Marketing Your G-Business


You are at an advantage as a small business. You hold the edge. Small businesses are able to develop relationships with their customers, can learn quickly of their likes and/or dislikes, and can quickly react to buying habits and trends.

Your target marketing should consider the following about your potential customer:

Age
Income
Occupation
Family size
Marital status

There are many places that you can research your market. First is your local area Chamber of Commerce, (it is a good idea to consider joining your local area Chamber of Commerce—this will be money well spent). Not only will this give you an advantage to marketing your G-Biz abut it will also offer wonderful networking opportunities that you may not receive in any other arena.

Second, consider visiting your Local Library. You will find a plethora of information at the library. With your library card, you can log on to www.answerpoint.org. You will find a one search box (probably on the right). Enter your library card number. Scroll down to the reference usa link and you will be able to research business and residential prospects. You can define your search categories to narrow the search to your specific needs. The best part of this is that it is FREE!

Then you will want to target this market when your research is complete. Different marketing strategies will appeal to different target markets. For example, a "better value for the money" offer will be more appealing to a "family" consumer group while "a wider distribution" would be more attractive to those who travel frequently. Different segments such as define the market:

Geographic
Demographic
Psychographic
Product Benefits
Previous Customers

Some other advertising venues that you may want to consider are:
The Yellow Pages
A Press Release

The newspaper (visit your local newspaper first). Some offer free seminars to develop your ads---at no cost. You only pay when you place the ad; however, you have the ads available at a moment's notice.
Billboards
Fliers
Direct Mail
Radio

Your next step is to evaluate the performance of your marketing strategies. Evalute such objectives as:

Did I capture an increased share of the market?
What was the cost per added share?
What worked effectively, what did not?
Did your advertising efforts reach the specific target groups? Were the promotions timely?
Rate of return on coupons, mailers, etc.

Evaluating the performance of your marketing efforts is extremely important. This will be a deciding factor in future decision-making. Your efforts want and need to be result oriented or you will find yourself out of business before you actually get "in" to business. Be flexible and able to adapt to changes in the market, customer's desires and the economy and do not forget to ask for your customer's opinion (either positive or negative). Remember .negative talk will spread much faster than positive and will affect your business much quicker too.