Small business marketing strategy: A concept and Strategies

Small business must be more creative because small business has a limited budget. The limited budget don't allow spending large amount of aggressive ad campaign and promotion.

Small business should not waste money and time to perform ineffective marketing.

Therefore small business owners must strive hard to understand their customers, their business, and strengths to craft an effective marketing strategy.

Marketing is a product journey from A to Z, involves all the activities to get a product from producer to the final consumer.

Customer-driven philosophy is finding out what people want and provide that to them.

All business need customers and marketing do communicating with customers to attract customers and generates sales.

The fundamental concept of marketing: marketing is all activities to retain current customer and obtain new ones.

Marketing strategies must contain:

a. What you want to accomplish.

b. How you intend to accomplish it.

Marketing strategies can be found literally in the marketing section of business plan.

A marketing strategy will help you in running your business.

A good marketing strategy can help you to communicate the benefits you deliver to consumers.

1. Vision

2. Marketing objectives

3. Sales forecast

4. Target markets

5. Marketing mix

The characteristics of marketing-performance objectives:

– specific : time, etc.

– quantifiable outcomes : sales revenue, market share, profit.

– measurable

– action oriented

Marketing performance objectives example: “to increase sales of (your product) by 15% for the next fiscal year.”

Sales forecast is in dollars and in units.

Sales forecast is important because it will affect all marketing activities, such as set the right distribution channel, sales force requirements, budget for advertising and promotion, pricing strategy, etc.

A faulty sales forecast can damage small business. So, you must concern this in your marketing plan.

There are two ways developing sales forecast:

1. Build-up method

With this method you can identify how many target markets you can reach and predict the sales for each.

2. Break-down method.

For this method, you can start with an estimate of the total market potential for the product. This number is broken down into forecast of smaller units. In other words, forecast you do an estimation of how large a market you will reach and how many sales you will make.

Another sales forecast method

There are two more method to do sales forecast, but these are not suitable for small business. Because these two methods depend on historical data, and small business has no (or little) historical data because small business is usually newcomer in running business.

These methods are time series analysis and regression analysis.

Time series analysis is forecasting method that uses historical sales data to identify patterns over a period of time.

Regression analysis is forecasting method that predict future sales by finding a relationship between sales and other variables.

I recap the definition of target market here: A group of people who have a common want/need that your company can fulfill.

Target market is crucial to your company because they consist of the people who are more likely to be your costumers.

The goal of segmenting the market is let the right people know your product so they will want it.

The thing to be concerned by small business owner: must define the ideal customers.

It is important to understand what motivates the ideal customers, so that you can tailor your marketing to your customers.