Back when you were studying the basics of marketing in college, you most likely learned all of the recognized methods used for a business. Those basics are still viable today and are still being taught. However, marketing a small business in current atmosphere of today's market has become so much more than just the traditional methods we learned many years ago. Today, marketing your business has become a combination of several marketing methods.
The typical methods for marketing your business still includes your product design and production, target market, pricing, payment, advertisement, customer relations, etc. But with the changes we are seeing in the marketplace, we now have to expand our knowledge base and efforts to include online marketing with search engine optimization knowledge, social media marketing and even a bit of Guerilla Marketing too.
Social media has become the must-do portion of marketing today. This is due in part by finding your target market, meeting and marketing to them using methods that they use and are comfortable with.
With the millennials capturing a growing part of the sales business, social media has become one of the fastest growing methods of marketing to this age group. Today people of all ages are using some form of social media. If your business is not using social media, what chunk of your target market are you missing out on?
Knowing something about how the search engines work and the basics of optimization will give you the ability to properly market content and the online portion of a small business. Millions of small businesses are making the move to online sites every year that work together with brick and mortar portion of their business. Capitalizing on the knowledge of SEO will help you in marketing your site and business to your target audience.
Guerrilla Marketing is a concept of marketing developed by Jay Conrad Levinson. A definition of this strategy from Wikipedia states that Guerrilla Marketing is “an advertisement strategy concept designed for small businesses to promote their products or services in an unconventional way with little budget to spend.”
This concept is one to include in your new Marketing 101 basics for today’s small business because relying on traditional methods alone is not going to help you get your business to the level you want it to be. You have to be imaginative and be willing to make an impression by using different methods to reach your target market.
The best part of these 3 additions to your small business marketing plan is that many of these are free or low cost. For the price of studying and learning the methods, you can begin to incorporate them into your plan and start to see results.