According to Small Business Administration research, most small business owners say they wish they had invested more into marketing when they started their businesses. A good marketing effort can help start-up businesses gain customers quickly, allowing the business to get off to a good start on sound financial footing.

Marketing is more than just buying a few TV or print ads or hiring a guy in a gorilla suit to stand outside your location. Marketing is the evolution of a brand and image for you business, and should not be undertaken in a haphazard, fly-by-night manner.

The following are a list of proven marketing strategies that work for small businesses, particularly recent start-ups.

1. Send a press release to your local newspaper or media outlet. Many newspapers and other outlets have a section in their print edition or website for community happenings. By sending information about your business to these outlets, you may be able to take advantage of a little free advertising to get the word out about your business. Also, if your press release has a unique angle or concerns a special event, you may get a news story out of it, increasing your business’ public exposure at a minimal cost.

It may also be beneficial to send out a few press releases each year and cultivate relationships with local media, as they will be more likely to help their friends with coverage.

2. Have business cards printed. It may seem a little 20th century, but the business card has been around more than a century for a very good reason. It provides potential clients with a portable and quick to access point of contact for your business. Once you get some business cards printed out, distribute them around town in public spaces like diners and gas stations, and carry a few around to distribute yourself to potential clients.

3. Build a database. When possible, try to get client contact information so you can get in touch with them about sales or new products. By keeping detailed contact information, such as individual customers’ favorite purchases, you can make more targeted promotions.

4. Build a brand. When starting your business, have a definite brand image in mind for your enterprise. Have a logo for your business, and have it printed on a variety of media, such as business cards, t-shirts, mugs, etc. By building a likeable brand, you can build consumer loyalty  and build a sense of community around your business. The more you can get your customers to identify with your business, the more likely they will be to support it for the long term.

5. Opening event. Don’t just open shop one day. Stage a grand opening to make a first impression with the community that you are serving. Grand openings for home-based or online businesses may be impractical, however. Instead try offering opening discounts or other incentives to get your name out and score some inital customers.

6. Keep track of your marketing efforts. Track how foot traffic or web traffic to your business, sales and other metrics go up or down after a marketing effort. From this data you can see what marketing efforts are working, and the ones that you may need to re-tool or abandon. Marketing dollars are precious, so making the best use of each one is key to your success.

7. Don’t spend it all in one place. The key to a successful marketing strategy is duration. If you spend all of your marketing budget on just one or two promotions, these events or deals will eventually subside from the public consciousness, leaving you with minimal benefit. Dole out your marketing budget carefully throughout the year, sponsoring several promotions in order to stay current with the public.

8. Let’s make a deal. One easy way to market is by offering promotional deals or discounts. If you’re new to a business, this is a great way to get the public in your store and if you’re an established business, it’s a great way to get them to come back. Even if you’re an online or home-based business, offering the occasional price break is an excellent way to make sure your existing customers stay loyal, and to attract a little new blood to your revenue stream.

9. Guerilla marketing – Unconventional marketing that gets the most bang for the advertising dollar has become the new wunderkind of marketing in the current economic environment. Publicity stunts, direct contact marketing and other techniques have proven to be very effective for smal niche businesses. Guerilla marketing relies on creativity and improvisation, so it doesn’t hurt to be a little unconventional with your marketing approaches when trying this tactic.

10. Get in good with public safety. By offering discounts to cops and firefighters, you gain a valuable customer base, and one that can keep your business safe. It also helps to reach out to civic organizations, giving them donations when you are able. By becoming affiliated with these groups, you gain loyal customers.

By using these 10 marketing tips, small businesses and new small businesses can grow their brand and make the most out of their marketing dollars. As your business grows and prospers, you’ll likely be able to increase the scope and your dollar investment in marketing your business, moving into areas such as television, radio and print advertising, social media marketing, search engine optimization anThe importance of good marketing in a competitive economy cannot be understated, as you can go broke having the best products and services in the world if no one knows about them.

Because of the high visibility of your site, and the importance that first impressions make, it is important to have a site that is well-designed in terms of aesthetics as well as functionality. Online sales are a huge part of retail revenue – just last year, online retail sales reached $177 billion. And because of the level playing field online selling can give small business to compete with larger competitors, having a top notch web site for your business is a must.

While many business owners can easily design attractive and reliable web pages on their own, less tech savvy owners may want to turn to a professional web developer to help build their Internet pages. Web developers are professionals who develop software specifically for Internet applications and webpages. They can provide you with the technical expertise neccessary to take the concepts you have for your website and bring them online.

