subject: Types Of Marketing A Small Business [print this page] When you are a small business owner, most of your waking hours (and sometimes your sleeping hours as well) are spent on operating your business as well as your marketing efforts for your business. As a business owner, you know that the only way you can get your target clients to know you exist is to market your business to them. This means having to look for strategies, be it color printing or custom printing, or having a professional color printer to produce your marketing tools, or even to have a tv commercial the bottom line is to market you business so that people would know about it.
Indeed, as a small business owner, you are more likely to use up a big amount of your time, energy and effort looking for ways to market to your target clients and get them attracted to your offer. And all of these at a budget you can afford, which is surely very limited compared to those of the big corporations.
Marketing can definitely be a stressful and challenging activity for many small business owners. And the key to making it more bearable is to learn and understand the different ways you can market your business.
For small businesses, there are four ways you can do your marketing. By knowing these types of marketing, you can focus all your resources to one particular type so you can get more results from your efforts.
Blanket Marketing
Although this is often used by big companies and Fortune 500 corporations, if you have the budget for it, you can always utilize blanket marketing for your strategy. This method engages a bigger amount of budget as you would want to reach out and cover everyone. You do blanket marketing by way of advertising in newspapers, magazines, tv and radio. Your target market is everyone that you are not concerned who sees, reads, or even hears you message; as long as it reaches out to as many people as possible. Hence, you are basically spending money so that a much larger audience (this time, everyone) can know about you and your business.
The downside? Again, it can be so expensive that you might even deplete your entire budget. It is quite costly without even knowing if you are getting target clients interested in your advertisement. As everyone is involved, your ad becomes unfocused and you might just be wasting your time and money without getting clients at all to buy whatever it is you are offering. It is best left out to those who has the funds for it and who believes that they can generate more clients from advertising to just about everyone.
Target Marketing
This is a method of marketing that allows you to choose a particular demographics or segment of your target market. This means that you only advertise to those who would most likely be interested in what you have to offer in your business. This also means that you have a better chance at attracting clients to your business because your message is more focused and concentrated on those who have an interest in you.
The downside? It takes more research and work to get to know your target audience. Since you are providing them a more focused and custom advertising, it takes a lot of legwork to find out the details of a marketing campaign that will work on them.
Social Media Marketing
This is the type of marketing that uses the internet to reach out to your target clients. You can use the social media available online such as Twitter, Facebook and Friendster. You can also create a blogspot or a website of your own, or sign up in forums and chat sites. The best thing about it is that you can do this for free. All you need is time to browse the internet, and of course, a computer and internet connection.
The downside? Again, you will be sending out to virtually millions of people who some of them might not even give a hoot about what you have to offer. Also, you dont see these people so you wouldnt know who is real or who is just out there having a good time at your expense. You also have to update your blogs constantly to keep people interested in your site.
No marketing.
The last one is that you dont market at all. The good thing about this is that you dont spend even a single cent or effort in marketing.
The downside is that no one will know about you and your business so you might just dwindle away and nobody gets to know about it even.
by: Steve James Perkins
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