I get it. You slept through marketing class. Now you’re trying to run a small business.
Marketing your products and services doesn’t have to be confusing or uncomfortable. I’ll walk you through each step of the process.
In other words: you can cheat off my paper.
Small Business Marketing 101: This Is How You Start
Learning small business marketing is hard. In fact, running a small business, in general, is hard. Oftentimes it takes years of hard work and dedication before you even seen a dime in profit. You’re constantly learning new skills. With rapid learning comes discomfort, especially in areas we know little about. For many people, marketing is…
Consumer Behavior 101: People are Weird, Markets are Weirder
Consumer behavior is the study of why and how people buy things. It’s a mix of psychology and economics, blown up on a massive scale. To understand it is the dream of prophets, wisemen, and hucksters. We’re going to focus on what consumer behavior is and why it is important to you as a small…
This is How Consumer Decisions Work in Small Business
Consumer decisions can seem mysterious. Last week, I wrote at length about consumer behavior. How do we understand why consumers do what they do? Nowhere is consumer behavior more important than the decision-making process itself. After all, knowing how people make decisions will make your small business thrive! The very first post on this blog…
These 8 Decision-Making Styles Decide How People Shop
Decision-making styles are different for every customer. Understanding why customers arrive at their decisions is crucial for your small business’s success. To know why someone makes a choice empowers you to create beautiful experiences for them. Crafting the right experiences for the right people, after all, is one of the goals of marketing. I touched…
The 7 Important Market Forces That Shape Small Business
As small business owners, we like to imagine ourselves immune to market forces. After all, we have the willpower to run the show. Why should we have to answer to anyone else? The truth, as always, is more complicated than that. We’re captains of ships in choppy waters, skilled and determined but at the mercy…
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Here Are 5 Marketing Philosophies for Small Businesses
Marketing philosophies change how we approach marketing as a whole. No matter which one you subscribe to, marketing is all about crafting the right experiences for the right people. This objective is deceptive in its simplicity, though, and raises many questions. How do you define the “right” experience? How about the “right” people? Even if…
Globalization: Your Small Business vs. the World
Globalization is one of the defining forces of our era. As the world becomes more connected, we find our small businesses competing in a bigger arena than ten or twenty years ago. In some ways, this is thrilling. In others, it’s terrifying. No matter how you feel about globalization, it’s so big that you can’t…
How to Find a Niche & Make Your Small Business Memorable
For many small business owners, finding a niche is a daunting task. For many of us, our small businesses are a form of self-expression, and focusing on small business marketing forces us to answer two deceptively complicated questions. Who is our target audience? How are we meeting their needs? If you’ve been reading this blog…
How to Use Competitive Analysis & Make Your Small Business Richer
No business is an island. Competitive analysis is vital to the success of your small business. If you’re not able to read the competition, a lot of doors start closing. How can you find a niche, craft a strategy, compete on a global scale, or even understand your customers without understanding your competition? The purpose…
How to Craft a Small Business Marketing Strategy That Works
Crafting a small business marketing strategy can seem awfully complicated. Many business owners have to be convinced that marketing is worthwhile in the first place. Among the converts, many more struggle to choose a coherent philosophy of marketing, find a lucrative niche, or even simply understand their customers. Today, we’re going to take much of…
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Here Are The 7 Ps of Marketing
The 7 Ps of Marketing is a classic marketing model that helps us understand the “set of marketing tools that a firm uses to pursue its marketing objectives in the target.” You may also hear this referred to as the “marketing mix.” This is no mere academic exercise, though. Each one of the 7 Ps…
The 4 Cs of Marketing: Make Your Customers Comfortable
The 4 Cs of Marketing are a newer marketing model that helps us to understand the “set of marketing tools that a firm uses to pursue its marketing objectives in the target.” You may also hear this refer to as the “marketing mix.” This is not just some exercise for out-of-touch academics, though. Like the…
This is Why B2B & B2C Marketing Are So Different
On this blog, we’ve talked almost exclusively about business-to-consumer marketing so far, also known as B2C marketing. This doesn’t reflect the whole truth, though, because business-to-business (B2B) is a significantly bigger market than B2C. As you’ll soon come to see over the course of this post, marketing to businesses is an entirely different animal than…
How To Craft the Perfect Products and Services
Every small business wants to sell big. The desire to earn a lot of customers is deeply ingrained into business culture. However, to do so, you need to create products and services that people are really enthusiastic about. Dedicated readers of this blog know that we refer to this as product-market fit. What we have…
Don’t Be Evil: Ethical Marketing for Small Businesses
