In This Issue: Happy New Year! | Marketing Planning for Small Business - Part 2: The Plan Itself | Top 5 Best Practices for Email Marketing | Recommend a Business

 

 

Happy New Year!

 

As is customary with most people, businesses also have New Year's resolutions. Our goal for this year is to increase awareness of the directory. To meet our goals for this year, we are asking for your help. How often do you suggest a great restaurant or hair stylist to clients, family or friends? If you know of a business that offers excellent service, fair prices and quality products, we want to hear from you. Making a recommendation is as easy as submitting the suggestion.

 

This month we are pleased to feature articles on Marketing by Gregory McCormick of Walking-Stick Consulting Group and Dana Ditomaso of Liquidesign. These savvy words of wisdom are part of an on-going series by local experts in their field. If you have any questions or comments, we are always glad to hear from you. Please feel free to contact us at info@ihighlyrecommend.ca.

 

 

Marketing Planning for Small Business - Part 2: The Plan Itself

 

As I described in November's article, marketing your own small business is both easier and more effective if you have a solid Marketing Plan to work from. Of course, the process of actually writing a marketing plan can be a little intimidating on it's own, and many small business owners have a hard time figuring out where to start.

 

Working through a large difficult project is always made much easier if you can break it into smaller, easy to manage chunks. A Marketing Plan is no different - and can easily be broken into several distinct sections:

 

1. Introduction: What are your goals?

 

This is where you describe the specific goals you hope to achieve with your marketing strategies (don't forget "S.M.A.R.T.!" S pecific, M easurable, A chievable, R elevant, and T ime-limited).

 

Also, many planners will include a brief summation of each of the following sections.

 

2. Product: What are you selling?

 

This section collects everything you know about your product or service. How you describe it to customers, pricing, features, benefits 'in use' and the differentiators that make it better than what the competition offers.

 

To many business owners, the value of what they're selling is so blindingly obvious as to become almost completely internalized. Working on this section of the marketing plan forces you to step back and evaluate the offering objectively and to understand it the way your customer does.

 

3. Market: Who are you selling to?

 

This section contains everything you discover about your customers, your competitors and the marketplace you're operating in. It's easiest to break these into their own subsections:

 

a) Customer Profile: Who are they? Where do they live? What 'benefits' are your customers most interested in? Where do they go to find out about products? How much are they willing to pay?

 

b) Competitive Profile: Who represents the most direct threat to your business? What are competitors offering? What are they doing really well, and can you copy/emulate that? What are they doing wrong and how can you avoid making the same mistakes? What opportunities are they missing that you can capitalize on?

 

c) Industry Profile: What is happening out there in the world, or in your market that might impact what you are trying to do? Are there any laws or regulations that affect what you're doing? Are recessions or seasonal buying cycles something you need to be concerned about? How does the ubiquity of household computers and cell phone cameras affect what you're doing?

 

As you can see, this section is effectively a whole bunch of answers to a whole bunch of questions. The process of identifying and answering these questions is called 'Market Research' and we'll be talking about how to do that in a future article.

 

4. Strategies: How are you going to do it?

 

Planning strategies require that you consider everything you've learned about your product, your customers and your market and figure out what to do about it... This section describes the precise mix of advertising, sales, promotions and public relations activities that you are going to undertake.

 

These strategies can be broken into two basic sorts (although, there's always overlap):

 

a) Promotional Strategies: What you're going to do in order to guide prospects from being completely unaware that you exist to becoming satisfied customers and ideally passionate advocates of your product or service.

 

b) Interface Strategies: How/Where does your company interact with the marketplace? Could be via a storefront, trade shows, by phone, online, on the customer's premises... This section describes how to make each 'interface' more effective as a venue for marketing, conducting sales or supporting your customers.

 

Ultimately, these sections are all thoroughly interdependent - as you make progress in each section, new information or ideas are going impact the other sections. If you refine what you know about your target market, you'll need to adjust how you promote your product or service. Likewise, if you modify your goals in response to changing market demand, you may wish to revisit your pricing, and so forth.

 

Gregory McCormick operates Walking-Stick Consulting Group - supporting small and medium sized businesses and entrepreneurs, often acting as a 'virtual' marketing department.

 

 

Top 5 Best Practices for Email Marketing

 

1. Keep It Short

You may be tempted to include all kinds of information in your newsletter – but keep it brief. Your subscriber is most likely to read what's shown in the preview pane, then lose interest as the email continues. If the email is too long, they may think that your newsletter is too much work and unsubscribe.

 

2. Maximize Click-Thru Rates

Numerous research papers tell us that the majority of Internet users respond to a plain, bold, text link. So, if you're going to include links in your emails, make sure not to use bold or underline words that are not a link. This will mean that more subscribers click through, meaning more sales for you.

 

3. One-Click Unsubscription

If you want to grow your mailing list, then there are 2 things that you absolutely must have: a double opt-in process, and a quick way to unsubscribe. In Canada, it's required by law that every email has an unsubscribe link in it. The unsubscribe link should take the recipient directly to a page where they are then removed -- courteously -- from your mailing list.

 

4. The Half-a-Second Subject Line

When your email arrives in your subscriber's inbox, you generally have about half a second to catch their attention with the subject line of your email. In your subject line, try and specify a benefit that the subscriber can expect by reading your email. For example, instead of using 'OurSite Newsletter Issue #1', use 'OurSite Newsletter: 10 Tips for Financial Freedom'. This will also help reduce the risk of being flagged as spam and deleted. Avoid using words such as 'Free', '$$$', 'Save', and 'Discount' in both the subject line and the content of your email.

 

5. Tuesday / Wednesday = Increased Response

Studies have shown that the best days to perform a mail-out to your list are Tuesday and Wednesday, as this is when people are more receptive to communication. This means that they are more likely to read your content and click on links, meaning more sales.

 

Dana Ditomaso operates Liquidesign - a web design company providing intelligent and affordable internet solutions.

 

 

Recommend a Business

 

I Highly Recommend is a unique business directory based on recommendations. We actively promote the directory and the members within it, simulating the power of a "referral by word of mouth" in the online environment and creating a network built on trust.  If there is a business that you would highly recommend, be it product or service, please contact us.