Small Business Marketing Makeover Part 1: Improve Your Small Business Marketing

I'm also going to assume that you're unhappy with your small business marketing because it hasn’t been doing anything for your bottom line. After all, that's the bottom line for effective marketing. Effective marketing strategies are the ones that result in more sales and more profits.

This Small Business Marketing Makeover will show you how to avoid wasting time and money on ineffective marketing strategies and how to pick and implement effective marketing strategies instead. Follow these steps:

1) Look at your small business marketing from the right end of the telescope.

Too many small businesses get and stay hung up on the cost factor of marketing. The first question they ask about any marketing strategy is, "How much does that cost?"

This is entirely the wrong question. The right question is "Will that target the right market?", the market of potential customers for your products and/or services.

For instance, creating and distributing flyers is an inexpensive marketing strategy that small businesses often use – probably because it's so inexpensive. Now suppose that you run a small business selling ski equipment. You design a bunch of flyers on your home computer, print them, and then go down to your local Community Centre and put one of the windshield of every vehicle in the parking lot - the night of the big Annual Horticultural Society meeting. Unless a lot of little old ladies suddenly decide to take up snowboarding, you've just wasted most of your time and energy.

Sure, it was inexpensive marketing – but it's not effective marketing.

You need to switch your telescope around and look through it from the right end - the end that will keep you focused on customer-directed rather than cost-directed marketing.

2) Focus on your target market.

Dump the idea that everyone in interested in your products and/or services. They're not. The reality is that only people who feel they have a need for your products and/or services will be interested in them – and those are the people your marketing has to reach. They are your target market.

Step 1 of effective small business marketing is knowing who these people are.

So first, read How to Find and Sell to Your Target Market and learn how to zero in on your target market by using market segmentation.

Then work through Writing a Business Plan: The Market Analysis. This article, part of The Business Plan Outline series, directs you to write out your Market Analysis in paragraph form. You don't have to do that as you're not writing a business plan, but you do need to write down answers to the questions about your target market.

3) Find your target market.

Step 2 of effective small business marketing is focusing your efforts on your target market and no one else. To do this, you have to know how the people in your target market behave.

You already know a fair bit about these people from the Market Analysis you just completed. To help choose the most effective marketing strategies to reach these people, you need to know the answers to just two more questions:

How do the people in your target market access information?
For example, do they read newspapers and magazines, watch television, text, web surf, email? Each of these ways of accessing information demands different marketing strategies.

Where do the people in your target market hang out?
Mainly at home? Shopping malls? Gyms or fitness centres? Skateboard parks?

I find the easiest way to do this is to pretend my target market is an individual. Try it. Create an avatar, a fictional person that represents a person in your target market, and answer the two questions above as completely as you can.

4) Evaluate your current small business marketing efforts.

Now that you know exactly who your small business marketing efforts need to reach, you're ready to judge what you've been doing.

List all the marketing strategies you're currently using. By each, write how likely your target market avatar is to see and pay attention to your marketing message.

For example, suppose that my business involves selling lingerie. I've created an avatar named Julie, who is young (30), married, working, with one young child. (This is all statistical; stats say that a woman of that age would be all these things, generally.)

In terms of my questions, Julie does not read print newspapers at all; she gets most of her information off the Internet through her Blackberry, and spends a fair bit of time emailing and texting. She also has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. Occasionally Julie picks up a glossy women's magazine when she's going through the grocery checkout.

Where does Julie hang out? Well, like everyone else, Julie does things such as taking her young daughterto preschool and out to the local park with a playground. Other than that, Julie is very physically active; she takes yoga classes, works out regularly at the gym, and she and her husband participate in a lot of different seasonal sports, such as biking, skiing and snowboarding. Julie's hobby is cooking; she doesn't have a lot of time for it but likes to try out gourmet recipes now and again.

I could go on but the point is that you want to make your avatar as complete as possible, because the fuller the mental image of your target market person you have, the easier it will be for you to figure out how to reach him or her.