RESTAURANT COACHING & CONSULTING
  • Home
  • About
  • Learn
  • Blog
  • My Business Book
  • Contact
  • My Forbes.com article
  • Be a guest on my Podcast
  • $100K Food Cost Formula

5 Steps to a Killer Small Business Marketing Strategy

3/11/2016

0 Comments

 
By Peter Daisyme On Mar 10, 2016

As the saying goes, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” When it comes to creating and implementing a marketing strategy for small business owners like myself, this couldn’t be any more true. When I first launched my company, I had daily fires to put out, and I found it challenging to find time to develop a marketing strategy. However, with five basic steps, I generated one that was killer.

1. Define Your End Goal
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never started a road trip by just getting in a car and seeing where it would take me. Instead, I’ve picked a destination and determined what I needed to do to get there, using directions and landmarks along the way.

This same idea can apply to a marketing strategy. When I wanted to get publicity for my startup, I decided that I wanted to generate a certain increase in website traffic, add a specific number of followers on social media, and convert a defined number of leads into customers.

Ask yourself what goals you want to accomplish.When do you want these milestones completed? Once you have that end goal, you can start mapping out a course of action, including marketing tactics designed to reach that destination.

2. Determine Your Target Audience
No matter how great of a product, service, or strategy you have in place, you still need customers to make your small business a success. But who are your customers? Obviously, you’re not catering to everyone. You have to define and target the customers that need what you’re offering, and structure your strategy towards them.

While this may seem pretty tough to determine, Tommy Walker offers the following suggestions on the Crazy Egg blog:
  • Start by identifying the basic demographics of your audience, such as age, location and gender.
  • Learn how to talk to your audience by knowing things like their personalities or shopping behavior.
  • Establish your brand’s personality after conducting research.

When I used these recommendations for my own business, I was able to hone in on exactly who would be interested in my company’s service offering. I discovered that those most interested in website hosting were freelancers and other small business owners, including millennial male and female entrepreneurs in their late 20s and early 30s. These tips also helped me to better understand their needs for reliability and technical support, so I knew that they would respond favorably to my free website hosting and other low-cost services.

3. Assemble Your All-Star Team
Michael Jordan once said, “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” To launch and maintain an amazing marketing strategy, you need to have the right team, which means people who can add diverse strengths and skills. For me, this meant having a content writer, developer, social media manager, web designer and a customer service professional. 

When building your team, my colleague John Rampton recommends you consider the following:

  • Identify the positions that you need to fill in order to achieve goals.
  • Decide if you are going to hire contractors, freelancers or full-time employees.
  • Identify each candidate.
  • Be well-prepared before interviewing each candidate.
  • Conduct a post-hire assessment.

As a small business owner, this may be more challenging since resources are limited, but you can try alternative working arrangements. For example, do you have an intern who’s a social media whiz? Is your partner experienced with coding? Is your spouse an excellent writer? Use those resources until you have the chance to expand your team.

4. Create Value With Content
It’s one thing to be able to explain what your business does, but it’s another to explain your value to customers and how you’re filling a specific need or desire. 

Launching a content marketing campaign involves increasing engagement, building a community, becoming a trusted authority figure in your industry, and driving traffic to your website or storefront. You can accomplish this by creating content via blog posts, tutorials or how-to guides, a white paper or eBook, video, podcasts, webinars, etc. These channels will allow you to reach more of your audience in less time. 

5. Advertise Your Business on the Cheap
Marketing doesn’t have to cost a fortune. In fact, you may be able to spend as little as $15 per week. I’ve been able to achieve this low-cost marketing strategy throughout my startup’s marketing history, and you can too.
Jason Parks, CEO of the Media Captain, explains how this is feasible inEntrepreneur:

  • Purchase retargeting advertisements for $0.70.
  • Consider Bing Ads, which may not be as popular as Google AdWords, but they’re 33.5% cheaper.
  • Advertise on Facebook for around $1 a day.
  • Don’t forget to reach out to bloggers and influencers in your industry. In most cases, this actually doesn’t cost you anything more than your time. Use a tool like BuzzSumo to get started.

Creating that killer marketing strategy doesn’t have to cost a lot of money, but does require your time, effort and focus. Once you make the investment, the return will start coming in quickly and in large measure. Time and again, these steps have proven to ramp up my marketing strategy. Now it’s your turn.
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/5-steps-to-a-killer-small_b_9408566.html?section=india
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Picture
    Restaurant Marketing Blogs

    Marcus Guiliano

    Catch up on my current posts along with industry articles

    Archives

    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Marcus Guiliano Productions LTD
PO Box 731
Ellenville NY 12428
​(845) 647-3000

www.MarcusGuiliano.com
Disclaimer
This site is not a part of the Facebook website or Facebook Inc. Additionally, This site is  
NOT endorsed by Facebook in any way. FACEBOOK is a trademark of FACEBOOK, Inc.

DISCLAIMER: The sales figures stated above are my personal sales figures. Please understand my results are not typical, I’m not implying you’ll duplicate them (or do anything for that matter). I have the benefit of practicing direct response marketing and advertising since 2009, and have an established following as a result. The average person who buys any "how to" information gets little to no results. I’m using these references for example purposes only. Your results will vary and depend on many factors …including but not limited to your background, experience, and work ethic. All business entails risk as well as massive and consistent effort and action. If you're not willing to accept that, please DO NOT GET OUR INFORMATION. ​
  • Home
  • About
  • Learn
  • Blog
  • My Business Book
  • Contact
  • My Forbes.com article
  • Be a guest on my Podcast
  • $100K Food Cost Formula