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

Hopefully, by now you’ve concluded that today’s marketing requires lots of content, lots of education, and lots of trust-building via expertise sharing.

The tri-fold brochure just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Today’s smart marketers think in terms of information products more than marketing collateral — education over selling rules the day.

The best way to tap this necessary marketing shift is to think in terms of kits or suites of information. The most practical approach for the typical small business is the creation of on-demand, flexible and personal marketing kits, press kits and new customer kits.

These multiple page-documents, often housed in a pocket of a custom file folder, allow small business marketers to tell the entire story in a range of formats that take in the learning styles and personalities of a broad range of prospects.

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Yes, if you have a small business, even a one-person shop, you have a brand. Many small business owners don’t think this way, but when you grasp what a brand really is, I think it may become a clearer.

A brand is little more than the collective perception and association of your business in the minds of your market. So, even if only half a dozen people know your business exists, their thoughts about your business make up your brand.

I like to define small business branding as the act of intentionally becoming more knowable, likable and trustable – in a way, much more aligned with how we might think about a personality.

Let’s face it there are certain traits that make one person a more attractive total package than another – so, I’m wondering, could your business stand a brand (personality) upgrade?

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People don’t want to be sold – if they don’t know, like or trust you they can block your messages in a staggering amount of ways.

So, what’s a small business that wants to target a very defined group of prospects to do? I mean, direct mail is still a viable tool for this kind of engagement, isn’t it?

I believe direct mail is a very powerful medium for targeting prospects, but the rules of engagement, just like about everything in marketing have changed.

If you want your mail offers to get noticed they must be more personal than you could ever have imagined something falling in the junk mail category could be.

Think one to one personal.

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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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A funny thing happened on the way to social media tools like Twitter becoming so popular. More and more consumers started to find that one of the best ways to get help about how to use the products and services they had purchased was to ask other users who happened to be online.  (People have done this for some time in forums, but social networks have a more open and public feel.)

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