Building the actual business

• What exactly is marketing and how does a small business use it?

• How do you know what the best way to market your business is? 

• How much should you spend on marketing? 

• Does marketing guarantee that you’ll make a profit?

• What are all the ways I can market my business?

• How much do I need to spend to generate a sale or a new customer? 

What exactly is marketing and how does a small business use it?

Marketing is the effort you put into telling others about your business. Typically you do this in a number of ways including advertising, word of mouth, email marketing, building and driving traffic to your website, direct mail and social media to name a few.

How do you know what the best way to market your business is? 

You’ll need to decide between the types listed in question above, typically the type of business you have will help determine the type of marketing. For example if you have an online business, you will probably run online ads, and work on getting your website found and listed on Google (this is called SEO or Search Engine Optimization).

How much should you spend on marketing? 

Optimally, you shouldn’t spend any more than you need to – but the GOAL is to spend less than the profit you’ll make on each sale. For example if you sell shoes and make a profit of $35 per pair sold, you shouldn’t spend more than $35 on advertising to generate that sale. 

You’ll need to keep track of your average profit per sale since all your shoes are different prices probably, and know how many sales you generate in a time period (say a week). Multiply the average profit per pair sold ($35) by the average number of sales (say it’s 10) and you have $350 in profit that week. Make sure you don’t spend more than $350 in ad costs to generate that $350/week in profit, or you’re losing money. 

Does marketing guarantee that you’ll make a profit?

Absolutely not.  Diving headfirst into ad spending and other marketing efforts is one of the most common ways new founders waste money and sometimes run out of it. 

It’s critical to understand the marketing choices you have first, before you start expending time, energy and cash on them.

Big take aways:   Social media is HUGE and is still a fairly cheap way to market. It is the make or break factor with a lot of businesses. If you’re good at building your social media audience (primarily via Instagram, Facebook and or YouTube), these audiences can fuel your business for years with the evergreen exposure you get from having all the posts, photos, videos etc. out there available for people to find.

Learn to use Facebook and Google online advertising slowly. Don’t dive in with a big ad budget of hundreds or thousands of dollars immediately. Start small. Spend $25 a week for a month or two while you learn to optimize your ads, increasing clicks, engagement and conversions, while you gently raise your ad spend. There are lots of ways to do this – more info coming soon on this site on how to effectively use online ads.

What are all the ways I can market my business?

• • Use social media to help people learn about your business and to answer questions for them regarding your business or industry. For example, if you’re a bookkeeper, post things like “When are your 1099s due? Follow this easy information” or “Don’t miss out on these 5 powerful tax strategies before you prepare your taxes” etc.
    
    Instagram, Facebook, YouTube are the biggies..  you can also use Twitter, Nextdoor.com and others.
    
    A great way to get started in building your social media following is to watch a bunch of Gary Vaynerchuk’s (Gary Vee) YouTube videos.  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCctXZhXmG-kf3tlIXgVZUlw
    
    Regarding Instagram, make sure to use as many hashtags as you can, to increase your views on any posts. Just posting on your Instagram page every day with something of value for your readers, and hashtagging well, can be worth a lot.  Remember that your posts should offer something of value to your users, not just act as ads for your products. Inspire them, give them a tutorial, how to, insight into the subject of your page/business, helpful advice, etc.
  • Have a clean professional looking website that clearly defines your product or service and explains quickly and clearly to the user exactly how your business is different than all the rest. 
  • Make sure your Google Business Listing is complete when a person googles your business there is a listing that is free from Google, which normally shows up on right side of page, or sometimes alongside other businesses on left side in a column..  Make sure that you claim your business and update your listing so it’s complete and current! https://support.google.com/business/answer/2911778?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en
  • Facebook ads – these are typically cheaper than Google Ads and most importantly, Facebook ads allow you to choose a highly specific group to show your ads to. You can set a limit to how much you spend, so you are in control, and again, the highly specific targeting features are amazing. ALWAYS SET A CAP for how much you want to pay within a week or a month. Learn about A/B testing, also known as iterative ad testing.
  • Facebook or Google Ad Retargeting – You’ve seen this when you’re browsing… you are on a site looking at some shoes at Zappos for instance. Then you’re on another site doing whatever else, and you see an ad for those Zappos shoes. That’s called retargeting. It allows you, the business owner running the ads, to display your ads after the user leaves your site. This results in greater brand awareness and the user has a chance to consider your product many times, instead of just once while they are on your site. 
  • Create an ebook for customers to download in exchange for their email address – This is a common technique – it asks people for their email so that you can market to them, and then sends them a link to download your ebook. An ebook can be as little as a few pages and as many as a few hundred, but it should provide valuable insight into whatever your customers care about. It also establishes you as a subject matter expert in their minds, raising your credibility and value. 
  • Connect with social media influencers on Instagram and Facebook and YouTube. Follow them, write to them, befriend them, get known by commenting and contributing on their feeds. Then contact them and ask if they would be willing to look at, try, test your product and if they like it, introduce their users to it. Send them some free product to try.
    
