Promoting a Small Business

What You Need to Know About Marketing & Sales

Promoting a small business must occur if sales are to be made. You need a solid foundation in small business marketing and sales, as well as PR for small business.

Let's take the mystery out of small business marketing...

Regardless of your product or service, a sale has to happen for your business to exist. The best way to determine where to get a sale is through marketing and a marketing plan. The marketing plan is an essential part of your overall business plan. It has two parts: Market Analysis and Market Strategy & Promotion.

The 3 steps of market analysis are:

1. Defining your business idea
2. Identifying your target markets
3. Evaluating your competition

Market strategy and promotion is equally as important in promoting a small business as market analysis is. This second half of your marketing plan is about the what, when, why and how you plan to offer your products and services to your target market.

By the way, if you'd like to learn more about how to analyze your market and develop a marketing strategy and promotion plan, you'll want to check out our Business Buffet "Help Yourself" video learning series:
Business Buffet on Marketing – helping small business help itself to profit, by making business learning fun.

Creating effective appeals is essential, so the people you're trying to reach try to reach you.

There are 5 main areas where marketing strategy can help you with promoting a small business:

1. Positioning, to create a perception in the minds of your target customers
2. Identifying product value via unique personal, emotional, and rational advantages
3. Establishing a marketing plan as part of the overall business plan
4. Estimating customer reality
5. Projecting sales potential

You'll need to understand the "4 Ps of Marketing"... product, place, promotion, and price. You'll also need to be able to estimate the sales potential of your product or service.

In the end, a successful market strategy is a target customer, plus thoughtfully-positioned product, place, promotion and price elements that "fit" your target.

So, if you're ready to get started in learning how about promoting a small business, explore these pages:

• Develop a small business marketing plan
• Learn about small business advertising and promotion
• Use relationship selling as the foundation for an effective sales process

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