A good web developer will be able to create an attractive, functional site for your small business. He or she will be able to use the resources you make available to him to make your site perform to the limits of those resources. The web developer you want will be able to take input from you and put it into action onscreen, and will also be able to advise you about ideas you may have that are impractical or unfeasible.

A qualified web developer will need to be skilled in hand-coding HTML and should also be able to work in CSS. Your web developer should also be familiar with JavaScript, XML, CGI scripting, and should also be able to work with a variety of servers.

When advertising for a web developer, you’ll need to determine whether you’ll need a full time employee or someone who can work on a contractual or part-time basis. For many small business start-ups, all that is needed is for the web developer to do the initial work in getting the site up off the ground and instructing the owner how to do basic maintenance. However, it is recommended that you keep the web developer’s contact information handy in case technical support or advice is needed.

Web developers can be found online using Elance or Craigslist, or you may want to turn to some fellow business owners you know and trust to help you find a reliable web developer.

When hiring a web developer, you’ll want to ask specifically about their technical skills. Ask for a detailed resume, including their education and previous employers. Ask to see what web sites they’ve helped design and check the references they’ve provided to get an idea of the quality of work they’re able to produce.

When talking to potential hires, outline what you want done with your site, and ask the interviewee direct questions about how he or she would accomplish your goals. This gives you the opportunity to assess the developer’s technical skills, as well as the developer’s skills in communicating with his or her potential employer. Technical skills are important, but the ability to understand and adapt to an employer’s requests are also key skills that your web developer must have.

When hiring a web developer you’ll want an individual or team who can design the information architecture – that is, how information is organized – on your site. It’s also important to choose a developer with graphic design skills who can pick attractive graphics, colors and fonts for your site. Programming skills are, of course, a must as well and the developer or developers you hire should also have the neccessary skills to test and launch the new site.

Be upfront about the technology and resources you’re able to provide the web developer and ask about the web developer’s own equipment and resources. And before making a final agreement, be sure to outline exactly what you want from the web developer and also work with him or her to come up with a series of milestones and a completion date. The dates don’t have to be set in stone, but having regular progress markers is important to getting the job done in a timely manner.

A web host is essentially the company or organization that owns and maintains servers, high-performance computers that stay connected to the Internet at all times and keeping the web sites they hold up and operational. When your business uploads its website files to the web host’s servers and the host gets your site’s domain name properly configured, your site will go live and be available to online visitors.

Web hosts have varying rates and typically charge either a monthly or yearly rate. The rate is often based on the amount of data your site needs the webhost’s servers to store or how much data is transferred in and out of your site per month. The fancier your site is and the more traffic it gets, the more expensive it will likely be to host the site.

According to recent research, the cost of web hosting typically runs from $10 per month to thousands of dollars per year. Most small businesses pay between $180 and $600 per year for a simple web site. Small business owners who have extensive online databases or a large volume of online sales may pay $250 per month for web hosting.

There are free web hosts out there, but most of them place advertising on your site to offset the revenues they aren’t receiving from you. If you’re okay with other sites advertising on your site, and don’t have a big budget for web hosting, this may be an accepatable option for you.

When looking for a web host for your small business it is important to find one that is reliable. If your host’s servers frequently crash, people will not be able to visit your website. For small businesses that rely on online sales, having a buggy website can be fatal to their business. When picking a web host, you should shoot for a host with a minimum uptime of 99 percent or better.

Another key consideration when choosing a web host is whether the host has enough data storage space for your needs. If your site needs to grow in the future, your data needs may outgrow your host’s capacity. Changing web hosts can be extremely inconvenient. Before choosing a web host, determine if they have the capacity to handle your future needs as your online presence grows. You’ll also need to make sure the site does not have restrictive file size uploads, as some hosts have limits on the size of the files you upload or restrictions on the type of files you may upload, allowing you to only upload simple HTML and GIF or JPG files. Make sure your host offers you the flexibility you need with regard to file size and type.

Bandwidth allotment is also important, particularly if your site is going to have a lot of traffic. You’ll likely need about 1 to 3 GB per month in bandwith if you’re making sales online.

You’ll also want to choose a web host that is compatible with a variety of web design programs, as your business may have needs that require the use of specific design programs. A good web host should allow you to use FTP, PHP, Perl, SSI, .htaccess, telnet, SSH, MySQL, and crontabs.

If you’re going to be taking payments online, it’s important that your web host allows SSL. SSL is a cryptographic protocol that allows for the secure transmission of data such as credit card information via the Internet.

