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.

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.

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.