Conquer the Top 6 Small Business Marketing Challenges

Whatever industry you are in you are likely to encounter the top 6 marketing challenges for small businesses. As a small business what can you do? We will have a limited war chest of marketing dollars or even marketing staff at our disposal to tame these challenges. Like most small businesses you will be faced with other priorities from all aspects of operating a business and will struggle to find the time to do any marketing at all. That is until you realise that sales are not growing to the levels that you want or worst you are faced with declining sales.

This guide will tackle the key marketing challenges revealed in a recent online survey we run and will offer some very practical guidance that will help you improve your efforts for better marketing results.

Marketing is Business Development
Let us understand that marketing generates business development opportunities. This is the end-objective of marketing to build qualified prospects that convert into sales revenue. You must make the time for marketing or face closing your business. Marketing does not have to be complicated or time consuming. Every small business must develop a marketing engine or process that can be managed and fine-tuned with a planned effort of a couple of hours per week. Now let's get started and tackle those top 6 marketing challenges for small businesses:

1. Defining Target Markets
Who are you targeting and where can we find them? Basic stuff, but the very foundation of your marketing starts here. If you want to be successful with your marketing you must have a clear idea of your target market. Put together a short description or profile of your ideal customer. Write it down and refine it, work with your team or a marketing specialist and identify the buying criteria used by your ideal customer. Once you have conceptualised your ideal customer it will help you prepare and personalise your marketing message to make it relevant and important to the intended recipient. The next time you are writing promotional messages or offers put the profile in front of you and it will guide you in your efforts to communicate more effectively with your target market.

2. Increasing Repeat Business
The ability to deliver to the satisfaction of your customer is the threshold level to remain in business. Make sure you deliver. That said - you need to give them a reason to come back for more! Consider including a thank you coupon with every purchase that provides an incentive or discount that they can receive on a future purchase. You need to nurture the customer relationship by keeping in touch and offering value with every contact you make with your customers. The most cost effective manner to stay in touch with your customers and drive repeat business is with permission based email or e-newsletter marketing. Every business must have email marketing in their communications tool box in today's Internet connected world.

3. Getting Consistent Referrals
People generally want to help so why not ask them for their help in getting referrals? We have found this as quite striking among small business in general. Small business owners and managers agree that referrals are important to their business but so many are hesitant to openly ask for referrals. Let all your customers and network of contacts know that their referrals are important to your business. Make sure you can track their referrals, keep them updated and show your gratitude for their efforts in some way whether it is informal or structured as part of a referral program. Make a working system of it and drive referrals as an integral part of your marketing activities.

4. Increasing Sales Conversions
Sometimes we may even think to ourselves marketing does not work or we have tried that before with minimal results. Well look again what was in the marketing message? Make sure you make a relevant and attractive offer to your target market that requires a decision to be made by the recipient. However, before you commit to it, test it to refine and improve your results and test it again before running the entire campaign. Small business can not afford to spend on purely image or brand building advertisement. You can build and promote your brand or company image while generating increased sales conversions by providing an offer with an incentive to take action within a specified time frame! Make sure every promotional campaign is primary focused on generating a response that converts into a sale while at the same time building your brand.

5. Finding Time & Resources for Marketing
Do you find yourself thinking that you can not afford to spend time and money on marketing? If you do, then do not be surprise to find out that your business will not be achieving its capacity to grow. Can you afford to let your sales opportunities run out? Absolutely not! The fact is that you simply can not afford not to invest the time and resources into marketing. Say again - you can not neglect your marketing if you want your business to prosper. Take the time to explore what you can achieve with the exceptional marketing methods that are now available to small businesses that have minimal costs to implement.

6. Developing a Marketing Plan
Everyone seriously in business must have a marketing plan to support their business objectives. Take the time to prepare and develop your marketing approach and strategies including how you will track and test it. If necessary get a marketing specialist to assist you develop your marketing plan. Without a plan to run it is likely you will find yourself trying different "marketing ideas" that others have suggested and ending up with the expenses and no profits to show for it. If you ask others, who are no marketing experts, make sure you ask the ones, who run a successful business and understand the value of marketing.

