Small Business Marketing Ideas and Tips

When I started to read the article below, the word innovation turned me off, I didn’t associate the headline that was given with small business help marketing tips. It’s funny that a single word can do that, sometimes it all depends on your definition of the word and how it has been used to and by you in the past. In the English language so many words can mean the same thing & also one word can have various meanings. So when I discovered that Steve Strauss was referring to innovating marketing practices I took notice. Here’s the small business help, marketing tips he shared:

Small Business Help – Marketing Tips

Right, and wrong. It is a correct assumption in that innovation is indeed too much work for some small businesses. That’s fine, understandable even. Innovation takes time and money, and those things are sometimes in short supply. So yes, if you don’t want to innovate, we can relate.

But it is equally true that being innovative in your business and with your products can be the secret sauce that allows you to stand out in the vast sea that is capitalism. There is no shortage of competitors who want to steal your clients, and if they innovate and you don’t, they just may. Moreover, innovation fires up the team, invigorates the entrepreneur, wows customers, impresses potential clients, and, when done right, grows your business.

Let me give you an example: A few weeks ago I was invited by Symantec (a company I previously did some work with) to a product launch at the world headquarters of Tesla Motors in Palo Alto, Calif. Let’s just start there. That’s an innovative way to launch a product, is it not? Rather than sending out a boring press release, showcasing their products against the backdrop of some incredibly cool $100,000 sports cars captured one’s attention. [Read more…]

Having a Social Media Strategy for your small business will help you stay on track with whatever social media channels you choose to use. It is all to easy to become distracted flitting from one avenue to other without a clear direction of what is best for your business.

Here are 3 points from an 8 step plan from Richard Mullins on his recommendations for a social media strategy.

A social media strategy for your small business

1. Investigate

Start out by investigating the social space and trying to work out how it could add value to your business. Listen to what people are saying on social networks like Twitter and Facebook, and perhaps even put a basic listening tool in place to see what it can do for you.

2. Implement and integrate

Now that you have a rough feel for what is happening in the social world, you can begin thinking about the software tool set. If you’re running a bigger business, you’ll need something far more robust than a basic tool like Tweetdeck. You should be looking for a single tool that allows you to listen to social conversations, take part in the conversation, measure your results, and manage the workflow (for example, the content approval process) across your team. Ideally, the tool you use should support integration across your social tools and data, as well as with other customer communication channels, such as email and mobile marketing. It should also be able to grow along with your needs. For example, Co-Tweet is a comprehensive Web-based social media engagement, management and reporting solution that helps companies of all sizes engage, track and analyse conversations about their brands across the most popular and influential social communities.

3. Listen and measure

You need to decide who and what you will listen out for. This can include multiple objectives – from hearing what the market is saying about you and competitors, to what the community is interested in. You also need to turn these factors into quantifiable metrics. To prove the value of social media marketing, you have to compare it to other channels. This means that you will need standardised key performance indicators (KPIs) – such as frequency of mentions, sentiment allocation, traffic, reach or influence (friends, fans etc.) – to make it easy to compare social media channels with each other and with other channels. There are tools such as Social Analytics from Adobe that allow marketers to start measuring social media, sentiment and it’s relationship and impact on a business’s broader online environment.

Check out the rest of Richards steps for more detail on his social media strategy. If this is to hard for you to implement at this time, simply take note and revisit when it suits you. The more you read and digest on social media, the more it will become second nature rather than completely overwhelming.

Let us know how you aregoing, do you have any tips to share?

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Small Business Help Marketing Tips

A Social Media Strategy required to stop distractions

A social media strategy for your small business