Ethical marketing may seem like a paradox. The whole reason for marketing, after all, is to sell more products. It’s easy to cast aside the very real problems that marketing can create. Marketing deals with the intangible emotions of other people, pushing their buttons to make them take certain actions. Just because you can be…
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A Crash Course in Market Research for Small Business
Building a small business for the first time is really difficult! You have to create a product or a service that’s perfect for your audience. Then you have to tell people you exist. These two tasks are the essence of marketing. While they sound simple, anyone who’s tried them knows how tricky and nuanced it…
14 Cheap Market Research Methods to Grow Your Business
Conducting quality market research is one of the best ways to ensure the long-term growth of your business. Just last week we talked about exactly what market research is and how it can help your business grow. From crafting perfect products to finding new audiences, the benefits are clear! But let’s be real for a…
23 Excellent Questions to Ask Your Customers
Want to know what your customers really think of you? Sometimes, the easiest way to find out is to just ask! In many cases, market research is really that simple, though it helps to go in with a list of questions to ask your customers. Over the last two weeks, we’ve focused heavily on market…
15 Market Research Methods to Grow Your Small Business
We’ve had market research on the brain lately! A few weeks ago, we wrote about what market research is. Shortly thereafter, we wrote about how you can do market research cheaply and made a long list of questions you can ask your customers. Now we’re going to talk about all the ways you can use…
How to Build an Online Community for Your Business in 7 Steps
Many businesses are beginning to understand the power of creating online communities. The Holy Grail of all marketing is to make it where customers really like and trust your business and they buy everything that you make. But that kind of success must be earned, and it takes a lot of work! First things first:…
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How to Build a Mailing List for Your Small Business
Email is one of the most effective marketing tools you have at your disposal. Many find this to be surprising at first, but the value of building a mailing list to grow your small business cannot be understated. In this article, we are going to talk about how you can use email to spread the…
A Crash Course in Setting Up Small Business Social Media
For businesses big and small, customers expect businesses to have a social media presence. In fact, 63% of customers expect customer service through social media. An online presence has gone from being the frontier to being the norm in a little over a decade. As such, small businesses, in order to compete, need to have…
15 Ways to Research Your Competitors & Grow Your Small Business
Researching your competitors is one of the most valuable things a small business can do. To succeed in business, you must be able to create products that fit market needs. This is borderline impossible to do without understanding what else your customers might be looking at. That’s why we’re going to teach you how to…
What is a Product Anyway? This is a Detailed Answer.
“What is a product?” This question can be found in every business or economics book from elementary school onward. The answer seems obvious, but the truth, as often happens, is a good deal more complex. Ask yourself the question once more of “what is a product?” This is not a question of petty semantics, but…
Why Do New Products Matter for Small Businesses Anyway?
Ah, the bliss of creating new products. Many small businesses live and die on their ability to make new products and services to delight their customers and meet unmet needs. Yet when we see other more established firms like Spanx and Roku lean on a single product, we can find ourselves asking “why do new…
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How to Recover from Failure as a Small Business Owner
Fifty percent of small businesses fail. Or maybe it’s 66% or 70% – depends on who you ask. Failure – on a small scale or a grand scale – is a part of doing business. When you run a business, you need a plan not only to succeed but also to recover from failure so…
How to Avoid Burnout as a Small Business Owner
Sometimes you wake up in the morning and you don’t want to do anything. It happens to everyone. If you wake up every morning and don’t want to do anything, then something more sinister could be going on: burnout. It feels awful. That’s why we’re going to talking about how to avoid burnout. If you’re…
Why It Takes So Long to Build a Great Business
To succeed in business is the dream of many people around the world. Becoming competent and making a lot of money is deeply satisfying on a number of different levels, so it’s no wonder that people pursue success with such motivation and vigor. Few really “make it,” though, and a large part of that is…
How to Brand Your Small Business
When asked to define marketing, many people think of advertising. They talk about how marketers use different tools to make money. Yet the job doesn’t stop there – marketing isn’t just about making money. It’s about spreading ideas. That’s why we’re going to teach you how to brand your small business. What is Branding? According…
How to Design Packaging for Your Small Business
People judge books by their covers. They judge products by their covers, too. It’s no secret that packaging affects whether people will purchase your small business’s products. That’s why we’ll be talking about how to design packaging for your small business’s products. Basics of Branding for Small Business Before we can talk meaningfully about packaging…
