Small Business Marketing

 Marketing.  This word is increasingly ambiguous these days.  Imagine if you marketed your business the same way for 10 years?  Your doors would have shut a long time ago.  That’s unless history repeats itself and all of a sudden you are standing on a street corner handing out flyers about your tantalizing home-made BBQ sauce to passer-by’s, while completely cutting short your email campaign and on-line ppresence.  This is something your grandma would do.  But not you!  Not today.  With the emergence of hundreds of on-line tools for small businesses, such as Craigslist, Facebook, SKYPE, Google Aps, and Linkedin, there is no excuse to have a decent on-line ppresence.  The problem is it’s overwhelming.  You may ask yourself, where do I start?  What do I do now? Well, those are questions I am asking myself.  As Marketing Manager of a small company here in Toronto, I know that there are applications and free tools to use to get the word out about my firms seminars.  The problem is finding the most appropriate tools that will reach my target market.  First I need to find them, grab their attention, than get their interest, grow their desire, and finally get them out to my seminars.  It’s tough.   I had a phone call the other day from a gentleman who wanted to know more about the seminars we hosted by our small business experts.  He couldn’t get enough of them.  He asked me when the next one was in his area, what the topic was, what time it started, and who was presenting.  As I grew increasingly impatient I told him that he could find all this information on our website.  His response “Yes, I know that, I am on the site now, but I wanted to hear it from you to make sure I wasn’t missing anything”.  Than it hit me.  My firm has to become more intimate with our loyal customers.  It is people like that gentleman that tell his friends, colleagues, family, and neighbours about what we do, about how valuable our free seminars really are.  My conclusion; viral marketing is one of the more important strategies for my firm. Regardless of how people find out about our seminars, it is our intimate, take-time-out-of-my-day-to-talk-to-my-customers approach that help fill our seats.   But lets be honest here, if it weren’t for meetup.com, Facebook, and other affordable on-line event listing sites, many people would be little informed about our seminars. As a small business owner or entrepreneur my suggestion to you would be to SEO your site, use as many affordable on-line tools as possible, keep them up to date, keep posted on the next ‘big’ tools (What would we do if Google became obsolete tomorrow?), always answer your customer inquiries within 12-24 hours of receiving them, and keep track of the tools you do use in order to stay on top.   So, back to the ambiguity of the term “marketing”.  Social networking, blogging, face-to-face networking, advertising, sales, seminars, business cards, are all forms of marketing.   Social marketing, to further define, was developed in the 1970s, when Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman understood that the same marketing principles that were being used to sell products to consumers could be used to sell ideas, attitudes and behaviours.  Blogging, on the other hand, is a passionate form of expressing a person’s thoughts, ideas, and interpretations.  See a pattern? Blogging is social marketing, which is marketing.  To find the original term for marketing I would have to visit the libraries archive section. But I bet I wouldn’t be too far off in saying that back in the 18th century marketing was defined as a form of persuading customers that one manufacturer was better than the other.   

Get more information about small business ‘How-to’s” at www.bizlaunch.ca- Canada’s Largest small business training firm.