    Doing this is amazing if you can get it to work because influencers are users with social media channels that have tens or hundreds of thousands of followers. Even millions. This is an amazing amount of leverage and can really help introduce others to your business. Consider a special offer for their users too!
  • Google Ads – Usually more expensive than Facebook ads and also not targetable to your specific customer group. ALWAYS SET A CAP for how much you want to pay within a week or a month, because GoogleAds can go FAST. It’s very common to spend all your money on Google ad clicks and get no sales. You need to fine-tune your ad so that it’s speaking to your specific customer. It’s a numbers game – if you can get a click through rate (CTR) of more than 3% that’s fairly good and a conversion (sales) rate of more than 1-2% is good. This all varies based on your price, product and market. 
  • CraigsList – Still free to post – and a lot of people are on CraigsList. Make sure your subject line stands out.
  • Going to Meetups in your area and giving a short presentation about your business and why someone would want to use your business. Meetup.com is a great way to find local meetups where like-minded people are gathering to discuss and interact regarding their interests.
  • Networking among friends, family, co-workers and attending networking groups. You need to make sure everyone knows what you do. Don’t be bashful. 
  • Partner with symbiotic businesses – if you are a yoga studio, you might partner with a sportswear store selling workout clothing for instance. You can both promote each other’s businesses.
    
    If you do tours, find a restaurant to bring your tours for lunch, in return the restaurant promotes your tour. Look for win-wins like that.

• Contributing articles on LinkedIn – you can write blog pieces and contribute to LinkedIn – these articles can help with SEO and industry recognition

• Google Ads – more expensive than Facebook ads typically, but they get a lot of traffic and you pay per click.

• • Create, build and market to an email list – Do everything you can to build your email list, (Google how to do this) and send emails once a month to your list giving out tips about what your industry or news about your business. 
  • Conduct helpful seminars to potential clients. Explain to clients things they want to learn about and position your company as a solution to some of their needs. 
  • Excellent info about Sales Funnels and the 6 Principles of Marketing here: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/296526

• Run ads in local online or offline magazines or newspapers

• Go door to door – depending on what you’re selling, you can learn a lot by taking a clean, clear handout into all the stores or businesses they could be your customers, and talking to the owners or managers there. Find out if they are interested in what you have to offer, ask them how your product could be better or benefit them more, what they believe the correct price point would be, etc. You will learn an extraordinary amount if you take the time to talk to your potential customers – BEFORE you embark on building your entire business. 

• Gather testimonials

• Contribute to articles to blogs, magazines, newspapers, etc. and include a link to your site in the byline. Contact bloggers and tell them you would like to write an article within your sphere of expertise for posting on their site, and make sure you tell them you’d like a byline with your author name and website link.  (Without the website link, there’s no point to doing this really)

• Follow up with leads you get from website or wherever. Unless they tell you they don’t want to be contacted, follow up gently and at intervals so as not to bother them but to stay on their radar.

• Be willing to discount your product/service for a limited time to gain clients. “Lowest barrier to entry” is a good motto at the beginning, in other words, make it easy for people to love your business.
• Sell on Amazon – The biggest marketplace in the world. 
• Use the most up-to-date online marketing tools  Every year there are more new online marketing, CRM (Customer Relationship Management), selling, analytics and other tools available. So many new solutions and ways to connect with, find, and keep in touch with your customers. Seek out these new tools. 

Here are some more ways to reach out to customers and market your business:

• Flyers
• Coupons
• TV ads
• Direct mail
• Press release with local newspaper
• Collaborative marketing with partners
• On radio shows
• Webinars
• Trade shows
• Local meetups (try meetup.com)
• Podcasts
• Write articles that have to do with your special knowledge and offer them to magazines, bloggers, etc. for free  
• Writing to bloggers to share your interesting business offering
• Corporate speaking 
• Other speaking gigs
• At Farmer’s Markets
• Find an online company whose users could benefit from your service and partner with them
• Nextdoor.com
• Teaming up with other companies who provide like-minded services