What is Hot with Small Business Marketers – Our Top Posts
With the 3rd quarter of the 2011 calendar year recently wrapped up, SMBmarketer.com decided to look back over the last three months to see which blog posts resonated the most with small business marketers. Site statistics are a great way to monitor the marketplace to identify current marketing trends, and to better understand which issues are top of mind for small business marketers.
Here are the top 5 posts by views, followed by a quick summary of each post:
1. Press Releases – How to Convince Your Colleagues to Use Press Release Marketing – While writing press releases to promote your small business is a “no brainer” strategy to many professional marketers, they often times have to influence their corporate peers to support this activity.
2. Press Release Distribution Strategies for Small Business – Some quick thoughts on the importance of developing an appropriate distribution strategy for sharing your news with key stakeholders for your business.
3. Pitching Your Small Business for Speaking Events – Speaking at local business or community events, or seeking out presenter slots is a great way to get exposure for your company’s expertise, as well as generate some potential sales leads.
4. 10 Tips for Small Business Marketers – A quick-read article from Entrepreneur magazine that features some “to do’s” for any small business trying to navigate through these tough times.
5. Email Messaging Templates for Small Business Marketers – Email marketing provides a cost-effective approach to targeting your markets, either by industry, organization type, specific user profile, or by geography.
It is amazing that many of these tops post are older, some dating back to last year, which goes to show that some topics are consistently important to our readers- a helpful gauge as to what we should cover on a regular basis. Our Smart Marketing Basics blog will make a point to track this hot list each quarter. Please feel free to comment if you don’t see your hot marketing issue represented here, and we will try to address it in a new post in Q4.
Advertising Tips for Small Business Marketers
The practice of advertising can seem overwhelming to small business marketers, viewed by most as appropriate only for large corporations with big ad budgets. Actually, when used properly and in a targeted fashion, advertising can be a powerful tool in the small business marketer’s tool box. Advertising is designed to build awareness for a particular product or service, and is a cost-effective way to get a consistent message communicated out to a large group of people. The first step, before pursuing any type of advertising investment, is to define the marketing objectives for your company, and then determine whether advertising is a good fit or not.
A key marketing objective for any small business to promote their thought leadership, or business expertise. Many small businesses overlook marketing what they do on a daily basis, when in fact, sharing some of their knowledge in a webinar event, or speaking at an industry trade show, can be a great way to showcase the value they provide. This can be done by hosting and promoting an educational-themed event where company executives or subject matter experts share their industry perspectives. Another idea is to share a company’s best practices, or customer research findings.
It does not cost much money to hire a local graphic designer and copy writer to craft a simple, professional ad layout around your “business expertise” content. Advertising your expertise works well, because readers will respond positively to offers of educational value because, especially when researching new solutions. Featured ads in targeted publications and websites can be very effective in branding your company as a thought-leader. Running fractional ads in local business sections of newspapers, or in industry association newsletters, can provide any small business marketer with a lot traction among prospective customers.
As part of your advertising strategy, be sure to include a compelling “call-to-action” or next step that your prospects can take to get more information. For example, a link to a recorded event, or an offer for a free white paper, or case study on a topic important to your customers. Again, targeting print ads in vertical industry magazines or conference programs, or local business journals, as well as online banner ads in those same venues, can be an economical way to get started in advertising. Just remember to stay focused, and avoid the mass media outlets that reach a broad user profile, such as TV or radio, because those can be very expensive and not very targeted to your audience.
For more information on smart marketing basics, download my free article, Ten Marketing Basics for Your Small Business, located on the SMBmarketer.com website.
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