Marketing a small business using a diverse assortment of advertising is essential to sustained growth and brand awareness. Many small business owners rely on word-of-mouth or location-based efforts to build their revenue stream. Unfortunately this mentality will lead to cash flow issues and lackluster business performance. Advertising is essential and should be built through a budget-based marketing plan considering social media, print and audio visual, and public relations efforts. Even small businesses should have a website, token presence on Twitter, Linked-In, Face Book and other low cost/high visibility mediums. Understandably time and money are major factors in the decision process, but businesses that don’t market themselves don’t exist for very long.

Marketing as a process

Evaluate the strength of your marketing efforts by applying our 7 Step Method™. Building out a process to measure marketing efforts and to manage change in your company will result in controlled growth. Critical to success is the development of  a series of key performance indicators (KPI’s) that depict the positive or negative results of alteration in the company. These KPIs should cover planning, execution, and feedback in addition to finance. Potential areas to keep tabs on include growth of Industry, opportunity, intellectual capital development, market share, product demand, growth rate (>15% is ideal), expandability and sustainability. The results will help you understand the steps necessary to correcting or enhancing your marketing strategy.

Marketing plan and strategy

Many business owners mix planning and strategy together. This should not be the case. Planning involves a step-by-step process to define and realize a set of goals. Strategy is based on planning and lists the necessary executables or tactics to enable performance. So often sales and marketing is based on how much money is in the ’till” and not structured against ROI, brand awareness goals, and leveraging partnerships. For example, a restaurateur can leverage supplier promotional dollars to fund local advertising for their establishment or upcoming event. A service provider can take advantage of joint marketing with alliance partners to offset costs associated with a particular campaign. Purchasing of a one year contract for print advertising versus a two or three month campaign is another example. In each case, short-term cash is secondary to building brand awareness and creating marketing power through network.

Welcome feedback

Before starting any kind of advertising setting expectations and brainstorming potential outcome is a solid  best practice to enact. Feedback can act as a measurement of success outside of financial gain or loss. Advertising budgets should account for short-term cash and long-term brand awareness. Companies that build in parallel will be more successful. The bottom line.. take the time to develop both cash in your pocket and long-term growth.