Your web host should have a user-friendly system that allows you to easily and conveniently make changes to your website. The process should also be quick, as you m

Lastly, a good web host should have an excellent technical support staff. You should be able to contact them 24/7 and they should be able to quickly address and resolve any problems that you may have.

When looking for all these important attributes, your best resource is perhaps other business owners. Ask them who they use for their web hosting needs, what service plans their host offers and how reliable the service is. Also visit their sites to see how they look. If you like what you see, chances are that you have a winner.

The key to making advertising and marketing successful is found in knowing how to approach the market and using the right advertising strategies. The following ideas will help get the marketing started and get in motion a strategy to bring in more clients and more money.

Marketing Tips

Before a small business can implement and advertising strategy they need to first understand some key ideas to successful marketing. Some of the most common tips for small business marketing include:

• Customers and products: It is vital to know and understand the product that is being marketed and the customers that are purchasing the product or utilizing the services offered. This may sound like a no-brainer; however, it is often a much overlooked part of marketing. Many businesses, both big and small, often attempt to market to the entire purchasing public when they should be marketing their product to smaller, more select groups of people.

The group that should be marketed to is the focal group and is usually a section of the population that uses the product or service offered. For instance, if the service is errand running and assistance with getting around town, senior citizens would be an excellent core target; however, young adults in a college town might not be apt to utilize this service and targeting them would be a waste of advertising money.

•  The Message: The advertising slogan or message is vital. It should be concise, catchy and easy to remember. It must tell the customer exactly what the business or product does and why customers should use it.
• Marketing Materials: Every piece of paper that the small business uses is a marketing piece. Letterhead, envelopes, invoices, sticky notes, business cards, pens and pencils and much more. If it can have a logo put on it, then it should be considered a piece for marketing. One look around at coffee cups that people carry around every day is proof of the advertising power that marketing materials have.
• Networking: Networking is another vital marketing tip that is often overlooked. At the end of the day, many business owners are tired and simply want to go home; however, if some time and energy is invested in business groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, the number of business contacts earned can change the way the business operates and the money it makes. Networking is simply meeting more people who ultimately will help spread the word about the business.
• Referrals: Ask current clients and customers for referrals and use these to earn more business. Testimonials are powerful tools in advertising.
• Partner: Use the networking tool to find other businesses that target the same core group of customers. Partner with them in promotional materials where each company refers customers to the other. This can be a highly effective marketing tool.
• The Internet: Utilize the Internet to put get the business name out in the public. Blogs, social networks and other free options abound on the Internet that can help circulate the business name. Take the time to start a blog and keep it up daily so that the content is always fresh. The blog will have links to the company website and thus bring in more clients.

These are just a few tips on putting together a marketing strategy. The next step is finding places to advertise and put the marketing ideas to work.

Advertising

Today’s technologically advanced world has made it possible to advertise in many places for very little money. There are also other marketing strategies that won’t blow the budget and at the same time will help bring in customers. Some of these include:

• Social Network Advertising: These are typically pay-per-click advertisements. The ads are only charged for if they are clicked through. These are extremely inexpensive and can put the company in front of hundreds of thousands of viewers.
• Mail Outs: These can be inexpensive as well, if they are designed in-house. Once they are designed, the main cost is the mailing list and the postage. A mailing house can be helping with this part of the process.

These are just two of the many advertising ideas that are possible and can be successful when using the marketing tips presented earlier. Small business advertising is an essential part of a long and successful business.

Affiliate marketing is essentially a means of marketing in which a business pays affiliates for purchases or visitors to the business’ site that result from the marketing efforts of the affiliates.

For example an affiliate may entice visitors to its sites to make purchases from a business or may direct visitors to a business site from their own site. For each purchase made or site visit made, the business will pay the affiliate an agreed upon amount in cash or via a rewards program.

Affiliate marketing can help drive traffic to your business website, as referrals from popular sites can bring an influx of visitors to yours.

Here’s a few steps to help you get started selling your products through affiliates:

1. Get your company listed on an affiliate networks such as Clickbank, Commission Junction or Google Advertiser.

2. Negotiate a reasonable pay-per-click or pay per sale commission with the network or affiliates you’ll be working with.

3. Help prepare some marketing tools for your affiliates such as product reviews, pictures, sales letters, etc.

4. Monitor your site traffic and sales to see if your affiliate marketing efforts are productive.

The downside of affiliate marketing is that it will cut into your profits. However, if the sales volume created by your affiliates is large, it will more than justify the cost of paying your affiliates.