About the Author
Patrick Zuluaga has more than 20 years experience in marketing and business development roles with Australian and international companies. You can visit the web presence at http://www.pmzmarketing.com.au

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Patrick_Zuluaga

Surpass your Competition in the Internet and use Reverse Keyword Search

You have a website, but nobody can find you. You have your product or service on ebay, google, Yahoo, Amazon, but still nobody can find you. That's mainly because you're not using the relevant search keywords/phrases people are entering when looking for your product or service.

A key to showing up at the top of search engines is to include the very keywords your business is related to in your website, in the headline name and/or first paragraph of each page. Think of your website as a book. The name of your website is like the title of the book. Just as a book is categorized in a library by its title and content; likewise, your success in the search engines depends upon the title, or headline, of your website and the content. In fact, using keywords in the title and content of your site is critical to your marketing.

We recommend to all our clients to use our Reverse Keyword Search Tools when writing content for their website. This cutting-edge technology researches keywords and phrases their clients or potential clients are actually typing into the search engines to find products and services in the internet. Our search term data is collected monthly from numerous search engines worldwide. This includes major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and other global and premium databases. For instance the more accurate Premium database bases its results on 4.3 billion keyword searches using user panel data. This data is free from skew caused by automated agents, a problem that has traditionally faced all keyword suggestion services.

Keep in mind: you need to check and change your keywords on your website at least every three months. Need help? Contact us. Crawlers and spiders like updated keywords on each of your pages - (content is king again); they give you credit for the content changes and rank you higher on search engines.

We not only do the Reverse Keyword Search for your web site and help you with the content, we also offer a full 20 page Reverse Keyword Search Analysis of keywords your competition uses. You do not need to wonder any longer why your competitor is always No 1 in the ranking. Our Reverse Keyword Analysis will give you the reasons, and you can act accordingly to surpass your competition in the ranking! Don't have time to do it yourself? You shouldn't: "Do what you do best and leave the rest to us."

Many of our clients find that comparing their site, their choice of words, and even the design of their site, to other sites that are at the top of search engines, is helpful in developing an effective Marketing strategy for their own website. By the way: we not only search single keywords, but also double and triple phrases!

Keep in mind: Although keyword usage is important, and indeed critical, in certain aspects of Internet marketing, keywords alone are not a "magic bullet". They must be used in conjunction with other efforts and strategies, especially with search engines. More on that in our next Blog "The 10 Steps you need (us) to do to get anywhere close to page ONE on Google".

This month we're giving friends of Breezewelt the opportunity to optimize their website with our inbound marketing tools.

This helps you:
* Evaluate the search engine optimization of your website.
* Track your company's Internet marketing position compared to competitors.
* Launch or enhance an effective business blog.
* Monitor and snapshot relevant product, service and Google trends.
* Keyword Distribution, Search Demand, Competition.
* Relevant Link Search Report on major search engines and bookmarking siteson Delicious
* Measure the return on investment (ROI) of all inbound marketing activities.

We have a limited number of trials we can offer, so start your trial now.

We offer "Do-it-yourself" starter packages, for a limited time only, for $249.00 (normally $599.00) up to "All Inclusive" bundles for $1500.00 (normally $3,500.00). Email us for more details.

Do Dentists Need A Website?

Patients will migrate to dentists who 'seem' to be popular. You don't believe us? Well, image is everything nowadays. Even as a dentists. Conclusion: Dentists need to spend their Marketing budget more wisely, and get into more marketing activities at the same time. But which ones? More advertising in which magazines? More direct mail campaigns in which zip codes? Do I need a dental website or a relaunch of my old website? How do I convert the 'curious' patient into the 'visiting and paying' patient? etc.etc. So many questions, so many answers?

No, there are not that many answers. Just analyze the marketing activities that work: Direct mail campaigns are still very successful, ads in regional magazines are certainly no waste of money, too, and a 'good' website definitely drives new patients to your practice. But what is a 'good' website? !

