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December 13, 2005
More thoughts on microbusiness marketing
Here's a recurring complaint that I hear among microbusiness owners:
'I want to get more customers and make more sales but I don't have a big marketing budget and nobody knows that I'm here.'
The thing about this plaint is that it assumes that big-dollar marketing — which translates into things like direct mail campaigns and email marketing campaigns and expensive media buys and equally expensive PR professionals — is the best way for microbusiness owners to reach their customers.
But how accurate is that assumption? Well, for starters, who are your customers? If you sell to other businesses, then the odds are that most of your best prospects are other microbusinesses. In that case, as we learned from the recently released survey from Small Business Trends, the most effective way to reach your target market is through referrals and networking (offline), and SEO and your web site copy (online).
Referrals and networking and search engines are also pretty effective ways of reaching consumers. Overall, getting people talking about you and your products/services is both more effective and more practical for microbusinesses looking to market their wares. You just have to be creative about how and where and how wide to cast your net.
Then, too, there is this interesting insight from marketing maven Mary Schmidt:
| [S}pending big bucks on high-gloss marketing also doesn’t guarantee success. Ask any of the big companies who’ve spent billions and billions over the years on ad campaigns and such – and are still fighting toe-to-toe for customer mind share and shelf space. Does anybody really care if Coke wants to buy us a Coke? Or, that Cindy Crawford loves Pepsi? |
Food for thought, wot?
Besides the question of efficacy, recall that those expensive marketing methods may be standard operating procedure for larger firms but that's no reason to assume that they are the best available options for microbusinesses. We don't do anything else like the big boys do. Why should our optimal marketing methods be any different?
What's required is undoubtedly training yourself to be innovative, pondering marketing from the Punchline Perspective. What are you trying to accomplish? And, within the context of your available resources, what is probably the most effective way of doing that?
While we're trying to put together the marketing puzzle for our own businesses and products and target markets, we should all remember that tried-and-true is not necessarily the way to go. And, for any activity under the sun, just because that's the way everybody has always done it is a pretty piss-poor reason why you should do it now.
Posted by The Journal Blogger at December 13, 2005 10:41 AM
