Over the past decade more and more people are getting fired, getting downsized, or getting fed up with their corporate jobs and embark on the journey as a small business owner. Unfortunately, most of the new small business owners fail to consider their marketing plans or strategy. There are many marketing concepts for small business marketing to consider and plan for, but here is our list of Top 10 Marketing Concepts For Small Business Marketing.

Marketing Concept # 1: Consistency

Consistency is the number one marketing concept for small business marketing only because it is left out of marketing concepts for so many businesses. I have worked with a long list of clients, big and small, that are extremely inconsistent in all areas of their marketing. Consistency helps lower the cost of marketing and increase the effectiveness of branding.

Marketing Concept # 2: Planning

Once small business owners decide to be consistent with their marketing, planning is the next major concept to engage. Planning is the most vital part of small business marketing or any level of marketing, for that matter, and so many owners, marketing managers, and even CMOs plan poorly. Put the time into planning your marketing strategy, budget, and other concepts presented here to ensure success.

Marketing Concept # 3: Strategy

Strategy immediately follows planning because your strategy is the foundation for the rest of your marketing activities. In the process of planning, you must develop your strategy: who you will target, how you will target them, and how will you keep them as a customer.

Marketing Concept # 4: Target Market

Target market is also another key concept for small business marketing. Defining exactly who you are targeting allows small business owners to focus on specific customers and reduce marketing waste. A well-defined target market will make every other marketing concept so much easier to implement successfully.

Marketing Concept # 5: Budget

Although it is listed at number 5, budgeting is important throughout the entire process. Creating a marketing budget is usually the hardest and most inaccurate part of small business marketing. Most small businesses owners lack a great deal of experience in marketing, so their budgets usually end up skewed. The most important part of this marketing concept is to actually establish a marketing budget. From there, you can worry about how to distribute your available funds.

Marketing Concept # 6: Marketing Mix

The marketing mix is usually defined as product, pricing, place, and promotion. As a small business owner, you must specifically decide on your products (or services), the appropriate pricing, where and how you will distribute your products, and how will you let everyone know about you and your products.

Marketing Concept # 7: Website

In today’s market, a business of any size must have a website. I hate when I see businesses that have a one page website with out-dated information. Customers, be it businesses or consumers, will search the web over 60% of the time before making any purchasing decisions. This marketing concept contains a slew of additional components, but you must at least develop a small web presence of some kind and keep it updated.

Marketing Concept # 8: Branding

Many small businesses owners also neglect this concept. Small business marketing must focus on this marketing concept just as much as large corporations do. Branding consists of the pictures, logo, design scheme, layout, make up, and image of your products and even your company. Branding is how your customers perceive (please place a lot of emphasis on that word!) your products and company. Make sure to pay special attention to what kind of brand you are building through each step of your planning and implementation.

Marketing Concept # 9: Promotion and Advertising

Promotion and advertising is a very complex marketing concept, but must be considered for any type of business and its products and services. Once you engage the previous 8 marketing concepts, you must finally let your target market know about you and your products. Proper promotion and advertising will result in effective brand recognition, and, ultimately, increased sales.

Marketing Concept # 10: Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

The concept of customer relationship management has become a huge industry in the marketing world. There are many types of software and services offered to help businesses of any size handle their customer relationship management. Since there is so much available, usually for a large sum of money, small business owners usually look at this concept as something they are not big enough for or have enough money to implement. Don’t be fooled by the massive industry that has evolved from this concept. Maintaining proper customer relationship management is essential to creating loyal and consistent customers.

This list of marketing concepts should be examined, researched, planned, and implemented, especially by small businesses, in order to be successful. Also, your marketing doesn’t stop here. Each business is unique and will have additional components that must be considered, but this list will jump-start any marketing plan.

Source by Nate Stockard

Kotler and Armstrong define marketing as “the process by which companies create value for customers and build strong customer relationships in order to capture value from customer in return.” This definition alone can explain why marketing is important, but let’s outline several reasons why marketing should be one of the small business owner’s main priorities.

