popularity as society has embraced businesses who allow users to take a look inside of the business and let people know that your business is actually made up of individuals and not just machines.

Ok, So I have somewhere to vent. How is this good for business?

If your goal is to boost business, make sure you include your web address as a link and fill the blog with lots of keywords that relate back to your business. Adding these links and keywords will also help “optimize” your website, also known as Search Engine Optimization. This means that the more links there are to your site and the more relevant keywords used relate back to your website, the higher your ranking is on search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

There are many different blog sites to choose from. Here are a couple good ones that feed information directly to search engines:

Technorati: www.technorati.com
Google: www.blogger.com
Yahoo: 360.yahoo.com

For more information, go to www.daly-communications.com, or send an e-mail to info@daly-communications.com