Wondering how in the world you can afford to invest in marketing for your small business? Learn why marketing is important for every small business and find out how to do so without breaking the bank in this exclusive expert interview with Sylvia Browder, Project Director, Business Coach, and Consultant with the Women’s Business Center, Inc, based in southern Alabama.

Q: Do all businesses need marketing? Why or why not?

Browder: Absolutely!  Marketing is critical to the success of small businesses, in fact, to all businesses!  If a small business wants to achieve its potential, a marketing plan must be implemented!  Marketing is more than just ordering business cards or creating a flyer, its how you communicate with your current and potential clients. Consider potential businesses competing for the same customers?  It is important to get your name out in the business community and differentiate your products and services from that of your competitor. If you don’t market your products or services, how will people know that you are a serious business owner or worse, in business?

Q: What advice do you have for small business owners who think they can’t afford to market their businesses because of the recession?

Browder: You can’t afford NOT to market your business!  Since most small business owners have limited budgets, they need to concentrate their efforts on their target market; understand who, what and why of their business; and convey the features and benefits of their product or service.

Six inexpensive ways to market your business are:

  • Write a press release – Publicity is an important part of getting the word out about your business.  Make sure that your press release is well written and news worthy.
  • Create a brand for your business – It is important to create a logo and professional marketing material to build an image for your business. This conveys that you are reputable to your business and customers. You can create basic brochures, flyers and business cards using Microsoft publisher as well as www.vistaprint.com or www.123print.com.
  • Join local and online networking groups – This is a great way to establish relationships with other business owners and potential clients. Check your local Chamber of Commerce or other area business groups for upcoming events. Do a ‘Google’ search online for industry related organizations and groups.
  • Leverage Your Current Customers – As an entrepreneur, the best compliment to your business is when your customers are happy and willing to give a testimonial or refer people to you.
  • Take advantage of online marketing – Most social media sites are free to join. This is the one of the most cost effective ways to get the word out about your business on a national level. Small business owner sources such as e-newsletters, blogs, search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, and social media. A few popular sites are Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin and Twitter.
  • Commit to e-mail marketing – E-mail marketing is cost-effective, easy to track progress and flexible. Services such as Constant Contact or I contact make it easy to deliver professional messages fast and effective!  If you create a monthly e-newsletter, it allows you to be in front of your customer with relevant information and allows you to build a subscriber’s list.

Q: How can small business owners avoid unnecessary marketing expenses?

Browder: With the current economic downturn, small businesses are looking for ways to decrease cost and increase their cash flow. The best advice that I can give small business owners is to make sure they have a marketing plan in place. A marketing plan is essential to the success of all businesses. By having one in place, ensures you have a course of action to attract and attain customers as well as an idea on how to boost your sales and increase your profit margins.  Most importantly, as part of your marketing plan, have a planned budget in place.  By budgeting what you plan to spend on marketing, will help you to avoid unnecessary marketing expenses.

Q: What factors do small business owners need to consider when choosing marketing techniques?

Browder: Most traditional marketing techniques such as television, newspaper and radio ads can be very expensive, so small business owners need to be creative in their marketing approach.  Keep in mind your marketing budget.

Effective marketing strategies consist of a combination of several tactics working together to create a memory for your brand and a buzz for your product or service. For example, for our 15th Anniversary Gala and SAL Awards Ceremony, we advertised in our monthly e-newsletters which have over 3,000 subscribers, sent out a series of press releases, appeared ‘FREE’ in local newspaper and magazines, mailed out invitations, had our board of directors and advisory board link information about the event from our website to their websites and our executive director had guest appearances on two local news stations. Because this event highlighted successful entrepreneurs that we helped over the years, the local media was willing to give us FREE media spots.

Create marketing strategies that captivate your customer’s interests. Make sure everything that you do, reflects your personal brand including your company’s mission, vision and product or service goals. Simple and inexpensive marketing techniques can help in business growth.

Q: How can business owners track if their marketing expenditures are wise investments?

Browder: As entrepreneurs, it is important to be able to track results / statistics to determine if your marketing campaigns are generating leads and revenue.  There are a number of ways to track your return on investment (ROI) depending on your marketing efforts.

If you have been advertising for a length of time, you can use actual data to determine the effectiveness of your campaign.

For example, I am the editor of my organization’s monthly e-newsletter. Constant Contact tracks historical statistics on all email campaigns.  We find it important to track clicks, bounces and opt outs.

If you distribute flyers to different areas, assign a campaign code to them to track the progress.

If you are tracking visitors to your website, put a ‘counter’ on the web pages.  This allows you to track website hits or individual visits.

Survey Monkey allows you to create professional online surveys.  We use this as a part of our annual report.  We send our clients a questionnaire about our services and their needs.  We can then track responses to our survey.  This helps us to plan next year’s programs and determine what our clients want.

Google Analytics monitors website traffic with advanced segmentation, custom reporting, motion charts and more. This is very powerful tracking tool, free and easy to implement!

These are just a few tools used to track solid reporting capabilities that you can tailor and use to track the metrics of your marketing investment.