One of the best things about marketing for small business is that it is affordable. Many businesses are going broke because they can’t afford to buy everything you need. If you don’t have that luxury, you can grow your business in many ways that are affordable.
Marketing for small businesses is really a great way to get free exposure. You can easily be on the front page of a business directory and have it be the first thing people go to when they search for your business. Also, you can build a small business list to show potential clients that you are a person who takes the time to check out their business.
I have a tendency to fall into the trap of assuming that if I have a great idea, then I need to spend tons of money to get it to fruition. Not true. If you have an idea that has a potential for a great future, and you can afford to put in the work to make it happen, then great. But if a business plan is nothing more than a list of expenses and a list of numbers, it is unlikely that it has that much of a future.
You have to go to the next step. That’s the most important. You have to find the business person that has the biggest vision and the biggest idea for the future. It will be a business. But it’s not a business without a marketing plan.
And that marketing plan, in my opinion, is what I call a marketing package. I call it that because it is designed to help you build a small business. In many ways a marketing package is all marketing. It’s a list of things that you need, all the things you need to create the marketing plan for your business.
I’ve had the opportunity to work with many marketing packages, and in all of them I’ve found one thing they all have in common. They all have a ‘buy and sell’ element that makes the business much more likely to succeed.
We all have a tendency to keep our companies small because we want to maximize our profits. But because small businesses are often the only way we can make a living in a time where there are so many more things that need to be done, the only way we can make a living is by selling a product that is so successful that others begin to emulate it.
We’ve all been guilty of this, but we’ve been more afraid of the unknown than we have of failure. Selling a product with a huge and untested market is easy, but selling a product that is untested and only moderately successful can be a risky business.
Small business owners like to say that if youre a small business owner youve got to take risks, but that doesn’t mean you just sit down and start designing the perfect product and expecting customers to magically appear out of nowhere. The best way to take on a risky business is to make sure that you have a well thought out plan, and then execute it.
The big risk in marketing products is that you make the wrong decision about what your market is. Marketing a product may be cool or a bit quirky, but its only cool and quirky if the market has a good enough reason to choose to buy from you. For example, if a customer has a bad attitude, it can be hard to get them to see the value in your product. But if they have a good reason to buy from you, it may be much harder.
