Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the Entrepreneurs category.
Writing Press Releases to Promote Your Small Business
Getting started marketing your small to medium-sized business can quickly become overwhelming. Whether you are an entrepreneur or business principal, or an internal marketing manager, there are many tactical approaches to consider. Recognize that the discipline of marketing is broad and deep, and best practices can vary based on your vertical market, and whether you sell B2B (a business that sells to other businesses, who in turn sell to another end-user) or B2C (a business selling directly to consumers). After 20+ years as a marketing professional, I do recommend a couple of smart marketing basics, one of which is Public Relations and writing press releases to promote your successes and accomplishments.
Writing press releases to promote each of your business successes is a easy, actionable strategy that can fits any marketing budget. What results can you expect you ask? Issuing press releases regularly helps to keep your company top of mind with prospective customers; it builds awareness for what you do, and the value you provide; and it is a “smart marketing play” that can get your company known.
The press release has also evolved, from a simple news announcement sent only to journalists and media outlets, into a powerful marketing tool for organizations of all sizes. With the Internet and social media venues as prominent communication vehicles for both business and consumer audiences, readers can come across your news in several places, and can take multiple actions after viewing your announcement. For example:
- Press releases can be indexed by Yahoo and Google, and shown in search engine results.
- Press releases can be posted to your company website and optimized with your keyword phrases to improve your search rankings.
- Press releases can be re-tweeted by readers to their followers on Twitter, who share the same interests.
- Press releases can be used by your sales teams as conversation starters on cold calls.
- Press releases can be pushed out to mobile phones, through RSS feeds, and redistributed to news syndication and aggregator sites.
- Check out our marketing templates downloads page
- Access our Press Release Tutor interactive templates, and
- Subscribe to the Smart Marketing Basics blog for continual marketing tips and help.
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.
Writing Press Releases to Market Your Small Business
Throughout my career as a technology marketing professional, I have spent a lot of time counseling small businesses on effective marketing, and helping them to justify investments in marketing. Often times, they have tried a tactic or two, without understanding what their overall strategy should be, or how different types of campaigns are designed to bring different types of results.
As a small business owner or marketer, it is key to invest in marketing to promote your product or service. This does not have to be an overwhelming or costly endeavor, and there are many smart marketing plays that are proven for small business. You can start by downloading our free “Smart Marketing Playbook” article, Using Press Releases to Promote Your Small Business.
Writing press releases to promote each of your business successes is a easy, actionable strategy that can fits any marketing budget. What results can you expect you ask? Issuing press releases regularly helps to keep your company top of mind with prospective customers; it builds awareness for what you do, and the value you provide; and it is a “smart marketing play” that can get your company known.
The press release has also evolved, from a simple news announcement sent only to journalists and media outlets, into a powerful marketing tool for organizations of all sizes. With the Internet and social media venues as prominent communication vehicles for both business and consumer audiences, readers can come across your news in several places, and can take multiple actions after viewing your announcement. For example:
- Press releases can be indexed by Yahoo and Google, and shown in search engine results.
- Press releases can be posted to your company website and optimized with your keyword phrases to improve your search rankings.
- Press releases can be re-tweeted by readers to their followers on Twitter, who share the same interests.
- Press releases can be used by your sales teams as conversation starters on cold calls.
- Press releases can be pushed out to mobile phones, through RSS feeds, and redistributed to news syndication and aggregator sites.
- Check out our marketing templates downloads page
- Access our Press Release Tutor interactive templates, and
- Subscribe to the Smart Marketing Basics blog for continual marketing tips and help.
Get Your Small Business a Speaking Gig: 32 Tips from ToiletPaperEnterpreneur
I’ve written about the importance of speaking at events as a key strategy for small business marketing. Pitching yourself for speaking opportunities at relevant industry tradeshows or local business events that your customers attend is a great way to establish yourself as a thought leader in your area of expertise, and to get exposure for your small business. I offered up a couple of my favorite tips in my previous blog post, Pitching Your Small Business For Speaking Events.
My contributions were also featured in a great article compiled by Mike Michalowicz, Author of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, in his blog post titled, “Ways To Get A Lot More Speaking Engagements“. If you are serious about pitching yourself for speaking engagements, then you should definitely check out this article. It features 32 easy-to-read, actionable tips from a variety of experts that can help any small business get the speaking gig they really want!
My Favorite Marketing “Tweets” for Entrepreneurs and Small Business Owners
It is not hard to argue the importance of marketing to the success of any business. For entrepreneurs and small business marketers, the challenge seems to lie in simply getting started. The discipline of marketing is vast, encompassing many practice areas where most marketing professionals focus on mastering only a few specific skill areas.
After spending 20+ years in the marketing arena, my experience has shown that startups and small businesses need actionable, easy ways to get started marketing, and they need to do it fast. They can’t usually afford in the beginning to invest in a lot of staff, agencies or consultants, and so having some easy templates and strategies to get them going is key. If the initial steps seem too complicated, they simply won’t do it. Think easy, actionable tips – or in this case, tweetable tips!
If you subscribe to my blog, Smart Marketing Basics, or follow me on Twitter @SMB_marketer, you can see that I write on this topic often. Below I feature some of my favorite ‘tweets’ that highlight two “must do” marketing tips for small businesses simply trying to get started with marketing:
1) Use PR to promote Your Business
This is easier than most people think, and is a low cost of entry investment. Even if you are not doing a big PR blitz around a new product launch, creating press releases give you a sales tool for cold calling, helps with drive better search results to your website, and gives you content you can email to prospect lists. You should regularly write press releases on what your business is up to. One idea is to seek out local business and industry events where you can speak on a topic related to your business. Here are some of my favorite tweets on this topic:
Small Business Marketing Should Include Speaking at Events: http://t.co/rGtjxjJ
Tips for small business on how to write winning press releases: http://t.co/3bsxyoj
2) Good Marketing Starts with a Solid Message
Most small companies don’t invest in this activity, and so initial marketing results meet with poor performance because their messages are not clear, concise and compelling to readers. There are cheap, easy templates available from many sites to help get you started (including ours, www.SMBmarketer.com). Here is a favorite tweet on this topic:
Smart Marketing Starts with a Solid Message: http://t.co/ZpyamxZ
I hope these tweeted tips give you the marketing inspiration you need to get going! Don’t get overwhelmed by all the marketing possibilities out there. Rather, focus on doing a couple of things first, and then build from there. Once you are ready to add more to your marketing mix, check out our free article, Ten Marketing Basics for Your Small Business on our website.
Article: Ten Marketing Basics for your Small Business
Reinventing Themselves – Women Entrepreneurs
I recently read about this new community, http://www.2womenentrepreneurs.com in an article on OpenForum, a small business resource site from American Express (www.openforum.com). Because we at SMBmarketer.com are all about supporting small and medium businesses, I wanted to pass this along to all you women considering starting your own venture! Check it out at: http://www.2womenentrepreneurs.com/
According to this site, there are 1 million women-owned businesses… Providing employment for 13 million people…Generating $1.9 trillion in revenue… representing 40% of all business!
The site offers some good articles for entrepreneurs, as well as a discussion forum. Let us know what you think?
Smart Marketing Basics 