You may be able to offset some of the costs of affiliate marketing by becoming an affiliate site yourself. By linking to businesses that don’t sell competing products, but may be related to your business, you can rake in some affiliate money of your own.

Despite the many benefits a website can offer small businesses, nearly half of them don’t have one. According to a 2010 marketing study, about 46 percent of small businesses had websites. That’s up from 33 percent two years previously, but nevertheless, the Web is still underutilized by small business.

This is unfortunate because small businesses can use their online presence to compete on a more equal footing with larger businesses. An effective small business website can actually give small businesses a competitive advantage over their larger competitors, particularly if the site’s design is more attractive and user friendly.

When building a website for your business, take in mind the following steps to create the best possible site:

1. Pick the right web address – When creating your website, you’ll need to pick a web address. Domain names are hot commodities, so you may not be able to get the domain name you want or you may have to pay a premium to get it. Picking a domain name is a lot like picking a business name, it needs to be creative, attention-getting and appropriate for your business. In fact, it’s encouraged for new business owners to pick a domain name while they’re developing the name for their business.

If you’re an established business that’s going online, you’ll need to pick a domain name that is easy to remember and fits your business. As mentioned above, you may not be able to just use the name of your business, as the domain name may already belong to someone else. When purchasing the domain name for your business, you may also want to purchase similar domain names to prevent competitors or malicious individuals from associating your business name with inappropriate content.

2. Design a professional-looking site – Consider your website as your online storefront. An unattractive, cluttered storefront will not attract customers. Your site needs an attractive, clean design that is appropriate for your business. Use videos, pictures and graphics as needed, but don’t let them overwhelm your site. Also shy away from overly plain, cookie-cutter looking sites, as it gives your business an amateur image.

3. Make sure it works. Periodically look over your site to make sure it is functioning properly and provides an easy shopping or browsing experience for your visitors. The key is simplicity. You want to ensure that visitors to your site can get to information about products and services quickly, with a minimum of clicks. It’s also important to make sure the process is intuitive, as the last thing visitors to a website want to do is spend a lot of time reading instructions about how to view or buy something.

4. Monitor your traffic. Once you launch your website, you’ll want to monitor how much traffic it gets to determine how effective it is. If your traffic is getting a lot of traffic, that means its easy for your customers to find and the design of the site is likely conducive to a good online experience. If you’re not getting a lot of traffic, you may need to think about redesigning your site or checking it to see if it has any technical problems that may be preventing it from getting the traffic it needs.

5. Hire a professional. If you can afford the services of a competent web technician, by all means hire one to help design and maintain your site. While basic web design is easy to learn, and, in time, something you can easily learn to do on your own, the launch of your business website may be something you want to entrust to an experienced web professional. There are a variety of websites where you can find good web designers who will work at competitive rates to help design a good site for your business.

6. Consider using SEO – Search Engine Optimization can help ensure that customers are directed to your site by search engines. Studies show that most people only look at the first two pages of search results when looking for something online, so getting a high rank on search engine results for specific keywords is important. There are a variety of ways you can boost your rankings, many of which, such as the strategic use of keywords throughout the copy of your site, you can do yourself. For a little extra edge, you may want to employ a search engine optimization specialist who can help you with the more technical and esoteric aspects of web design to help maximize your search engine results.

7. Online payment – Setting up an online store or a means of allowing your customers to pay their bills online can be a winner for small businesses, as it can provide them with a wider regional footprint for their goods or can allow their customers a more convenient means of paying bills. When setting up an online payment option, it is important to use a payment processor you can trust to correctly send you the appropriate funds for a transaction and protect the identity of your customers. Paypal is often regarded as the industry standard for online payment and is easy to incorporate into most small business websites.

8. Alliances – You may want to post links to other small businesses you’re friendly with to build up a mutual network of support. By referring your customers to other small businesses they may like and having them do vice versa, you help protect your small business community while gaining new potential customers.

By building a professional, well-designed website, you can take advantage of the many marketing and sales opportunities provided by the growing proliferation of the Internet in homes and offices throughout the world. The Internet has become nearly ubiquitous in American society, giving businesses with websites a clear advantage over companies that don’t have a way to reach out to their customers in their homes. Small businesses, increasingly under pressure from consolidation and globalization, cannot afford to skip these opportunities.