Your website is a vitally important part of a comprehensive marketing plan. It is a great way to build and improve your image, find new patients, educate your patients and provide information for individuals who have received one of your printed marketing pieces. So, what is a 'successful' website? Not just a good ‘looking’ one! A 'successful' good website is the sum of many factors, including customer-friendly navigation, attractive design, the right keywords, interesting content, technical matters etc.

The Internet has changed the way people communicate and interact with each other. It has changed the way businesses communicate with current and potential clients, also for businesses like dental or medical practices. What amazes us most is that after 20 years of computers and 10 years of Internet, we still find dentists, who don’t even own a computer or have access to the Internet in their practice. If you want to build an image around you, attract sophisticated and paying patients, retain employees and obtain patient referrals, and you do not use the internet, you will have a very hard time to catch up with all the hungry, internet savyy dentists pushing into the market every day.

Did you know that 52% of people who see an online video ad go to a website, visit a physical location, or buy something." This amazing statistic is from the Frames of Reference Study in 2007 by the Online Publishers Association. How would you like to increase your patients by a whopping 52%?

There is so much new patient potential out there, but a nice looking website is just not enough. Keep in mind: No Traffic - No Demand - No Patients! As a dentist you not only need a website, you need an internet presence which converts the 'curious' into 'patients": Find it. Like it. Buy it!

Some quick advise about web design: Do not try to build your website yourself! Ask a professional web designer and content writer to build a high ranked website. In any case, they should offer not only an easy-to-use content management system (i.e. typo 3), but also affordable SEO services (i.e. reverse keyword searches). Avoid pay-per-click campaigns - your competitors love to push your budget to the limit by clicking on your ad - and/or other paid Google ads at the beginning. Instead, go for the right keywords and test your web site for at least 3 months. Implement a video and some other funky stuff (i.e. educational games for kids). Remember, the more often you change the content in your website, the higher you get ranked. When you see positive results, you can go with paid ad campaigns, but keep in mind: your patients do not look for ads, they look for advise!

Out-Of-The-Box-Thinking (Source: USA Today)

This week we would like to share an article, which appeared in US TODAY yesterday. It is a story about Modernista, one of OUR role model ad agencies in the U.S. We just know, we are not alone out here! It is just not the ad or PR campaign alone, which makes it all grooving and going. It is the vision and ideas, the creation of new 'marketing' worlds, the willingness to let go of old school thinking and embracing the 'new'. Autsch - change hurts, but it feels soooo good, after - believe us. We just love Modernista for their hot creative Marketing approach. Great stuff! Here you go! The article is written by Bruce Horovitz:

"The two guys whose quirky ad agency creates ads for Hummer and Cadillac don't figure their future is in advertising.
The future is in ideas, say Gary Koepke and Lance Jensen, co-founders of Modernista. (More on that off-the-wall name later.)
At Modernista, those wacky ideas are remolding the agency from a place to go for ads to a place to seek out a magazine revamp, an instant infusion of online creativity or even a jammin' rock video. With most of Madison Avenue tanking in the Internet age, and Modernista's biggest client, GM, squeezing for cost cuts, perhaps it's time everyone took notice.

"This business is no longer about just creating things," says Koepke, the co-founder widely known for his artistic eye. "It's about conceptualizing ideas — kind of like a think tank." These ideas have begun to decouple from ads that appear on TV screens or in magazines. When U2 went scouting for someone to create its Window in the Skies video, it didn't pluck some sunglasses-wearing Hollywood director. It knocked on Modernista's door. The video is a collection of music greats apparently singing as one from Elvis to Frank Sinatra to The Beatles.

Earlier this year, Modernista oversaw the redesign of BusinessWeek magazine that resulted in an unexpected sales uptick. Should you ever attend a concert where super-cool British trance DJ Paul Oakenfold is spinning tunes, it's a good bet that those cosmic computer visuals on the big screen are Modernista's. And Modernista just won a key Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gig. Executives say it's not an advertising assignment. Yes, it's for the organization's global health initiative. But it won't be ads, says agency President Clift Jones. Such non-traditional stuff is 25% of the firm's business, and it could be 50% within five years, Koepke says. Modernista sees the future, and it ain't 30-second TV spots.