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This Is Why User Experience Makes & Breaks Businesses
As technology continues to improve, people will spend more and more time with products, systems, and services. This can be very good, too, since technology removes irritation and inconvenience from day-to-day life. But ultimately, systems need to feel like they’re made by humans for humans. In other words, it’s really important to provide a good…
Spotify: A Love Letter to Great User Experience
Up until June of 2017, I had always used iTunes / Apple Music. It was all I knew. I went through various iPod models, transferring music from my laptop to my iPod, making new playlists as I went along. I knew what Spotify was but never paid much attention to it. Honestly, at that time,…
This is How You Provide a Great Customer Experience
Have you ever walked into a restaurant and waited forever to be seated, only to be treated rudely and have your food served cold? If so, it’s safe to say that you’ve had a bad customer experience. Odds are, you probably told others about it too. Maybe you even left a one-star review online! Likewise,…
How To Grow Your Business with Relationship Marketing
Relationships matter. There are a million ways to say this simple fact, and a million ways to prove it too. Good relationships lead to customer retention, partnerships, referrals, and – ultimately – a big payday. That’s why well-run companies put so much emphasis on relationship marketing. Deep down, successful small business owners want to make…
How To Use Small Business Advertising To Grow Quickly
When you’re marketing your small business for the first time, advertising is just plain intimidating. Effective advertising requires you to understand both complex marketing ideas and the ins and outs of software like Facebook and Google Ads. Figuring out where to start with small business advertising is a difficult task in and of itself. When…
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How Your Small Business Win Big With Online Reviews
How do people find your business? Vague question, I know. But take a moment and really ask yourself the question. Is it through outbound marketing? Do you have a steady stream of organic traffic coming to you? Or, are you taking a more “old-fashioned” approach and marketing specific client opportunities directly? Regardless of how people…
Use Influencer Marketing to Quickly Grow Your Small Business
Influencer marketing is a relatively new way for companies of all sizes to market their products. Today, we are going to dive into all things influencer marketing. We’ll answer questions like: What is influencer marketing? How to find and hire influencers? What influencers can do to help you sell your products? What is Influencer Marketing? …
Why Supply Chain Management Is Important To Marketing
Leaders win through logistics. Vision, sure. Strategy, yes. But when you go to war, you need to have both toilet paper and bullets at the right place at the right time. In other words, you must win through superior logistics. Tom Peters, Quotes from Universal Cargo I find this quote pretty amusing. Sure, it might…
14 Easy Ways Your Small Business Can Handle Public Relations
Public relations! The phrase conjures up images of spin doctors working for evil megacorporations or politicians conspicuously pretending to be folksy in an effort to win voters. That first impression is definitely not wrong, but it’s for sure not the whole picture either! At its heart, public relations (PR, for short) is about guarding your…
How to Use Product Distribution To Grow Your Business
If you build it, they won’t just come. Your small business needs a product distribution strategy if you want to make sales. This is so important, in fact, that one of the 4 P’s of marketing is “place” as in “the place where people can buy your products.” But how does a small business owner…
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15 Easy Ways To Improve SEO & Rank Higher in Google
The marketing world is full of strange jargon and acronyms. One of the most common acronyms you’ll see people use is SEO. The internet is full of articles telling you that you should improve your SEO to grow your business. There’s good reason for that. Search engine optimization – SEO – is one of the…
How Delta Air Lines Has Survived 96 Years of Aviation
The airline industry is an unspeakably difficult one. As of 2021, there are 18 major passenger airlines in the United States. The list of airlines that have died is so long that it takes up four separate Wikipedia articles for the US alone. Yet Delta Air Lines has been operating continuously since 1925. That’s so…
Outreach: 9 Proven Ways You Can Grow Your Business
Drawing attention to your business is tough! Or at least it can seem that way if you’re not well-versed in the art of outreach. We talk a lot about customer retention, customer experience, and consumer behavior. But none of that means anything if you can’t acquire customers in the first place! Speaking from personal experience,…
This is the Difference Between Marketing, Advertising, & PR
A few years ago I was filling out some paperwork and it asked for my job title. I remember asking, “do you want my actual job title? Or just my field of work?” At the time I worked in insurance and my job title was unnecessarily complex. Fast forward a few years and I’m filling…
Trauma-Informed Marketing: Or, What Happens When You Put Empathy First
You’re a pretty regular person, right? Special in your own ways, to be sure. But you’d likely refer to yourself as pretty normal. And that’s awesome! Because we all have our own intricate way we’re put together. And in that web of what makes us unique, no matter how normal we may be, sits quite…
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