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.

• READ MORE

Half of all new product revenues come from the introduction and early stages of a product’s life cycle.   But what about brands?  Can you create a whole new life cycle by re-launching your brand online?

Sure you can.  In fact, brand managers have been working overtime on finding the best ways to keep their brands at your fingertips .  Here are some of the best online brand building tools and how you can use them to build a powerful brand presence online. As a small business, you have a lot of the same online marketing tools available to you as the big companies.

• READ MORE

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.

• READ MORE

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.)

• READ MORE

Springwise writes about new businesses, most of which are spotted by our network of 8,000+ Springspotters, who submit concepts they think are smart and innovative. Since those businesses can be anywhere in the world, our first point of entry is usually a website. Which means we look at hundreds of small business sites every week. Some of them tick all the right boxes: easy-to-find information, appealing design and an engaging tone of voice, all working together to showcase a product or service and brand.

Others… Well, they seem to have missed a few fundamentals. So before you dive into online branding and join the social web, make sure you’ve covered the basics:

• READ MORE