Marketing Your Small Business

By Molly A. Lopez, CAE, President/Owner

Are you asking yourself the right questions?

I recently attended a valuable session at the NAWBO Central Iowa 2011 Women Mean Business Summit. The session topic was, “Innovative Marketing Solutions,” and in addition to her comments Sharon Soder, the presenter, distributed a brief resource piece called, “Questions for Marketing Your Small Business!” For more information, Sharon Soder can be reached at www.032companies.com. This piece offered several good considerations and reminders and is worth sharing.

Questions for Marketing Your Small Business:
- Developing a Solid Marketing Foundation – Who Are You?
- Does your company have an easy to understand corporate identity?
- What is your USP (unique selling point)?
- What are your company’s top 10 selling and most profitable services?
- Does your company have written marketing goals, objectives and strategies?
- Does your company measure its marketing return on investment?

Finding the Right Target Audience – Who is Your Target Market?
- Who is buying your products right now and why?
- Do you need a target audience and why are they so important?
- Do you know how to find the customers with the highest propensity to buy your company’s products and services?
- Could direct marketing via postal mail increase your retails traffic?
- Is e-mail marketing an effective medium for reaching your customers?
- Is broadcast radio/TV advertising too expensive?

Perform a Marketing Competitive Analysis – Who is Your Competition?
- What Internet marketing strategies are they using to market their web site?
- What media strategy are they using in their print/broadcast advertising campaigns?
- What competitive positioning statements are they using in their product marketing literature?
- What incentives or seminars are they offering in their direct mail campaigns?

Building a Web Site – Making it Relative to your Business.
- Do your Web site descriptions contain effective “call to action” messages that will convince customers to click through to your site?
- Are your Web site titles, content and keywords engineered correctly to optimize your site for maximized free Internet marketing?
- Does your Web site collect business lead information from prospective customers?
- If applicable, does your site sell products worldwide via an electronic shopping cart?
- Does your Web site push information to customers automatically using electronic newsletters, e-mail blasts and promotional offers?