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

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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On May 6th at 9 a.m. PDT, I will be joined by Guy Kawasaki, author of Art of the Start, Chris Brogan of ChrisBrogan.com and David Meerman Scott, author of World Wide Rave, to discuss taking your brand online. This is the fourth in a series of five webinars brought to you by HP, creators of MarketSplash and the Creative Studio –- online tools to make your marketing simple, professional and affordable

I’ll be asking this all-star panel to cover many of the strategies and tactics that small business owners need to consider and tap on the way to creating a total web presence.

In today’s rapidly evolving world of marketing, few things are more important than being found online when and where your prospects are looking

For most small businesses, a website is an acknowledged part of being in business, but it’s not enough.

In this session we will dive into

• Ways to create and spread content that gets read and found,
• How to take advantage of local and social search
• How to make online PR work for your business
• Optimizing online brand assets such as social profiles
• Social networks and other online marketing outposts
• Monitoring and measuring your brand online

This is a rare opportunity to hear from some of best and brightest online. We’ll keep it fast moving, cover lots of practical tips, and reveal all of our favorite online tools- come ready to take a ton of notes. We’ll be taking questions live too, so start thinking about what you might like to ask Chris, David, Guy and me.

Register for event here and receive reminders as well as a link to the recorded archive.

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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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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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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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