MARKETING YOUR SMALL BUSINESS

It is essential that you create a good image for your small business and that you make sure that your community and any potential user or partner knows about your small business. In other words, you need to market your small business. A small business cannot be sustained nor can it serve the community well unless you actively market it to a variety of people and organizations.

The marketing skills described in this module will give you the basic tools you need to start this process. However, in marketing there is no magic formula for success. Sometimes you may need to make more than one attempt before you succeed in achieving your objective. The important thing is to learn from your experience and build that into your future marketing activities. Here is an experience that may help you focus on this issue.

1. BASIC IDEAS FOR A MARKETING PLAN

This section gives a step-by-step description of what you need to think about and do to market your small business successfully. Regardless of whether you use advertising, public relations, events or promotions to market your small business, these skills will be useful.

Each step leads to the next one, so it is important that you understand each of the steps well.

1.1 List your objectives

The first step in good marketing is to list what your marketing objectives are. You need to think about this carefully before doing anything else because it will determine everything that you do later.

A marketing objective is a simple sentence or statement that describes what you want to achieve. There are many possible marketing objectives. What you choose as your objective depends on what your needs are.

Take note that a marketing objective is very specific and can be met by using marketing activities. For example “To improve the customer service provided by my small business” and “To upgrade the equipment in my small business,” are general statements and not marketing objectives.

Examples of marketing objectives include:

• “To inform 90% of the villagers in my community about the services provided by my small business.”

• “To convince at least 75% of the community leaders to support and endorse my small business.”

• “To get all the local newspapers to write about the launch of my small business.”

Notice that we have emphasized numbers in the above objectives. Setting quantitative goals is very important when you write marketing objectives because it allows you to measure later how well you have done.

You may have one or several marketing objectives. However, the more objectives you have, the more time, effort, and money you are likely to need.

Awareness building

Awareness building about the small business can never stop. As there tends to be an “out of sight, out of mind” disposition among many metropolitan institutions, the small businesss in rural areas must remain visible to key national institutions throughout their operating life.

Awareness building is also necessary within the community itself. Some segments of the community will tend to be more attracted to the small business in the initial days of operations while others will be intimidated by the technology and will stay away. The small businesss will continue to have to work hard to overcome people’s fears about learning how to make the technology work for them.

Richard Fuchs, If You Have Lemons, Make Lemonade

For more information on marketing your business visit us at Gahsonay.com and search for Module TWO