4 Steps To Effectively Market Your Small Business

I love it when people ask me questions. And in being known as the Marketing Geek, one of the most frequently asked to me is this: "How should I market my business?"

If only there was one single answer, I would have mouthed it already. Fortunately, there is an answer but, as is often the case, it might not be the one you'd hoped for. As I'm sure you know the world is changing. Along with it, the business is changing and how we market our businesses is changing, too.

Once you could visit with your yellow page ad rep for 30 minutes per year, and you were done – your phone ringing, customers buying, and happy times. Right?

For those of you who could afford the initial play all you needed to do was drop a 30 second commercial into the prime time television cycle and it was fat city. Then you can buy a bigger house and a nicer car.

Not anymore. In case you haven't noticed, the audiences have fractured. The yellow pages is a door stop or gets thrown away on delivery and only a few watch the prime time TV shows.

Everyone else is somewhere else. But where? And is it possible to effectively market your small business in an environment like this?

Yes. It. Is.

And we can do it in only 4 steps.

Step 1. Know where you are. For you to know where you are going and where you want to go, you need to know where you are. In this step, you determine your current situation. To do this, you ask: “Where is my business right now?” This serves as your baseline from where you can develop a map to take you where you want to go. If you've been in business more than a year, you have a bit of history which helps a lot when developing your marketing plan of attack.

Up to this point you probably had:

• Selected some products or services to sell
• Spoken to some actual customers with money to spend
• Run some advertising campaigns
• Gotten some results

Great! Now, let's continue by sifting through the information and putting it into to two piles. Pile #1 is the stuff that worked and pile #2 is the stuff that didn't work.

Now, there can be degrees of how well it worked or not and most of the time I end up with an 80% pile and a 20% pile. I do that because the old 80/20 rule is reliable in most cases.

But before you can make any real progress you just have to know:

• Which of the products and services you have sell best and which don't.
• Which ones are profitable and which ones aren't.
• Which customers you want to do more business with and which ones you don't.
• Which ad campaigns produced desirable results and which didn't.

Is this making sense? I hope so, because I have to keep moving…

Step 2. Identify where you want to go. With the information from step 1 in hand, make a plan of where you want to be in 1 year, 3 years and 5 years. You ask:  "What is my dream outcome for my business?"

In this step, I'm talking about setting some goals for your business. You need to know what you want your business to be – your desired outcome. However, when I work with clients on goals, we talk in terms of the 'why' and not the 'what'.

You see for every goal you have there is an underlying reason why you want that. We've talked about this at length here, so if you're not clear, go read it.

You need to have a clear reason for your endeavors. The short version is that if the ‘why’ is clear, the ‘how’ becomes easier to itemize.

For example if you and your spouse dream of having a family but are unable to get pregnant and decide to adopt, getting the money becomes easier simply because your dream pulls you along.

Step 3. Identify your ideal customer. At this point, you need to ask yourself: "Who do I want to do business with?" This is done by learning all you can about your ideal client so you can determine the best ways to attract more of them.

When I was in high school I studied journalism (Side note: My English and Journalism teacher would probably die laughing if they knew how much I write these days) and the formula for story writing was to know:
Who - What - Where - When - Why - How

Attracting ideal clients and customers is similar. You use the above formula to know more about them.

Some questions to ask are:

• Do your ideal customers buy Online? Offline? Online to Offline/Local? Other Models?
• If they purchase online, are they comfortable shopping with smaller (local) merchants/service providers or do they tend to buy from brands?
• Are they searching online using keywords? If so which ones?
• Is their search impacted by social media and reviews? If so, which social sites play a role in their decision process?

Now, you might look at questions like this and think that you can't know all of this about your best clients. But when it comes to marketing your business these days you will have to make sure you know these and a whole lot more.

Step 4. Create a plan. Once you have identified your ideal customer, find the ideal form of media that will attract your ideal client or customer to your business. You do not jump into every opportunity to reach them without detailing the answer to this question: "How do I reach them?"

In case you hadn't noticed, there are now thousands of places you can advertise your business. From direct mail to online to social media to radio to TV to where ever, there's no shortage of places to promote.

But if you haven't done step 3, then any form of media will make it harder to get an ROI on than you get betting on black at the casino. The best form of media is the one that produces the highest ROI for what you spend on it. You identify the best methods of attracting your ideal customer only when you have done a profiling.

So there you have it! A straight forward model for marketing your small business in just 4 steps.

If you know someone that will benefit from reading this, please pass it along, or even better tell them to subscribe at ScottADennison.com.