Startups or small businesses consider marketing as an unnecessary expense due to which they rarely plan a marketing budget. Remember you can’t go from engineering to sales, skipping the marketing step.
Usually entrepreneurs hire sales people first, which is a wrong practice. At an initial stage hire a marketing expert whether on a contract or projected help to get a word out and then send out your sales force to targeted audience, based on the market research.
According to Bill Gates, the Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow. Based on a research conducted by Forrester Research, it has been observed that only the Americans alone spent more than $200 billion online in 2011 and the projection states that the total would rise up to $327 billion in 2016 i.e. 9 percent of all retail sales (up from 7 percent in 2011).
Social media as a platform provides you with a power to reach out to targeted people, online from around the globe and create a powerful long lasting relationship, because strong customers’ relationship is always the key success factor for the businesses.
Using social media to develop a brand is a non-linier process, which takes some time before you can actually see some results. This guide will help you in using social media efficiently to market your products/services online.
Before starting off with the marketing activities it’s very important to have a custom logo design for your business, as it not only gives a face to your business but also makes you stand out of the crowd.
Get a blog as it will help you, not only in generating a useful content for users to gain trust but will also help in getting business leads resulting in sales generation. So buy a domain name which shall be named as your business name and setup a blog over it. Analyze it by Website.grader.com to make sure that you have a search engine friendly blog by.
To increase your blog’s online presence it is recommended to submit your blog to popular blog and web directories and claim your blog with Technorati.com. Get you blog listed in Google blog search as thousands of people search blogs of their interests daily.
Twitter.com not only allows you to connect on a personal level with our employees and customers but it’s also found as a good medium for marketing your business online.
Start Marketing over on Facebook as its one of the most powerful social networking portal with over 800 million users from all over the world.
Pinterest.com is a relatively new social networking site that allows you to create an online image collection and quickly share them  known as “pinboardsâ€Â. Marketing your business through it is nothing less than fun.
LinkedIn.com is a professional network that allows you to get connected with the experts along with discovering new business opportunities regardless of where you are.
Start Video Blogging for Your Business, according to comScore, an average Internet user watches around 186 videos a month. For better video blogging for your business, do look into some interesting tips by Gail Goodman.
YouTube, considered to be top Social Media Innovation of the Decade is a video sharing portal which reached to 700 Billion Playbacks during the year 2011. It’s just a forum for kids who really like Star Wars or cats with funky t-shirts but is also an opportunity for you to market your business to millions of people for next to nothing.
Develop co-marketing plans to boost returns and lower your marketing costs, according to the research the economy is still struggling, which means small businesses can benefit by it through partnering up with complimentary business for co-marketing activities.
Build up credibility by signing up on Step by Step and focus on the topics related to your industry or niche, publish articles related to the issues your target audience is facing and get your name appeared in the list of experts. Generate local business leads by writing Step-by-Step guides over the local section of Stepbystep.com.
It has been proven already that when you show expertise, knowledge and credibility, the readers become clients and business start to flourish.
This post was submitted to Dorm Room Biz by Dave Mathew at Step By Step.
Great guide.. thanks for this.