Ten Top Tips for Marketing Your Small Business

Struggling to market your business at the moment?

It can be tough to work out what to do to attract the right clients and what you should be doing.  So here are my ten top tips to help you kick your marketing in to action.

1. Know who your customer is – the clearer you are on who it is you are marketing to, the easier it will be to understand where you can reach out to these people and how to communicate with them

2. Know that marketing is not selling – marketing is about building relationships with people and gaining their trust so that, one day, they may decide to spend some money with you.

3. Less is More – the more focused you are on your marketing activities, the more impact you will make.  If your marketing approach is to throw as much mud at a wall to see what sticks, you just make one almighty mess!

4. Do one small marketing activity every day – Rather than choose a day a week to “do your marketing” it is far more effective to integrate your marketing in to your every day business activities.

5. Make your marketing fun – Cold-calling and leaflet dropping may work for one person but to many of you this approach is just a hard slog.  Focus your energies on something you enjoy with a passion and you will notice your customers being attracted by this energy.

6. Set targets – there is no point writing down “do more marketing” on your to-do-list.  This just will not work.  Be specific about you need to do, give your self a time scale and have something to work towards.

7. Measure your results – Whether you are spending money or spending time on your marketing, you need to measure how effective your marketing activities are.  Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t and you will soon see more customers knocking on your door.

8. Do what is right for you and not for your competitors – By all means find out how your competitors are marketing themselves, but don’t just blindly follow their methods.  Just because they advertise week in and week out in the local paper, if it doesn’t get you results, then try something else.

9. Be consistent – It takes on average 7 times for someone to notice your messages and take action.  Don’t give up after one phone call or after sending a letter or two.  Vary your messages, keep the communication going and build a trusting relationship with your potential customer

10. Learn and move on – the biggest mistake anyone can make in business is to make the same mistake over and over again.  If something doesn’t work, learn from it and try something different.

Got any tips to add yourself? Please leave a comment with your ideas and thoughts.

Other articles you may be interested in:

1. Small Business Mistake: Attracting anyone and everyone to your business
2. The 5 Marketing Rules for Small Business Owners in 2009
3. How much mud is sticking on your wall?