The Small Business Promotion & Marketing Guide

Every business needs to be mindful of how they promote themselves. Be it a retail operation, educational institution, or charity. They all require to get the message out there and attract customers, students, or donations to their cause. Depending on the aims of the specific organization, there will be varying strategies open to us. In this guide, we will look at the various aspects of promotion and which are most appropriate.

Identify Your Aims

There are many different aims that marketing can have. Such as awareness of a new product. You could be promoting an event at your premises, or the opening of a new business or location? You might just be looking to drive traffic to your business, it is important to know if you are seeking traffic to your location or digital traffic to your website. You can even use online methods to promote offline events, and offline methods to promote online occurrences.

Know Your Target Audience

It is a must that you know who your target audience is for any campaign. You will have an overall profile of a customer of your business. Let's take an example of a company that modifies vehicles for drivers with mobility issues. They will have a general customer-base of adults with disabilities. But within their target audience, there will be sub-sections that differ from each other. One such sub-section will be customers who require wheelchair access and transportation, and another is those who have the use of only one arm. Each customer will need different products, whether it is a ramp for the back of the van or a steering aid. You would have slightly different promotional campaigns for each product. You could sponsor the One-Armed Golf World Championship for the steering aid and wheelchair basketball for the ramp. These decisions are key to achieving success.

Decide on a Budget

How much to spend on promotion is always a balancing act. In your business plan, you should ensure that your promotional strategy is planned in detail. It is not uncommon to cap this figure as a percentage of turnover or profit. If you set a 10% limit on your advertising budget, it helps prevent you from going over budget. It does not mean that you can decide to increase this budget if circumstances show it is necessary, but if this is done in an unorganized fashion you could run into financial trouble.

Consider Appropriate Methods

Once you have your budget in place, it is then time to assess how much of it is to be assigned to different parts of the business, and with different promotional methods. When starting, you may need a lot of help. A professional media partner may be the way to go. It would be wise to consider a company such as this one, with two decades of experience in public relations planning, social media, web design, and video production. You can then be sure of a professional product. You are then able to concentrate on core business activities. Rather than trying to learn marketing from scratch.

Be Prepared for Success

If our promotional campaign is a success, we need to be prepared to capitalize on it. Consider how an increase in sales or orders is going to impact the operation? Is your workforce happy? Do you have enough staff in the first place? If not, then the increased stress placed could create huge problems. Be sure that you have planned to deal with this extra work before it arrives on your doorstep. The tricky part is that you can never be sure what level of increase your promotions will bring. It is important to keep things as flexible as is possible. Any new staff should initially be on a temporary contract, this allows them to be let go if the expected increase does not materialize. You could even consider agency staff or outsourcing certain tasks. Getting this wrong may place irreversible damage to your reputation.

Monitor Results

There is little point in marketing if you have no idea how well it worked? It is essential to know if the money spent on a series of adverts has positively affected your sales. Using a simple customer survey can tell you a lot. It will be able to tell you how they found out about you. It is then possible to know which marketing is working. But you can also see what type of customers you have? Male or female? Young or old? This demographic data will inform future decisions.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes