Simple Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

You have a small business and limited resources to market. Is that a problem? Absolutely not! Here are a few tips on how you can best utilize your time, effort and money on marketing your business:

• Add a personal touch: Be it a Facebook post or an email message, add a personal touch to it. Make your brand more human by giving its voice a touch of emotions and sentiments. Whatever you write or send out, even the content on your website, should have a personal touch and a human tone because It helps in connecting with your target audience faster!

• Use your existing network: Charity begins at home and so does marketing. Your family, friends, associates are the first target audience that you have to reach out to. Their support will help you get further. It’s like a ripple effect. If your network promotes you on their social network or circle of friends. Their network promotes it among their network. That’s how the word gets out! But the most important in this is how you sell your business idea to your own friends and family and make them believe in you and your product.

• Let the picture talk: A picture speaks a thousand words! It has been concluded that images can potentially attract more attention, capture mind share and engage people. Hence, use images more than text on Facebook, websites and elsewhere. It allows you to build a better positioning of the brand. Even product images should be good quality so that the user experience on your website and other online portals is enhanced.

• Contests: Small contests and giveaway are a great way to engage existing and potentials customers. Keep aside a monthly budget based on your will and utilize that money for gifts and giveaways. Such activities go a long way in increasing your number of loyal customers. And if they like what they win, they will come back to you and buy the product!

• Get together: If other similar players in your industry are also small and mid-sized, it would be a great idea to join hands for joint promotion. A combined marketing activity is a great way to increase awareness about the product segment and reduces cost of marketing. You can approach media for PR stories on all the brands together. It’s a win-win situation for all.

• Network: Networking helps increase your personal brand and generate credibility in the market. You are the brand ambassador for your product by default hence people judge your product and brand based on your personality. Hence, meet as many people as possible and create a good impression on them to be able to generate a good impression for your brand.

7 mantras of successful positioning

Positioning is about building a brand image and sustaining it. Brand experts often find themselves wondering as to what is the best way possible for positioning a brand that captures the mind space of the potential consumer. While every brand has its own course to follow to build an impactful positioning, there are some basic mantras that can help put the brand on the right track.

Here are some tips that one should keep in mind while setting out to implement a positioning strategy:

 

1.     Aim to be different

You have to position yourself something different from what already exists in the field. There are various products in the category, why should they choose you over the rest? If you can answer this question, you have a focus as to how you want to position yourself.

 

2.     Find your core competence

You will find that there is an advantage that you have which your competitor doesn’t. Figure out what it is – what are you able to do better than the competitor, and focus on that while positioning.

 

3.     What do you stand for

If you had to describe your brand in one word, what would it be? When you say ‘Tata’, you invariably think of trust. That’s what they stand for, what do you stand for? When you know what you stand for, you get more aligned with your positioning strategy.

 

4.     Competition monitor

You know what you stand for, but do you know what your competition stands for? Your positioning should be stronger than your competitor. But for that you need to overrule what your competitor already positions it to be. If Idea stands for social causes, Vodafone stands for best Value Added Services. Both have made a very strong positioning for themselves, and both have their own audience to appeal to.

 

5.     Customer’s Quest

Do you know what will make your customers happy? Do some firsthand research, talk to people and see what they are missing in the options available to them. When you know what your customers want, you can easily align your offering to their needs. And that will be your positioning guiding light.

 

6.     Stay Focused

In all your communication with the existing and potential customers, hammer only what your key positioning is. There should be a very clean alignment between all forms and medium of communication when it comes to the message you are giving out.

 

7.     Relevance is the key

Your positioning should be relevant to the product as well as to the customer. If there is no relevance, establish it. Again, look at Idea. It has made social causes relevant to the brand, thus generating a soft corner for itself in the minds of the people. Now everybody perceives Idea as a brand that is very sensitive to social issues. The positioning is relevant to the Indian consumer.

Success Mantra: Retain customers than acquiring new ones!

Every small business must understand the importance of retaining the existing customers. Most small business owners get into aggressive customer acquisition and invest and all their marketing efforts, time and budgets to getting new customers and do not take any initiatives towards retaining the existing ones.
A repeat customer is good for any business but more so for a small business because of the following:

1. A repeat customer is as good as a new customer. Instead of going to the competitor, if the customer comes to you, it means you get a customer without any new investment.

