Who is your market segment?
Look at it as follows: It may be different for different products and services depending on who you want to serve. According to research out from BI Intelligence, the small business market is worth $12.1 trillion in revenue. There is a gap of $8 trillion between small and large businesses, which is a real problem to solve for your small business.
If you want to serve multiple industries and live multiple lives online, marketing a small business online is going to be the most complicated, but rewarding area of online marketing. Small businesses are more concerned with profitability, getting more clients, and more product sales, which necessitates marketing teams doing things differently. Therefore, you need to make sure that your small business has the strategies to address all of its various clients.
How do you market?
In your book, Tim Bartali shares some interesting findings of what small businesses can do right in order to go viral. He also offers great techniques for social media marketing — which is a critical part of the small business strategy. Most small businesses fail to market their Facebook page until after the brand has received hundreds of thousands of likes. The sooner you create a social presence on social networks, the easier it will be to gain clients and get more attention.
Social media marketing is a complex area with tons of different tactics that all work well and can be used perfectly. To get some of the basics of social media marketing here is Tim’s social media marketing methodology. You can use the time you save learning this method to also search for social media apps that make using social networks easier and discover easy ones to target influencers and big tech companies that are always trying to make it harder to succeed.
What to be smart about marketing
Marketing is easier if you do it the right way. That means keeping your small business first and foremost in your mind as you get online every day and figure out the best way to make money online. Follow Tim’s small business marketing guidelines and you’ll be marketing for a few more years. Small businesses often get high profiles in their first year. However, it takes many more years before the business is a standard contender in the marketplace. Therefore, small businesses need to be smart about how they market and take advantage of opportunities as they come.
This post is part of a weekly series called Making It Digital. It shows small businesses how to better utilize technologies to scale their businesses. You can sign up to receive it via email here.
