As a small business owner, don’t neglect the marketing aspect of your business. You may think you can open your doors and people will start walking in or visiting your site and start spending money. Well it’s not that easy. In order to compete with other small businesses in your industry as well as larger, better funded entities you have to develop effective marketing strategies to get the word out on your business. You need a way to get people in to your store or business, cash in hand and ready to buy. Here’s where to start.

Every marketing plan is different. Region, business type, products sold all contribute to how you should market your business. Before you decide on a marketing strategy write down the end result you want. Start from the end and work towards the beginning. For example, At the end of this marketing program I want to get 100 people to visit my store and I expect 40 of them to buy something.

Once you know the end result you want you can then figure out what you need to do to get there. Have concrete goals, with concrete numbers. Have a concrete time period and stick to it and finally, Write it down. I find the best way for a goal to come true is to write it down in a journal, planner, blog whatever, just somewhere that you will see it regularly

Once you have your end result you want you need to figure out who your audience is. When I say know your audience, you should try to find out as much as possible about your target audience. For example, if you sell tires, you should know who will be buying those tires. Will you target mainly men or try to focus on women. What is the average age of people who come into your store, do they own houses, do they have kids, what type of car do they drive, how often do they buy tires.

For that tire shop, knowing those intimate details about their customers will help you better target marketing programs for their audience. If you find out that the majority of your customers are men who are married between the ages of 37 and 60 you know that you may not advertise on myspace or friendster because chances are that’s not where your customers are coming from.

When developing marketing programs, try to find out as much information as possible about your customers. Put yourself in there shoes and ask yourself, would you buy from you. How does your business look from the outside looking in. Remember, you are selling your products to other people. You have to tailor your marketing and sales pitch to your customer not yourself. You have to know your customer better than they know themselves and use that understanding of them to sell them.

Hey, No one said it would be easy.

Small Business Marketing Research Resource

Intuit Future of Small Business Series

If you sell to other small businesses, Intuit (The Quickbooks company) has published a report on the future of small business in the USA. If this is your market this is a great resource to look at to get a really good idea of your target market.

The Six Costliest Mistakes You Can Make in Marketing To Women

Women are the primary consumers in the United States. Know how to effectively market to them. Everyone should read this article.

Marketing to Men

When and were do men shop and why.

Love Those Boomers

Marketing to the Largest age group this country has to offer: The Baby Boomers

Understanding Generation X

Marketing to Generation X’ers, An Introduction

create a website

A website is a necessity for every and all businesses today. Whether you are selling products online or have a storefront business in your local neighborhood, a website can offer you advertising opportunities as well as a communication portal between you and your customers. As a business owner you may not want to spend the thousands of dollars some web designers charge to build your website. Whether you don’t have the funds or would rather spend that money on inventory or expanding your business, you have decided you want to build a website for your business. Here is a step by step guide in building your website.

It’s not as hard as you may think. It takes time, patience as well as the willingness to learn and make mistakes. I will walk you through the basics for creating a web presence for your business.

Step 1 – Choose a domain name. A domain name is your website address name. yahoo.com is the domain name for yahoo. A domain name corresponds to an ip address (a numerical address) of the computer your website is hosted on. You need a domain name so people can find your website. Domain names are used because they are easier to remember than 72.09.0.100 which is a sample IP address. See How to Choose a Domain Name for tips on choosing a domain name.

Step 2 - servers to host your website. They will give you a specified amount of space (around 5GB) which is more than enough for your website. Many website hosting companies will also provide a free domain registration for one year if you use their service. Along with hosting your website, you will be able to create email addresses at your domain. ex. sam@mybiz.com See How to chose a web hosting company for tips on choosing a website hosting company.

Step 3 – Find a CMS Content Management System to build your website. A content management system is a software program that will aide you in building your site. A CMS allows you to write text and import pictures or what ever type of media you want into an online editor very similar to using mainstream word processing programs (Microsoft Word) and once you click save, the CMS program will create the HTML automatically so you won’t have to learn HTML. A CMS also allows you to update your site by editing pages easily. All CMS programs have a learning curve but once you get through that initial state of understanding how the particular CMS program you have chosen works, you will be able to build a simple to advanced website on your own. For tips on Content Manegement Systems click here.