The great thing about these methods of marketing is that they’re virtually cost-free. Chances are that your business already has a computer and Internet connection, which is really all you need to take advantage of the opportunities provided by blogging, social networking, etc. Some costs may be involved with using text alerts or with purchasing software and support for your blog, but often times low-cost and even free options can be found for these marketing tools, and in any case they will cost far less than a traditional marketing effort using television, print or radio ads.

Here’s a few of the online marketing methods you can use to further promote your business:

E-mail marketing – Many businesses maintain subscription lists of customers who have signed up for e-mail alerts about sales and promotions and other information.

Most businesses provide either marketing information or substantive information via e-mail. Substantive information is usually sent in the form of an e-newsletter. Examples of this could be an e-newsletter sent by professional service businesses such as attorneys or accountants advising folks signed up for the e-newsletter about recent changes to the law or to accounting rules.

If you’re sending out an e-newsletter, make sure it has a healthy dose of good, solid information and isn’t just a multi-page advertisement for your company. While it’s advisable to market your company a little bit via e-newsletter, make sure you have worthwhile content the recipient can use, otherwise the next time a message from your company arrives in the recipient’s inbox, it may immediately be moved to the delete file.

If publishing an e-newsletter, it’s good to do so on a regular basis (monthly, is usually the optimal interval) to help keep recipients engaged.

Marketing information usually consists of news about sales, promotions or other events at a business. The key to using e-mail marketing successfully is to present recipients with messages that let them know about good deals or events. Messages should be infrequent, to avoid being classified as spam and should have an eye-catching subject line or photo or graphical element in the message to engage the recipient.

Whether you’re sending e-mail marketing information or substantive newsletters, it’s important to avoid being regarded as spam. You can help keep your image legitimate by using the blind copy function to keep your recipients’ e-mail addresses private, and by aggressively managing your email list, honoring unsubscribe requests and requiring a double opt-in system to make sure the folks getting your messages actually want to receive them.

Blogging – Running a business blog is a great way to reach out to your customers and communicate recent information and informal communications that can create a sense of community around your business.

Blogs are simply websites that have chronologically ordered posts, with the most recent posts being at the top of the page. Most blogs also have the option of including photos or videos.

Most blogs have the feel of a personal journal, which gives them great appeal to the public. They’re also easy to maintain and update and have options that allow readers to comment on posts.

When running a blog for your small business, you need to balance offering interesting information and subtle promotion of your business. If every post you ever make on your blog is about how great your business is, it’ll be a turn-off to visitors to your site. But by making the blog fun – including photos of fun work events, charity or civic projects your business is involved in, and the occasional pithy quote – you can build readership and goodwill toward your business.

Here’s an example of a good business blog. Let’s say you run a flower shop. A good blog for you may include how-to tips in floral arrangement, fun facts about flowers and news and poll information concerning the gift industry.

A good blog should follow the “news you can use” model and offer timely tips and authoritative information on the subject of the blog. If you’re running a small business blog, you’ll need to update it at least once or twice per week and be sure to police the comments section of your blog for egregiously inappropriate or offensive comments.

Social media – Social media works as a more immediate form of blogging, allowing you to form relationships with customers and deliver relevant information about sales and other events at your business. Social media marketing can help you quickly identify what your potential customers like or dislike about your niche and your particular business.

There are a variety of social media sites, but perhaps the most influential for business are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Yelp. Yelp can have a huge impact on your business as it is a place folks visit to write reviews of businesses. Getting good reviews on Yelp can help steer more business your way, while bad reviews can be a business-killer, so it’s important to engage and respond to this online community and their concerns.

Social media sites, like blogs can help you put a human face on your business. By posting pictures, links to news articles relevant to your industry, etc., you can reach out to your customers in a way that is fun and friendly and likely to generate goodwill.

When using social media, it’s a good idea to know your business’ target audience and post content they can relate to and avoid posting things that may put the off. Potential clients for a children’s clothing store are likely to be different than those for a nightclub, so remember to keep your content audience-appropriate.

Bulletin boards and forums – Online discussion forums are great places to post information about your business and industry. By getting folks talking about your business you can attract interest and traffic to your website. Don’t just post spam messages to the boards, but do post quality posts intended to start conversation about your field.

Text messaging – Currently, there are more than 6 billion cellular subscriptions worldwide, and PayPal expects financial transactions via mobile device to top $7 billion in 2012. With stats like these, the value of reaching out to customers via text messaging to their mobile devices is a no-brainer. By allowing your customers to sign up for text alerts from your business, you create the opportunity to reach them directly at just about any time with news about sales, promotions and events at your business.

While you don’t want to antagonize your customers by saturating them with text messages, an occasional reminder about a good deal or special event at your business can help drive customers to your business and increase sales.