Its wild website — a virtual window of how the social-networking world views the agency — is turning heads in Ad Land.
Go to its website and you don't see a site, but a transparent vision of what everyone else out there has to say about Modernista. Instead of an agency site rich with hype, it takes you directly to what social sites Wikipedia and YouTube have to say about Modernista.

"It may be meant to scare away clients we don't want to work with," Jensen says with a smile. Its ads are as brash as its site.

These are the guys who — before global warming was a household world — made Hummer a must-have for the ego-obsessed. "They took a limited-production military weapon and made it fun without losing all of its naughtiness in the process," says admirer Jeff Goodby, co-founder of rival agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners. Hummer has since become the poster child for global warming's evil. (More on that, later, too.) This also is the agency that got actress Kate Walsh, star of ABC's Grey's Anatomy, to sit in a Cadillac and utter in her sexiest voice, "When you turn your car on, does it return the favor?" Ad historians may some day point to that moment as the very nanosecond when Cadillac's image popped a cultural wheelie.

Modernista never dreamed of having clients like Cadillac or Hummer — or of helping to lead the ad world's evolution away from conventional media — when Koepke and Jensen started the agency eight years ago on one floor of a warehouse that borders Boston's Chinatown district. Nor did they have any notion that their billings would eventually rocket near today's $900 million. (Agencies with billings over $1 billion have hit the big league.) All they really wanted was to create ads on their own terms. But with a tiny staff and cramped offices in a onetime garment factory, that seemed quite a stretch. Clients came anyway. Among them, brands with the hippest or wanna-be hippest of images: Gap. MTV. Napster. Converse. Each of those clients has moved on — as restless, cool-craving brands do — but Modernista has replaced them with more than GM's fleets of gas-guzzling Hummers and Caddies.

Modernista did the unthinkable: It filed a $500,000 lawsuit last year against its client, shoemaker Rockport, while working for it. The lawsuit claimed Rockport wasn't paying for work. They've since parted ways. Regardless of who wins, the lawsuit is a clear message that few agencies dare to deliver to clients: Don't mess with us. Still, clients come. Modernista creates ads for the Bono-inspired Product Red campaign, which gives some profits to fight AIDS. It's behind the offbeat financial-services ads for TIAA-Cref — with little-known singers crooning Somewhere from West Side Story.

Modernista's offices are wacko. You take a freight elevator to get in. Employees sit playing chess in the middle of one workroom. An eclectic CD library lines a wall of one floor. And what about the agency's over-the-top name? "We made it up," says Jensen, "only to find out it was a real word." It means one who subscribes to the tenets of the modernism movement. Unlike most ad agencies, which — like law firms — tend to be named after their founders, Modernista clearly is not. "It's by far the best of company names that don't involve names of real people," says Goodby. "Wait," he jests, "is someone there named Modernista?" Nope. A far better choice the name Modernista was than the one that finished just below it: Groop. (Right: like Group, but spelled in a forced-groovy way.) Of course, it's not the name that matters, right? It's the stuff. And these guys are becoming as well-known for the gee-whiz stuff they do for clients who aren't coming to them for advertising as those who do.

Here are some things they've done for non-advertisers:

U2 video
Modernista got its hands into a hot rock video. Bono, who worked with Modernista on the Product Red campaign — and loved the work — tapped them for this, too. Getting approvals from famous musicians was a feat. But Bono nudged reps for The Beatles, Elvis, and Frank Sinatra to sign on. A team of Modernista workers spent more than four months on the project. But it landed images of everyone from Nat King Cole to Jimi Hendrix to Frank Zappa in a wild jam-like session.

