House cleaning business cards: No matter what the size of your business, effective marketing can increase sales and boost profits. This Small Business Marketing Makeover will show you how to save time and money on marketing by implementing effective marketing strategies.
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Too many small businesses get and stay hung up on the cost factor of marketing. The first question they ask about any marketing strategy is, “How much does that cost?”
This is entirely the wrong question. The right question is “Will that target the right market?”, the market of potential customers for your products and/or services.
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For instance, creating and distributing flyers is an inexpensive method of advertising that small businesses often use – probably because it’s so inexpensive. Now suppose that you run a small business selling ski equipment. You design a bunch of flyers on your home computer, print them, and then go down to your local Community Centre and put one on the windshield of every vehicle in the parking lot – the night of the big Annual Horticultural Society meeting. Unless a lot of little old ladies suddenly decide to take up snowboarding, you’ve just wasted most of your time and energy.
Sure, it was inexpensive marketing – but it’s not effective marketing.
You need to switch your small business marketing telescope around and look through it from the right end – the end that will keep you focused on customer-directed rather than cost-directed marketing.
Focus on your target market.
Dump the idea that everyone interested in your products and/or services. They’re not. The reality is that only people who feel they have a need for your products and/or services will be interested in them – and those are the people your marketing has to reach. They are your target market.
Step 1 of effective marketing is knowing who these people are.
So first, learn how to zero in on your target market by using market segmentation.
Then work through Writing a Business Plan: The Market Analysis. This article, part of The Business Plan Outline series, directs you to write out your Market Analysis in paragraph form. You don’t have to do that as you’re not writing a business plan, but you do need to write down answers to the questions about your target market.
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Find your target market.
Step 2 of effective marketing is focusing your efforts on your target market and no one else. To do this, you have to know how the people in your target market behave.
You already know a fair bit about these people from the Market Analysis you just completed. To help choose the most effective marketing strategies to reach these people, you need to know the answers to just two more questions:
- How do the people in your target market access information?
For example, do they read newspapers and magazines, watch television, text, web search, email? Each of these ways of accessing information demands different marketing strategies.
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- Where do the people in your target market hang out?
Mainly at home? Shopping malls? Gyms or fitness centers? Skateboard parks?
The easiest way to do this is to pretend your target market is an individual. Try it. Create an avatar, a fictional person that represents a person in your target market, and answer the two questions above as completely as you can.
Evaluate your current small business marketing efforts.
Now that you know exactly who your small business marketing efforts need to reach, you’re ready to judge what you’ve been doing.
List all the marketing strategies you’re currently using. By each, write how likely your target market avatar is to see and pay attention to your marketing message.
Your turn. List all your recent small business marketing efforts and for each, note how likely it is your avatar saw and noted your marketing message.
Choose and implement at least two effective marketing strategies.
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If the results of the last exercise were that your avatar was extremely likely to see and respond to all of your current marketing efforts, that’s excellent! In that case, we recommend choosing and implementing at least one more marketing idea that has a very likely chance of reaching your target market avatar and tweaking your current small business marketing efforts to make sure they pinpoint your target market avatar’s needs as much as possible.
Remember, most people need to see and hear a message three to seven times before they will buy, so marketing strategies that allow repetition of the message over time are always going to be more effective than one-shot strategies.
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If your marketing efforts to this point have been a wash-out, as in the example of selling lingerie to Julie, the good news is that you’re starting with a clean slate. As “Julie” has never seen or heard your marketing messages before, they’ll all be fresh and new to her!
You want to choose two new marketing strategies that would be most likely to reach your target market avatar and implement them. One thing you want to do is get your marketing online because that’s where BusinessHAB gets most of her information.
And based on what you know about Julie, you have three main points of connection; young children, exercise and cooking.
Set time frames to evaluate your marketing efforts.
The trick to this step of effective marketing is to make sure that your time frames are reasonable. Marketing, like exercise, does not produce instant results; it’s the repeated practice that gets you to your goal.
So don’t make the mistake that so many people make of implementing your new marketing strategy for a month or so and then abandoning it because “it’s not getting results.” Give it the time it needs to succeed.
A strategy such as placing online ads, though, would have a shorter time frame for evaluation, such as one to three months. Do what you need to do to remind yourself to return and evaluate your marketing efforts in terms of their effectiveness in reaching your target market; use a phone app, your Day-Timer, your email or whatever calendar system you use to do this on a specific date for each marketing strategy.
Add to Your Small Business Marketing Repertoire
Once you’ve “mastered” the new effective marketing strategies you’ve chosen (i.e. you’ve gotten the results you wanted out of them or made a considered decision to abandon one or more of them based on your evaluation of results), it will be time to add others to your small business marketing repertoire – always bearing in mind, of course, that effective small business marketing is targeted marketing and that a target market is made up of real people, people that need to be persuaded to buy your products and/or services.