By taking advantage of the various online methods of promoting your business, you can reach out to a wider pool of customers, stay current with how the modern business world communicates and take advantage of an extremely low-cost, high-impact form of marketing.

Marketing is an important part of any business strategy, especially that of a recently started business. If people aren’t aware of your business or the goods and services it offers, they can’t do business with you. A recent survey of business owners by the Small Business Administration found that the majority of them said they wished they had invested more into marketing than they did when they started their business.

Paying for print, radio or television ads can be expensive, especially if you’re operating in a large city or metro area. If you’re already operating on a limited budget, kicking up the 9 to 12 percent of annual budget that most businesses devote to marketing may be impossible. If you’re working with limited marketing funds, unconventional marketing tactics will ensure you get greater value for your marketing dollar, and may even be more effective than traditional marketing, depending on how well your tactics go over with the public.

Whereas traditional marketing campaigns rely on big budgets and traditional print, television and radio media, guerrilla marketing relies more upon time, innovation, energy and imagination to get the maximum results from a minimal marketing investment. Guerrilla marketing efforts are often interactive, getting the audience involved in something they find entertaining and are likely to recommend to their friends.

The term guerrilla marketing was coined by Jay Conrad Levinson, and used as the title of his book, Guerrila Marketing. The object of guerrilla marketing is to capture audience attention and imagination, resulting in a viral spread of awareness and goodwill toward your product or service.

Guerrilla marketing uses unusual tactics such as street promotion, giveaways, games, contests, and intercept encounters of potential customers in public places. The concept has also embraced the digital revolution, using text messaging and social media to engage potential customers, creating a likeable and memorable experience with the brand.

In Levinson’s book he identifies some core principles of guerrilla marketing, such as:

- The compatibility of guerrilla marketing and small business entrepreneurship, as guerrilla marketing lends itself well to localized campaigns.

- The importance of understanding the psychology of your target audience.

- The need for creativity in devising guerrilla marketing tactics.

- How the key metric for guerrilla marketing success should be profit amounts instead of sales figures.

- Using the number of new customer relationships as another metric for gauging the success of your efforts.

- Building mutually beneficial relationships with other businesses. For example, a pizza store could offer a discount at a partnering auto service store with each purchase and vice versa.

- The use of free media, such as attention-grabbing promotional events and social media promotion.

- Outflank larger competitors by making quick decisions. Most of your large company competitors’ marketing operations are pain-stakingly slow, as all decisions must go through a morass of corporate red tape before being enacted. As a small business owner, you can be more nimble as the buck starts and stops with you.

- Focus small. Guerrilla marketers can find product or customer groups that they can intensely focus on so their business can become the leader of individual market segments.

Basic Guerrilla Marketing Strategies

Here are a few ways you can put the theories behind guerrilla marketing into practice:

- Cut prices. This is the simplest method of guerrilla marketing. By offering prices lower than those of your competitors, you can get good word of mouth from customers, resulting in an uptick in business.

- Hit the streets. Have employees dressed up as the company mascot or in other attention-getting garb go out on the streets and wave at passersby or try to engage people in heavy pedestrian areas in conversation to convince them to visit your business. 

- Print t-shirts. By printing and distributing t-shirts to your staff and customers, you create walking billboards for your business. Come up with a funny or creative shirt design and give them out, perhaps as a reward for purchases. Seeing their friends or just folks on the street wearing your brand will plant the seed in potential customers’ minds that your business may be somewhere they want to check out.

- Use Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. The great thing about these sites are that they are seen by countless people each day and you don’t have to pay for it. By starting a Facebook page or Twitter account, you can create a rapport with your customers, making them feel more emotionally invested in your business. Their friends can see this interaction and choose to become a part of it or to recommend it to friends. Offering the occasional promotion via Facebook or Twitter can also help keep customers coming to your page and to your business.

- Ally with other businesses. Small businesses can help one another out by doing cross promotions or by taking advantage of one another’s talents. For example, if a small business owner is great at building and maintaining websites, that owner may partner with a less web-savvy owner to take care of his or her web needs in exchange for the opportunity to offer discounts at the other owner’s business to customers of the web-savvy owner’s business.

- Get the family involved. Your family presents a free labor and marketing force. Get them in on your efforts. By enlisting the help of family members, you can reach more people and avoid having to shift employees to marketing duties.

