Small Business Marketing

The essence of marketing is to understand your customers' needs and develop a plan that surrounds those needs. If you own a business or are planning to launch a business idea, you will want to grow your business. The most effective way to grow and expand your business is by focusing on organic growth. Organic growth is a financial term that means expansion in your business associated with an increase in sales and cost efficiency in your product/service processes.

Effective marketing can significantly impact your business’s revenue and profit with a good marketing plan. Your customers, consumers in general, will always have a variety of needs and wants. Your responsibility as a clever business owner should be to target those potential and existing customers with information describing what you can do for that customer’s needs. Your marketing techniques should reach the most amounts of people (most coverage) that would potentially be interested in your product/service with the least amount of amount of cost.

Effective marketing becomes a very powerful tool for small business owners for reaching their customers. It is also a medium for understanding the needs of your targeted customer segments and delivering the message that you are able to serve those needs. It is important to develop a plan that encompasses your marketing strategy and outlines how you plan on growing your business. Your marketing plan should have objectives for the business in terms of market position. Where is your business compared to rest of the industry and why? What do you need to do with your product/service to obtain a desired market position? A good marketing strategy answers these types of questions.

An important part of your marketing strategy should be who you will want to target as potential customers. Targeting customers who are in need of car repairs is a broad market focus and targeting customers who are in need of car repairs for Honda cars is a narrow market focus. The business focus in your marketing plan can either target a particular segment of customers (a niche market) or the broad general category of your product/service industry. This focus decision may be based on the amount of competition in your industry, the amount of diversity in your industry, and the sales you need to generate to break even in terms of profitability.

Your marketing strategy should help you develop a competition strategy. A competition strategy is a business strategy that will help you build a competitive advantage over your competitors. This can generally be done with lower costs or more benefits offered to the customer.

There are two general types of competitive advantage strategies: 1) cost advantage and 2) product differentiation. For example, as a business owner, you can build a competitive advantage over your competitors by providing competitive pricing or making your product/service stand out from the rest of the competitor’s (i.e. quality, packing, package deals or bundling, excellent customer service, customer convenience, longer warranty, etc.).  In either case, you should focus on delivering value to your customers, either through lower pricing or some other aspect of your product/service. In either case, these things are aimed to benefit your customer in some way.