Are You Doing These 3 Marketing Musts? -

These three marketing musts are heavily weighted in a business marketing plan and should be taken and implemented very seriously. We would love to hear about your marketing gems too, please comment below!

Look Through Your Customers Eyes

Yes, seriously. If you have not yet fully been your own customer, you must do this. If it’s been a while, do it again. As the business owner, you have a different perspective on the company, and it’s heavily biased. Put yourself in your customers shoe and go through the process from start to finish with one of your products or services. If you don’t have a brick and mortar shop, rather are primarily online, then go somewhere other than your home or office to do this, you need to be with clear and open mind. You may also want to secret shop your competitor to see how their process works. The end goal here is to make the buying process easy and seamless for the customer. Look for areas in which you may improve upon.

Branding

This is another simple and important element of being a small business owner that is undervalued and often overlooked. Being a small business, you need to get the most bang for your buck in every aspect. Branding is important because this is what the world sees of your business, and where their opinion of you is formed. All of your print, online, vehicle, and every other mean should have cohesive branding: the same logo, the same colors, fonts, layout, and overall feel. If you have a new logo on your business card, it best be on all other marketing materials. If you change your phone number or email address, it best be also changed on everything else as well. A potential customer should look at any one of your marketing materials and not question who you are, they should at all times know.

Internet Marketing

By now you’ve surely heard of this concept, but are you actively including this in your marketing plan? A solid company base and presence on the internet really does take a good amount of time. Get started sooner rather than later and don’t use it as a last ditch effort. The internet has many free tools, all of which help you get more customers. Within this marketing bubble, there are many elements: having a healthy website, an optimized website, being linked to by other websites, advertising on websites, amongst many other things. Most of these only cost time, you don’t have to spend money to get a good foundation. Check out our Resources page to start out.

Another super informative resource: watch this episode of the Small Businesses Do It Better show with Sue Kirchner, who shares her tricks on writing content that continues to bring in traffic, where she gets most of her traffic from, which social network brings the most visitors to her website and her tips on getting press coverage.