- Catch them by surprise. Market to audiences in places where they don’t expect it. By putting up eye-catching stickers in public restrooms, having an allied business slip a promotional flyer into their product packaging or by having your people approach passers-by in the street, you can get the attention, and, if you make a good impression, the business of a broader cross-section of customers.

How Do I Know It’s Working?

As mentioned before, your profits and your number of new customer relationships are key metrics for guerrilla marketing success, but there are other factors you can use to determine the success of your efforts. For example, consider the feedback you get from the public about your guerrilla marketing efforts. If you get a lot of people telling you how they loved your stunt, game or other tactic, chances are that you have a guerrilla marketing tactic that’s a keeper. If people dislike your tactics, you may need to change them.

Also, keep track of how many new purchases are made by existing customers and the number of Facebook friends or Twitter followers your business has as another means of tracking guerrilla marketing success.

American Marketing Association experts define marketing research as gathering, documenting, understanding and applying information concerning how to market goods and services.

When you launch a new small business, you need to develop effective marketing strategies to gain customers and keep them. By engaging in market research, you answer the key question concerning:

- Who your customers are.

- What their wants and desires are.

- Where are your customers located?

- Are they able to afford your goods or services, and if so will they want them?

- Is the location you’ve picked the right one for your business?

- Are my prices competitive?

- What marketing promotions will work for my business?

While marketing research is not 100 percent perfect, it can give you a better idea of the wants and needs of a target audience for your business. The feelings and behavior of the public is almost constantly in flux and are influenced daily by an unlimited number of variables. To do good market research you must find out what people are likely to buy, based on current public mood.

The need for marketing research is simple: You can’t sell things to people that they don’t want. Small business has some important advantages in terms of market research. While bigger companies must deal with mass markets and will likely need to hire consultants to do the research, small business owners deal with a smaller market and can do a lot of market research on their own by simply observing customers’ buying habits.

The small size of small business also gives them another key advantage. Because there is less bureaucracy in small businesses, they can often move more quickly on applying the lessons they’ve gathered from their marketing research to launch new products or services, make changes to how they do business, etc. This ability to stay closer to the pulse of their market can help small businesses compete with larger competitors who may have better access to supply chains and the leeway to offer lower prices.

Benefits of market research

However, in the face of globalization, and changing customer wants and needs, it may be worthwhile for small business owners to take a more scientifically based look at their markets. Scientifically based market research offers a more focused and organized approach to markets, and allows for timely information. With market research, small businesses can reduce risks, identify rising trends or business challenges, find new opportunities and develop short and long-range plans.

Getting it done

Formal market research is just an extension of the evaluations business owners regularly do when they look at their inventory to see what’s hot and what’s not, ask customers questions about their purchases and check out competitors’ prices.

There are seven basic steps to market research:

1. Identifying challenges and opportunities for marketing – By using questionnaires, surveys or engaging a professional researcher you’ll conduct research to help you create a marketing strategy.

Your research should show you where the problems and opportunities lie for your business, such as possibilities for new product launches or problems with your company’s reputation for quality and service.

2. Making a plan – When you’ve finished step one, you’ll need to form a specific plan using the information you gathered from your preliminary research. You’ll need to decide what problems or opportunity identified in step one merits research, and then set goals, allocate budgets and form schedules to make the research plan come together. An example of a market research project would be determining whether bundling certain products together at a reduced price would result in increased sales volume.

3. Deciding on primary or secondary research – This is simply whether you’ll gather information generated specifically for this research project (i.e. launch a customer survey) or make use of existing information.

4. Deciding on research tools – Will you use an online survey or examine monthly sales figures? If you use a survey, what kind of questions will you ask? When crafting surveys and other research tools, you want to make them as specific and unambiguous as possible so you don’t receive muddled information as a result of vague or misunderstood questions.

5. Collecting the data – When gathering the data, be sure to try to keep your results as untainted by error and bias as possible to get the most accurate results possible. Also be sure to collect enough data from enough sources to make sure your data isn’t skewed because of demographics or other factors that may interfere in your research.

6. Organization and analysis – Once you’ve gathered your data, you’ll need to make some sense of it. This means editing, categorizing and tabulating your results. When organizing your data, you’ll need to focus on the information most relevant to your business’ needs, use subjective information only as a backup for findings gleaned from more objective research, make sure your research is consistent, and be sure you understand each piece of information and how it interacts with the other information garnered by your research.

7. Apply your findings – When you’ve finished collecting and analyzing your data, you’ll need to decide what to do with it. Give the decision makers in your business a copy of the research summary and get started on some brainstorming sessions on how best to make use of the data. It may be that the time is right for a new product launch, or the data you gathered may convince you that the market just isn’t there for a new product. Whatever the findings of your research are, use them to make informed decisions about how best to move your business forward.