1. Marketing builds value in your products and services for your customers.

Most salespeople want to know as little as possible to make the sale. Some sales staff needs technical specifications and things of that nature, but ultimately, the less they have to learn the better. This makes sense, because their goal is to make sales. Therefore, marketing has to step in and create value for your customer. If you can not create value for your customers, why will they buy from you? Sometimes they will buy from you once, but will they come back if there is no value?

Many times, business owners don’t capitalize on all the ways they can give value to their customers. They get lost in the production or product concept of marketing and end up with marketing myopia. Marketing myopia happens when a company pays more attention to the product/service than the value or benefits it offers to the customer. You can not let this happen to you. Pay attention to your customers and why they buy your products. People buy a Toyota Prius not only because it saves on gas, but because it makes them fell more eco-friendly.

2. Marketing helps build customer relationships.

Everyone put emphasis on the sales staff when it comes to sales. “If the sales team doesn’t work harder, we won’t increase sales,” but this is not necessarily true. It costs three times as much to obtain a new customer as it does to keep an existing one. This means you need to maintain the relationship with your current customers in order to lower marketing and sales costs and increase sales.

Properly planned and implemented marketing activities are the only real way to build customer relationships. These activities can include a lot of things: loyalty programs, thank-you cards, customer appreciation events, free gifts, and so on. Each company must find a unique way to set themselves apart from the competition while building a loyal and long-lasting relationship.

3. Marketing establishes a brand image.

When you use FedEx for shipping, you know what you are getting: fast delivery, flexible shipping options, and better service than other shippers. Are all of these things true? They may be, but their marketing activities established all of these. FedEx will have to live up to these expectations of their brand, but their marketing department set the customer up with this image.

You must use marketing to establish your brand. Customers need to know what to expect from your company based on your brand image. What kind of products and what types of service will you provide the customer? Let your marketing tell the story and establish your brand.

Source by Nate Stockard

Direct Marketing

 Mango Solutions is a business of direct marketing to the consumer, as by direct mail, mail outs or direct call over the phone. We direct market your services throughout Australia and New Zealand and direct marketing to customers either through mail outs, mailing lists or telephone rather than in a retail establishment.

 Mango Solutions can either provide you with the mailing lists for you to do your own direct marketing, or we have personally trained staff to suit your direct marketing requirements and to ‘direct market’ prospects and offer your service or products in a fashion that is not only professional, but in a manor that is direct and suitable for any type of marketing in the whole of Auz and NZ.

 If you think mango solutions can help you with your direct marketing you can contact us direct via email or call in to speak with us how we can assist you in direct marketing your product or services, you can choose to have us only mail out information or do all the work by direct marketing to potential clients.

 We also have Mailing lists for sale, in times past, when companies first started using Direct Marketing as a marketing tool,they come to a brick wall on where to start calling or sending information, however over the many years we have been in business we have now generated a huge mailing list and if you would like to enquire more about our mailing lists or direct marketing sercives visit our website below.

 Are you looking for a direct marketing company to work and manage and deliver direct marketing services for your business such as; telemarketing, marketing, mail outs, and an opportunity to grow and expand your business in Auz or NZ, then this is it, Mango Solutions… direct marketing for businesses like yours for the past 4 years!

Mango solutions, the solutions to you direct marketing needs.

www.mangosolutions.org

P: 07 5553 4178

Source by faryah

The marketing industry is highly dynamic and marketers are challenged all the time to come up with creative ways to increase brand awareness, market share and sales. It is thus crucial to keep up with new marketing concepts and strategies developed over time and this is where New Wave Marketing comes in.

According to Hermawan Kartajaya, a highly regarded marketing guru from Asia – Indonesia, the famous nine principles of marketing, as we all have learned to know and applied in our marketing strategies, need to be revised and adapt to the modern world today and these new principles will be known as New Wave Marketing.  Whether or not they will actually replaced the old terms from now on has not been announced.

Just to point out, The nine principles of marketing by Phlip Kotler also referred as “Legacy Marketing” are:

1. Segmentation,
2. Targeting,
3. Positioning,
4. Differentiation,
5. Marketing-Mix (Product, Price, Place, Promotion),
6. Selling,
7. Brand,
8. Service,
9. Process

12 C of New Wave Marketing

The new elements or principles has now been termed the 12 C of “New Wave Marketing” and they are:

• Communitization,
• Confirming,
• Clarifying,
• Coding,
• Crowd-Combo (Co-Creation, Currency, Communal Activation, Conversation),
• Commercialization,
• Character,
• Caring,
• Collaboration

You will be able to understand the new terms better with the illustration below and you will see that the New Wave Marketing is actually a replacement of terms of the Nine Principles of Marketing.

