When Guerrilla Marketing was first published in 1983, Jay Levinson revolutionized marketing strategies for the small-business owner with his take-no-prisoners approach to finding clients. Based on hundreds of solid ideas that really work, Levinson's philosophy has given birth to a new way of learning about market share and how to gain it. In this completely updated and expanded fourth edition, Levinson offers a new arsenal of weaponry.

Small Business Marketing

Innovative Marketing Strategies Are What Small Businesses Need

Small business marketing typically has to depend on creativity and innovation rather than high marketing budgets. Small businesses are not likely to have an unlimited budget for their marketing activities. How do you develop such creative marketing solutions?

First, let us look at the marketing function in some detail. Once we are familiar with the traditional marketing activities, we will be better able to look for innovative ways to achieve desired results.

Marketing Essentials

The basic objectives of marketing activities are:

Creating Awareness: Making people aware of your business. More precise marketing would identify the particular group of potential customers and make them aware of your offers.
Inducing Potential Customers to Contact You: Effective marketing will be able to generate a sense of urgency in the minds of your potential customers to contact you.
Persuading Them to Buy: Finally, the marketing exercise should convert your potential customers into actual customers by buying from you.

Marketing Starts with Market Research

The time and money spent on market research can save you much more time and money on your subsequent marketing efforts. Any market research worth its name would:

Identify Your Customer: Who would be interested in your product or service? Young persons, above 30's or retirees? High income group, middle income group or those with tight budgets? The jet set, home makers, DIYers, the hip group, or some other clearly defined group? Knowing these things can help you tailor your offer precisely.
What is the Competition: Who are your real competitors? What do they offer? How do they promote it? What do customers feel about the offers? Finding out such information can help you develop more attractive offers.
Industry Trends: Will you be entering a field which is getting obsolete? Or one with high growth potential? Where will the growth occur? Are better technologies emerging? With this kind of information, you can avoid the danger of setting up a business in a declining industry.

You can do "primary" market research by going into the field and interacting with the players such as existing suppliers, prospective customers and industry associations. You can supplement it with "secondary" research by studying published information gathered by others. Whichever approach you take, you should get the kind of information mentioned above.

Creative Marketing

Corporates with a plentiful supply of funds can afford publicity through all kinds of media, such as press, radio, TV, billboards, sports stadiums and other expensive (and often wasteful) avenues. Small businesses with tight budgets have to be more selective. They have to identify the particular media that will reach their particular audience most effectively.

For local businesses, this might consist of publicity through town newspapers, door-to-door flyer distribution and participation in local events. Both local businesses and larger small businesses can tap the potential of the emerging trend of web marketing. Web marketing is comparatively inexpensive, and highly effective if done right.

The aim of small business marketing should be to look for low cost media to reach their prospects and convey their messages. Using creative and innovative ways, they can even compete with larger businesses. Look around to observe how your competitors and even non-competitors do their marketing. You might begin to get some ideas.

Marketing Strategy

While the discussion so far has assumed that you will be attending to your small business marketing efforts directly, this is not the only option. You can negotiate with distributors and wholesalers to take upon your marketing efforts, while you focus on production and administration. You can also explore avenues such as getting numerous small affiliates to market your products.

Alternatively, you can set up your own marketing force and a separate marketing department to attend to all the tasks involved. Staffed with specialist marketers, the department can then help you develop the best ways for creating awareness about your offers and getting customers to buy from you.

Marketing Budget

You should develop a complete marketing plan developing your marketing strategy into a concrete action program. This plan would include a realistic marketing budget, showing how much funds you will be spending on each of the marketing activities. This budget would indicate whether your financial resources are enough to implement the strategy you have developed.

Review and Adapt

Your marketing plan is only a benchmark for initiating actions and estimating costs. In actual practice, you might find that certain actions are not producing intended results. It then becomes necessary to review the situation and develop alternative approaches and programs. Small business marketing becomes really effective with such a flexible approach.

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