Small Business Marketing Guide - DIY (do-it-yourself) BRAND MARKETING STRATEGIES to HELP YOU GROW YOUR BUSINESS

Lots of small business owners are intimidated by the thought of marketing their businesses. The buzzwords and flash associated with “marketing” often make embarking on a do-it-yourself marketing effort seem daunting. But don’t let that fear distract you from the goal of educating your customers and potential customers about your business.

In your day-to-day business, you focus on what your customers need and how you can provide them with that.  That is what your marketing should focus on, too. Too many marketing messages focus on the company rather than the customer. So as you craft your marketing strategy and materials, keep the customer top of mind.

Here are some great tips that will help you take that customer-driven attitude and translating it into marketing:

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If you want to develop a solid brand strategy, there are some things you have to do first.  I want to challenge you to focus on these two elements before you even get started with graphic design.  Before you get started on your website or meet with your website guy, you must wrestle with these elements.  And before you start thinking of all the different concepts for a new logo, wait.  To be honest with you, if you can’t answer these questions, you’re not ready to do anything else.  It’s like sitting down with an interior designer to talk about the color of your drapes before you’ve ever met with an architect.

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No matter what you want to call it — direct mail, junk mail, circulars, ads, or spam — they all share the same purpose: to motivate you to buy from them. While a lot of what is out there may actually be junk, a savvy direct marketer inspires the recipient to read their ad.

Unlike your brand, which will tell the customer what to think, your marketing strategy must tell them what to do. Before you can effectively do that, you need to know how.

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Last week we conducted a live web panel discussion here – Taking Your Brand Online – with Chris Brogan,[http://www.chrisbrogan.com] Guy Kawasaki [www.alltop.com], David Meerman Scott[www.davidmeermanscott.com] and me as part four of a five part series aimed at helping small business owners get up and running and successfully marketing on and offline.

We always receive way more questions than we can answer during the call so I thought I would grab a few that we did not have a chance to get to and post those answers here.

1) Q: What’s the one advice, one thing you think a small company starting up with social media should do?

A: There really are so many ways to utilize the various social media tools available to the small business, such as blogs, twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr, and many people want to jump in and test the waters on all.

However, the first thing you should is listen and watch.

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What is your business card doing for you? Is it a plain piece of card stock with your logo and contact information printed on it? This is okay for most companies, but for a startup, your business card is one of the easiest ways to spread word of your brand.

You could take Ji Lee’s simple–albeit a bit risky–approach:

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