2. Acquiring new customer is far more expensive than retaining an existing one.
Your competitor may take aggressive steps towards acquiring new customers and take away your customers too. Hence, once you have a customer, take extra steps in retaining him. On an average, it takes a small business at least 10 times more to acquire a new customer than retaining an existing one. Hence, the key to saving cost and growing a stable business is to retain the existing customers.

The following are the simple initiatives a small business can take towards retaining customers:

Be their support system: If you are a small business, you have a great opportunity to know your clients / customers personally. Give them individual attention and understand their specific needs, business requirements and feedback. If you make them feel important and valued, they will return the same gesture to you by sticking around.

Be responsive: the single most important key to retaining customers is to let them know that you hear what they have to say! Even a minor customer complaint or issue or feedback, if acknowledged immediately, helps the customer in developing the trust towards you and more importantly towards the brand.

Keep in touch: Make it a point to keep in touch with your customers / clients on a regular basis. If you don’t hear from them in a while, drop in an email asking if they are doing well. You can also send out periodical emails, newsletters, company/product updates on a regular basis to remind them of your presence.

Reward them: Reward your customers / clients for being committed to you. An annual discount, loyalty bonus, a public acknowledgement of your association with them, priority service, etc are all ways to give your customers more reasons to stay with you instead of wandering away.
Acquiring customers is important and a necessity for any business to grow but retaining the existing ones is critical for it to stabilize and have a higher return on investment.

The 5 Dos and Don’ts of Marketing for MSMEs

Here is a very common scenario amongst SMEs. The company gets started and the revenue starts flowing in with some ups and down. When the basic aspects are taken care of, the business owners start thinking about expansion and the most commonly used term which comes to mind at that time is “Marketing”. Now, we will not get into how marketing is different than sales or how marketing is not only advertising.

But here are some Dos and Don’ts for the MSMEs who are looking for expansion and are looking for some tips for that:

1. Do get a website. You cannot do effective business in 21st century if you don’t have a website.
2. Do have plans for online branding. Don’t depend only on offline promotion through print media, hoardings and billboards.
3. Do get on social media. That’s where your customers are. Don’t spend too much money on paid advertising.
4. Do online business thorough B2B market places. Don’t just depend on physical presence in one or few cities.
5. Do maintain a proper synchronisation between your offline profile (the products and services which you offer) and your online profile (what you showcase on website or B2B marketplace profile). Don’t assume that people will anyway find out which products or services you sell.

It’s high time that MSMEs start thinking about utilizing Internet as a powerful medium for expanding business. Once the potential of Internet is realized, there are tons of ways to utilize this medium without stretching the budgets.

Affordable Packages. New Interface. Online Marketing. Multi-Fold Expansion – All This and More in Last 6 Months at bizporto

As we entered the New Year 2011, we thought of taking a stock of things which happened at bizporto in last 6 months. We enjoyed every moment here with lot of new and exciting things happening. Our team grew multi-fold with new technologists, sales professionals, marketing minds and designers joining the team.

We announced a major release of bizporto and yes, that kept our engineers and user-interface designers very busy. We gave a brand new avatar to the complete search engine, made it very user friendly and easy to use. Now the site offers registration in 3 easy steps.

To support the increasing traffic to our search engine, we have ensured that the backend is equally strong. We have moved our server to a better ISP promising almost 100% up time, faster access and more secured environment.
On the promotion and expansion side, we have enhanced up our marketing efforts with the latest digital marketing techniques such as email marketing, social media marketing, e-press releases, blog marketing and more. The online brand is enhancing every passing day! This is helping our registered suppliers as well because it is helping in promoting their products and services as well. While going the online way, we are also expanding our physical presence in multiple cities across India. This is going to help us in being closer to our customers and providing them the required reach easily.

At the same time, through various packages, we have made it extremely easy for micro, small and medium sized business owners to establish their online presence and grow business multi-fold using Internet. We understand that MSMEs, in India especially, don’t always have hefty budgets and we did not want that to stop them from benefitting from the online way of generating business. We have therefore launched packages starting INR 750 which are very affordable for any business owner and these packages offer full value for money by guaranteeing leads.

We thank our partners and customers for showing the faith in us, supporting us and appreciating our efforts.

We are looking forward to a rocking new year ahead and wish everyone a very happy new year!