The Importance of Planning for Small Business Marketing
Marketing Planning is more important to a small business than to a large company according to small business marketing expert, Nate Stockard. He believes larger companies have more leeway to make mistakes in their marketing campaign while small companies can blow their budget with one mistake if proper planning is not done.
I have always believed planning made a difference, regardless of the size of the budget. As a Brand Manager at Bryant, I always had less funds then the Carrier team, so we spent more time planning and finding creative ways to get noticed. The result, our awareness grew significantly faster.
Since we couldn’t afford to buy big ads, we worked harder to develop stories about our products nationally and our dealers locally that would run in the paper and on the radio next to the ads Carrier bought. Buying an advertisement is easy, getting a story placed takes planning, but there is a pay off!
That same strategy is an integral part of my marketing today as a small business owner.
What about you? How much planning do you do?
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Good advice and it’s true that “free” advertising such as getting a story in the local paper isn’t actually free, it takes time which for a small business owner is a very real cost.
Small businesses probably don’t spend a lot of time planning their marketing as they are so busy simply running the business.
One option is to do it in bite sized chunks and start with the easy/free options first such as getting listed on free-to-list internet yellow page sites including Google Maps and Bizwiki.com, soliciting reviews from happy customers that they then write on your Google and Bizwiki listings, setting up Google Alerts for your company name, products and your main competitors to keep track of what is being said and, if relevant, leave a response.
The beauty of doing those simple things is that they don’t even require a website so even a brand new business can manage it without a huge investment of money or time giving them a bit of breathing room to then begin planning properly for the next steps.
@Teresha – While a website is not required to do these low budget things.. It certainly helps to provide a centralized point of reference for all marketing campaigns.