• Segmentation = Communitization
• Targeting = Confirming
• Positioning = Clarifying
• Differentiation = Coding
• Marketing-Mix = Crowd-Combo
• Product = Co-Creation
• Price = Currency
• Place =Communal Activation
• Promotion = Conversation
• Selling = Commercialization
• Brand = Character
• Service = Caring
• Process = Collaboration

These new terms described the principles of Marketing better than the previous terms and make more sense in the new world today. The changes in information technology especially the internet including social marketing has revolutionized how we communicate with one another, creating more opportunities as well as threats to all businesses.

The influence of the internet world also contributed to the evolution of Internet Marketing Strategies and New Wave Marketing principles and many large successful businesses that applied them have become successful companies.

Just like the 9 principles of Marketing that needs adaption to the new world, we too need to adapt to the New Wave Marketing and apply them to our business to face this new world.

These New Wave Marketing principles, when applied, allows companies to reap huge benefits, “getting high impact with low costs” with sustainable competitive advantage over others that have not applied it.

Source by Bobby Leong

As the owner of a courier business, you need to be very clear about what marketing is.

Marketing is “the whole idea of your business”. What your service is, at what price, when it’s available, the people it’s aimed at, how those people should actually buy from it, what colours it uses, the name, the pricing, its location and coverage, and so on.

This article deals with the marketing of your courier business.

You need to match the features, advantages and benefits (“FAB”) of your courier service with the wants and needs of your customers. Once you’ve worked out the details of your marketing, you need to communicate it to the people you’re aiming at.

Marketing should not be confused with selling. Selling is part of marketing. Marketing helps your selling to be effective. Selling is the act of to trying to persuade your target that you alone offer the
quality he wants, at the price he wants. It will not always the cheapest price. He/she will be juggling with a whole range of things such as price, system, performance, habit, prejudice, fashion, value and personal relationships. The bottom line is that he/she will come up with a simple conclusion that “I like it” or “I don’t like it”, and if it is “I don’t” he/she will go away and buy whatever it is he/she “likes better” from somebody else.

The crunch question is “What is the customer looking for?” and your success in marketing lies in getting it more nearly right than your competitors. If you get it right you make money.

Question Yourself:

Make sure you know the answers to:

“Give me a really good reason why anyone should actually choose
you rather than someone else”

“What is so special or different about your courier service that they should choose to spend their money with you”

“Is there anything unique about your quality, features, specification, service, design, convenience, availability, presentation, or performance that actually matters to the customer?”

“Which customers don’t you want?”

“Which customers do you want?”

“Where are they and how many of them are there?”

“How do they go about making their buying decisions?”

“What actual benefits will they get, and why would they get more benefit than from buying from someone else.”

“What problems can you solve that are commonly experienced by your customers?”

You should know the answers to all of these, and rehearse them in front of someone who will give you friendly criticism.

Make sure you know who your target market is. Look at what your competitors
are offering to those people, and make sure you know why your business
services more closely correspond to what your target market wants to buy.
You can find this out by phoning your competitors and asking them, usually, and by looking at their website. Work out areas in which you offer a better service or are better value than they are.

From all of this, decide on price, presentation, service quality and selling method, and keep this clear in your mind.

Respond to changes in the courier market, both local and national, such as the arrival or disappearance of a competitor, or changes in their prices or service, or the emergence of new technology such as freight exchanges, social networking, realtime Proof of Delivery systems, and online booking. If you fail to supply what your customers really do want they will simply take their money and spend it with someone who does.

In the end, business is about people, it is about understanding what they want, about supplying it when they require, wherever, whenever, and however they want, at a price they are prepared to pay that maintains your margin. And then getting paid.

“One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-
confidence is preparation.”
(Arthur Ashe)

© 2009 Tim Gilbert – All rights reserved.

Source by Tim Gilbert