Small Business Marketing
What is Marketing for Small Business?
Marketing is essentially any activity that promotes your products or services to potential customers. It helps fill your sales funnel with prospects so that your sales people can take them through your sales process and hopefully generate a sale from them. The biggest difference between general marketing and marketing for small business is that small business has a more limited budget. In other words, their return on investment for marketing is a lot more critical.
What Small Business Marketing Works?
With small business it is critical that whatever marketing they undertake, it generates leads and sales at a reasonable cost. Unlike big business, small business can't really afford to spend thousands of dollars on a branding exercise to promote their overall brand with the hope that this may generate leads and sales down the track somewhere. Now don't get us wrong, we're not saying that branding isn't important, we just believe that a good marketing campaign is a higher priority. So what small business marketing strategies have the best return on investment?
Outbound Marketing
This is also often referred to as Interuption Marketing, as that is exactly what it does. You interupt people in their daily lives with your marketing message hoping to find the odd person who is currently interested in what you have to sell. This covers such forms of advertising as Radio, TV, Newspapers, Magazines and Signange etc. Whilst these strategies definitely work, they can cost a bit per sale as you need to target a lot of people to hope to atract a few.
Find out more about Outbound Marketing.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound Marketing is where you attract people to your business who are currently interested in your products or services. Unlike outbound marketing where you are just advertising to anyone hoping to interest a few, inbound marketing is more targeted and is only really seen by people looking for what you sell. Common outbound marketing strategies are website content marketing, search engine optimisation, social media and Adwords.
Find out more about Inbound Marketing.
Digital Marketing (Web, Online and Internet Marketing)
Digital Marketing essentially covers any form of marketing done on the internet. So this actually covers strategies in both inbound and outbound marketing. This is what we specialise, so to learn more simply look around our website.
Traditional Marketing
This is all those marketing methods that small business has been using for generations. It is also often referred to as offline marketing as it covers those strategies that don't involve the internet. Common examples are similar to outbound strategies as well as things like Yellow Pages etc. Whilst these still work, we truly believe that you get a better return on your investment by spending it on online strategies. Now these aren't all the different marketing strategies available to small business, but it defintiely covers the main ones you'll come across and maybe wonder what they mean. Whilst they all have their place, we believe that every small business should have a good digital marketing strategy above all else, as this not only gives you a great return on your investment, but importantly can be measured very easily.
Frequently Asked Questions about SMALL BUSINESS MARKETING
Inbound Marketing is a relatively new marketing term, coined in 2006 by an internet marketing company called Hubspot. It was their name for what was already known as Permission Marketing. Permission Marketing was a concept developed by Seth God...
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Outbound Marketing is best known as Interruption Marketing. This is because the aim is to interrupt people and try to get their attention so that you can sell your product or service to them. The best example of this would be televisioon ads; w...
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Beyond the Marketing Funnel
What are consumer decisions? What is meant when you hear Marketers talk about the consumer decision journey or the purchase decision process?
A consumer or purchase decision process or journey is the ...
Learn MoreFor more in depth small business marketing information visit our Small business marketing Information page