(Page one of this article explained how to identify and focus on your target market and use that information to evaluate your current marketing strategies. Go to page one of the Small Business Marketing Makeover or continue reading about how to choose and implement effective marketing strategies for your small business.)
Now here's an example list of my marketing efforts to date for my fictional lingerie business:
- Yellow page ad
- Several different newspaper ads
- Several radio ads
- An on-site radio promotion (Sweetheart day for Valentine's Day)
Going over the list and asking myself, how likely Julie is to have seen my marketing messages, I have to say not very. She doesn't read print newspapers, remember? As for the radio promotions, she might listen to the radio in the car when she’s driving around, but she's more likely listening to preprogrammed music. In fact, these marketing efforts are probably a complete waste of time as far as Julie is concerned – and Julie is the one I'm trying to market to!
Your turn. List all your recent marketing efforts and for each, note how likely it is your avatar saw and noted your marketing message.
5) Choose and implement at least two effective marketing strategies.
If you worked through this marketing makeover to this point and 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! I recommend choosing and implementing at least one more marketing strategy that has a very likely chance of reaching your target market avatar and tweaking your current 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 marketing strategies.
If, as in my example of selling lingerie to Julie, your marketing efforts to this point have been a wash-out, 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.
Following through with the Julie example, I have to get my message where Julie is if I'm going to reach her. One thing I want to do is get my marketing onto the 'Net because that's where Julie gets most of her information.
My first marketing strategy is going to be to create a Facebook page or a website to give me and Julie the chance to find each other.
Based on what I know about Julie, I have three main points of connection; young children, exercise and cooking. One marketing strategy I could use to connect with Julie is to place ads on websites about these topics. Another might be to create and use a Twitter account (which I would use to tweet about these topics as well as my lingerie products).
Note that these are not the only marketing strategies that I might use that would be successful. These are just three of many that I've chosen for this example.
6) 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.
How long? That depends on which marketing strategies you're working. For instance, if I had created a Facebook page or a website, I would be evaluating its effectiveness at six months and again at the one year mark, at which point I would decide whether or not it was worth continuing.
A strategy such as placing online ads, though, would have a shorter time frame for evaluation, such as three months (assuming that I had placed a cycle of ads rather than 'one-shots').
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; make an entry in your Blackberry, your Day-Timer, your email or whatever other 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 these marketing strategies based on your evaluation of results), it will be time to add more marketing strategies 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.
Looking for more of the Small Business Makeover?
- The Business Planning Makeover - Create a Business Action Plan that will provide your small business direction for the coming year or longer.
- The Business Finance Makeover - Follow the steps in this business finance makeover, from separating your personal and business finances through financial statement analysis, to make sure that your business finances are in good shape.
- The Customer Service Makeover - Learn how to provide good customer service, the kind of customer service that builds customer loyalty, gives positive word-of-mouth advertising, and increases sales.
- Information Technology Makeover - Learn how to secure and manage your business data, manage customer contacts, set up a document management system and prepare an Information Technology maintenance and crisis plan in this Information Technology Makeover.