'BusinessWeek' redesign
The BusinessWeek redesign that Modernista oversaw late last year was a natural for the agency, Koepke says. "A message like BusinessWeek's front cover is their advertisement," he says. Executives at BusinessWeek were blown away by the redo."We don't think of them as an ad agency," says Stephen Adler, editor-in-chief at BusinessWeek. "To us, they have a very interesting design department that happens to be inside an ad agency." Adler says the results speak for themselves. At a time of steep sales declines for most magazines, it eked out a 1% circulation gain during the first six months of 2008.

DJ computer images
When Oakenfold's 2008 World Tour began, the DJ didn't just cart around a lot of high-tech equipment. He also brought along kaleidoscope-like images of colorful landscapes and cosmic people that blend with the music — images created by Modernista. Modernista is widely known for linking music from often-obscure artists with compelling visuals in its TV spots. That attracted Oakenfold's attention.

Here are some things they've done for key advertisers:

Hummer
Hummer sales are plummeting — down nearly 60% this year — but nobody's blaming the ad agency. To the contrary, Modernista's ads arguably made Hummer the envy-mobile back in 2000. It may be best known for a 2006 Super Bowl ad for Hummer with two monsters — a towering robot and a Godzilla-like creature — that happily spawn a red Hummer."Lance and Gary have a passion for the car business," says Liz Vanzura, who oversaw marketing at Hummer and then Cadillac, where she hired them. "What makes Modernista different is that they focus on understanding the real business issues." The agency founders are realists about potentially losing the Hummer business after GM finally unloads its fast-sinking division that's now openly on the block. "If it goes away," Jensen says, "we'll have to make a new baby."

Cadillac
All Modernista did for Cadillac was resurrect its image, make its redesigned CTS rollout a hit and get consumers buzzing about the brand. After the work Modernista had done for Hummer, it's no surprise that Cadillac approached Modernista when Vanzura was named its marketing chief. Good decision: The new CTS had double-digit sales growth for the first eight months after the launch. "Dealers started to see import-oriented buyers shopping in the Cadillac showroom," says Vanzura, who recently left GM. Modernista opted to celebrate the word Cadillac. And, of course, it got Walsh to coo for Caddie. Walsh has a new line in upcoming ads, but Modernista execs won't say boo about it, yet. Odds are, it'll be a hottie. Asked what Walsh has done for Cadillac, Jensen — before singing her praises — ponders a moment then turns the question around: "Isn't the real question: What has Cadillac done for Kate Walsh?"

Are You In or Are You Out? Reality Check On Your Marketing Activities

First, we want to thank everybody who sent us comments regarding our new blog. Almost 100% agreed on being challenged with finding new ways of reaching customers and clients. And almost all asked about how to find out, if they are still in the old Marketing world. That is why we decided to give you a reality check this week. You are still in the old mindset, if you believe the following:

- Marketing means advertising
- Advertising needs to reach out to the masses
- Advertising relies on interrupting people to get them to pay attention to a message
- Advertising is only one-way: company-to-consumer
- Advertising is about selling products
- Advertising is based on campaigns that have a limited life
- Creativity is the most important component to advertising
- Advertising and PR are separate disciplines run by different people with separate goals,
strategies, and measurement criteria – and they usually do not talk much to each other.

We all know that none of that is true anymore. The Web has transformed the rules. Please check, if you are (already) on the new track of reaching your customers and clients:

- Marketing is more than advertising
- Public Relations is for more than just a mainstream media audience
- You are what you publish
- Be authentic and avoid to spin
- Let people participate in your product, services etc.
- Deliver content at just the precise moment your audience needs it
- Reach vast numbers of underserved audiences via Web
- Marketing is about your company winning business, not about your agency winning awards
- You drive your customer into the purchasing process with great online content
- Blogs, podcasts, e-books, news releases and other forms of online content let you communicate directly with buyers in a
form they appreciate

In an offline world, marketing and Public Relations are still separate departments with different people and different skill sets, but this is not the case on the Web. The lines between marketing and PR have blurred. It really does not matter, if a customer's first exposure to your product or service is a hit on the Web site, or a news release your organization sent, or a magazine article, or a post on your blog. Great content in all forms helps buyers see you, because content drives action.