I’m often asked to work with small businesses to help with their marketing.

The thing is, marketing need not be expensive as long as you know what you’re doing and for the small business I recommend that you try out different marketing mixes and test, test, test until you nail a marketing approach that works best for your business.

No matter what any “marketing guru” may say, no one really knows how effective a marketing campaign will be until you’ve tried.

The first thing you need to do is work out what budget you want to play with. And it is to play with.

You need to go into this with the mindset that you’re going to use this money to see what works and what doesn’t. You’ll then modify, refine and test some more until you nail it.

So many small businesses start with a budget, they implement some ideas and then because they do not get an immediate return they just bin what they were doing when all it took was just a couple of changes and bingo! A winning formula.

So your mindset is really important when going into this.

So you’ve got a budget. Now you need to work out what to spend it on.

If I were you I would really get to grips and understand everything there is to know about your prospects and clients first. Who are they? How do they make ther buying decisions? Where do they “hang out” on the internet or otherwise?

Armed with this you will be better informed as to where to advertise, what campaigns to run and how to split your marketing spend. 

Then select some marketing approaches and do everything that you can to measure the response that you get. Direct marketing works best for small businesses rather than just brand awareness so bear that in mind when conducting pay per click campaigns, direct mail and when running adverts.

Then it’s a case of testing, measuring and tweaking. There’s lots of advice on this site but my biggest piece of advice is to just do something! And then modify what you’re doing as you go.

Happy marketing

Sean

Sean McPheat

Marketing Consultant – Motivational Speaker - Internet Marketing Consultant