Small Business Marketing - 6 Key Tips to Get Started

The New Year has brought a number of inquiries from smaller companies asking for help with social media marketing and marketing in general. For those of us in the marketing field, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that not all businesses see things from a marketing perspective. Example: we had an end-of-year meeting with our CPA firm and will be doing some marketing consultation for them, I'm happy to say. This is a women-owned firm, brilliant in the world of finance, tax prep and financial planning, but not big enough to warrant an in-house marketing expert. We mapped out an initial strategy, to capitalize on the lowest hanging fruit, and I thought I'd recap our discussion for the benefit of other small companies.



1. Know who your customers are so you can find more like them. Conduct a survey to find out what industry they are in, how many employees they have, general geography (how close or far away do you want to service a customer?)



2. Establish some initial objectives. Are you prospecting and looking for new leads? Introducing new products or services to current customers, asking for feedback on current performance?



3. Initiate an ongoing conversation with your current customers. Start a monthly e-newsletter, and before that, start gathering email addresses from everyone you do business with to that end. Assuming you have a website, start a blog to post updated information about the company more frequently and to start that dialog with your customers



4. Start gathering testimonials. You will find many uses for them as your marketing evolves. As soon as you have completed a job or transaction with a happy client, ask if they will provide you with a few sentences of testimonial, and confirm that you can use their name and company. If they can provide a headshot, or if you can video the testimonial, that's all the better. To make it very easy, you may want to write the statement yourself and send it to them for approval or changes.



5. Social Media Marketing. If your customers and prospects are participating in social media networks, pick an objective for your social media presence, and get started with a well-thought-through SM plan and schedule.



6. Create online visibility with geo specific websites. Yelp and others like them are great not just for restaurants and retail stores, but for professional services, consultants, service providers, coaches; in fact any business that would benefit by customer reviews.



Establish the initial strategy - but make it simple. If your marketing plans are more complex than your company can handle, then nothing can succeed.Small companies don't have marketing departments, so be sure the objectives are manageable. Decide on tactics, the person or people who will be actually doing the work, and set a schedule. Then keep it.





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Elyse Tager is a social media strategist and founder of Elymedia. Elyse develops effective marketing strategies to help the small business grow significantly.

Want to learn more about growing your business with Social Media? Sign up for Elyse's free introductory teleseminar available at =>

http://www.elymedia.com/freeclass.html