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Small Business Marketing Courses
This is a high level plan of all the marketing activities you want to participate in and can include both offline and online marketing. It’s also important to note that you don’t have to have all these things going at the same time, you might like to introduce your product or service to the market with some direct marketing via telephone and assess the success of it and modify your message or you could inform your customers about a complicated service one step at a time.
Online and Traditional Marketing
Remember that some business work best using one particular marketing medium so no matter how much you want to use the latest online or social media, you might find that a letterbox drop or telemarketing gives the best results. These are just some of the mediums you can use
- Google Adwords
- SEO / Blog
- Direct Mail
- Letterbox Drop
- Telemarketing
- Local Newspaper
- Radio and Television
Your Marketing Message
To discuss only the medium would be useless so you would start to develop a plan on how you would get your message out there. You may start for 3 months with just one medium and then choose others with different marketing messages to discover which one brings you the best results. Once you try some marketing messages and use different mediums you will be ready to assess just how well or badly you have done and re-align your marketing plans based on your new knowledge.
Some business advisers recommend that you spend 75% of your time on sales and marketing.
Sales and marketing is how you get your message out there and it is what results in sales. You might be an excellent bookkeeper, content writer, plumber or chef, but if no-one knows about you, how are they going to get to know you?
What you’ll learn:
So you plan to throw a few newspaper ads in and maybe have a website. Well there is much more to marketing with ‘timing’ being critical in most things. In this module we look at setting up a calendar of marketing activities. Projects that take longer or are more complicated are broken into months and costs allocated. Those costs need to be reflected in the financial spreadsheets. Your marketing plan is the HEART of your business plan. Pull this page out and put it on the wall and FOLLOW it. No marketing- no sales- no profit- no business.
Marketing Activities
Once you setup your plan or list of goals, the next step is to actually do the work to get your message out to prospective customers. Many people use Google Adwords to directly target people looking for their services, but you can also use Content Marketing for longer term benefits and to increase the organic ranking of your website.