Market research doesn’t have to be horribly complicated. It can be done with just a few questions printed on the back of a monthly bill, asking your employees a few questions or an analysis of your store’s receipts. If done correctly, it can be greatly helpful in charting the right course forward for your small business.

A website can be your small business’ 24/7 store, yellow pages ad and marketing tool. Although the need for a website is very clear, many small businesses still don’t have an online presence, and most of those that do don’t properly take advantage of all the opportunities the Internet presents.

Reasons to go online

Whether you’re a booming small business with a store and employees or a home-based business just starting out, you can benefit from having a website. Here are some of the benefits of having a website for your small business:

- Cheap source of advertising: Today, more and more people are choosing to look up business contact information online rather than through traditional means like the phonebook or newspaper. This is good news for small business, as print ad prices can be high. If you have a good website that ranks high on Internet searches, chances are you can direct a lot of business traffic to your store or office.

- Broader reach: The Internet allows businesses to break traditional geographical barriers and sell to customers outside their immediate area. If all you had is a traditional storefront, chances are your sales would be limited to the area around your business. With a website, people around the world can purchase your products or services.

- Advertising opportunities: If you’ve got pretty good volume on your site, you can sell advertising space to other businesses to diversify your income stream.

- Open all hours: If you sell products or services online, you’re no longer bound by traditional business hours. Using online purchasing and payment, you’re open 24 hours a day, 365 days per year.

- Convenient shopping: If customers can buy your products and services online, they can shop from the convenience of their homes, making life easier for them and building some brand loyalty as they see how easy doing business with your site is.

- Promote the physical location: You can use your site to promote your physical location, providing contact information, a map and directions.

- Market research: You can easily analyze market trends by checking your online sales figures to see what’s hot and at what times or dates it’s hot.

Getting started

Once you decide to start a site for your business, there are a few things you need to do to get started. First, you’ll need a web address for your business site. You can purchase an address from domain hosts such as Register.com or Go Daddy. When picking a domain name, you’ll want one that’s easy to remember and relevant to your business. For example, if you’re running a mechanic’s business named Mike’s Mechanic Shop, www.mikesmechshop.net may be the right choice for your business. However, many domain names are already taken, so you might not get your first choice. You may also want to buy domain names similar to your own, to prevent customers from accidentally getting directed to a site other than yours when they search online for your business.

After you get your domain name, you’ll need to choose a web hosting service. Typically, your Internet access provider will also provide a web hosting plan as part of your Internet service. If your site requires increased bandwidth or data storage, you’ll likely have to upgrade your plan. If your website becomes a large part of your business, you may eventually want to purchase the equipment necessary to host the website at your office or store.

Next, you’ll need to design your website. If you’ve got the cash, hire a professional web developer. They can design a professional-looking site with the right amount of bells and whistles to create lots of interactive experiences for your customers. They can also set you up with a content management system that will let you quickly and easily add and remove content from the site, allowing you to update your site at will.

If you prefer to design the site yourself, it’s advisable to use a simple design as you start, especially if you’re new to web design. Two web sites that can help you out with templates and tips are http://www.conceptfeedback.com/ and http://www.openwebdesign.org/. Another, nearly all-inclusive web design site you can use to build your business website is http://www.homestead.com/.

Elements for your web site

As you design your website, here are a few tips for good design:

- Keep it simple: A clean, uncluttered design is more aesthetically pleasing, uses less bandwidth and is easier for customer computers to handle. Don’t make it completely bleak, but don’t overdo it with photos and videos, either.

- Payment processor: If  you’re going to have an online store, you’ll need a user interface that can help your customers shop and a payment processing option. Check out sites like Amazon and other popular shopping sites to see how they handle shopping and payment and use them as a template for your own online store. PayPal’s shopping cart feature is a great option for small businesses setting up an online store.

- Search Engine Optimization: As in the real world, location, location, location is important in cyberspace. To make sure your site gets a favorable ranking on search engine results pages, you’ll need to engage in a little search engine optimization. You can do a lot of this yourself, or you can pay a professional to help you. SEO consists of making your site more attractive to search engines, thus making it more likely you get a high search engine results ranking when customers are looking for your type of business or location. You can optimize your page by weaving strategic keywords into your copy (Google has tools that can help you find the right keywords), using meta tags, linking to other sites, making sure your site is free of broken links and bugs, etc.