Neighbor to Neighbor
Marketing Steps for Small Business
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Go Forward with Your Website
All small businesses ought to have a web site in this online age. That said, many business- let’s face it- do it all wrong. The data revealed in market questionnaires,like the one I just did for PolyEsther’s Costume Boutique, will reveal areas you may need to improve online. Some sites may even need to be rebuilt in order to align with a marketing campaign like our firm’s. Here are some important hints for setting up your own small business’s website in order to best serve your market, along with links to some of the internet’s worst and best designs.
Use your Information
Decide the appropriate level of investment you need for your online media or website. Your survey should yield important data concerning your target market’s media habits, including time spent online.
Using Your New Information
After gathering all that data, and determine what it says, where do you GO with it all?
For our student marketing firm, it may have seemed intuitive how to use the data- but that is after enduring years of a hands-on academic boot camp discreetly called ‘Marketing Degree Program’. Clients and business owners often take a look at what they’ve discovered and realize that they don’t quite grasp the direction the data reveals. Our firm quickly deduced the following areas, from which we developed strong trajectories.
Gathering the Data; Analyze the Situation Through Online Surveys
Like our client, many small businesses have an intuitive understanding of their customers and their environment. But having quantitative data on those subjects can help check assumptions against facts. Using online tools available to anyone for free, we have conducted our own primary research on the local costume boutique’s environment, competition, and target market. These are the steps we took to do some research for our local business client.
Setting the Foundation; Using Your Small Business’s Existing Infrastructure to Measure Goals
I am serving a business as a part of a student marketing firm, and the most significant constraint of advising this business, especially in the area of E-Marketing, is the lack of measurement tools in place. Since small businesses make up almost half of the U.S.’s total private sector employment, developing effective tools that can be used by small businesses is incredibly relevant.
Starting with historical data is key, and this is how we plan to build tools directly into a real small business’s infrastructure in order to accurately evaluate our E-Marketing performance according to specific goals- and how you can do this for your business, too.
Local E-Battles: PolyEsther’s Clothing Boutique vs. Junkee
PolyEsther’s Costume Boutique is a small, not-so-well-known costume store in the heart of downtown Reno, across the street and down a block form marketing macho Junkee Clothing Exchange. Don’t let this petite shop fool you- the owner, Esther Dunaway, has made herself well known in the custom outfit market through her excellent craftsmanship, creative talent and zany ideas But now, she needs to break into the marketing mainstream- with tough competition. An effective online strategy is important, and measuring online presence and website utility is necessary for measuring online effectiveness. Keep reading for a brief analysis of these two businesses and how they currently stand online.
The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.
