If you have had it with the workaday world and just don’t feel like it challenges you enough, perhaps you will be tempted to start your own business in 2010. Sure, who wouldn’t want to work overtime for nothing? Who wouldn’t want to give up a steady paycheck for the risk of going bankrupt? But seriously, there are so many incredible benefits to owning your own business. At first, you may not feel a lot of freedom. You’ll be tied to your work day and night—finding new clients, setting up your office, and marketing. But in the long run, with a lot of skill and a little luck, you could see that business grow and become successful.
Marketing is one aspect of owning your own business that is always challenging and always changing with the times. You may feel like a real marketing expert one year, but what you tried before may not work the following year. The internet changes, the world marketplace changes, and laws change too. So here are some small business marketing tips just for 2010.
These days, companies are focusing more on inbound marketing. Outbound marketing—which emphasizes advertising and direct mailings—is less trusted by today’s customers. With inbound marketing, companies rely on word of mouth and on utilizing the contact information from potential customers that have already contacted them. This means setting up an excellent web site that enable potential customers who are searching for a business like yours to easily see all the benefits your company offers and why it may be better than the competetitors.
Pay per click marketing has been popular in the past, but now experts are saying that “organic” traffic (or internet traffic derived by being accessed through search engines rather than advertisements) is “smarter.” That means that folks who access your site via a search engine will stay longer and read more and have a much higher potential for actually contacting you and becoming customers or clients. Today’s experts are saying to spend your advertising dollars on optimizing your web site to gain more organic traffic, rather than on PPC.
Press releases are becoming more and more important in today’s marketplace, but they must be SEO optimized. Press releases must be specifically written for the web and targeted to the potential customers you seek.
Finally, today’s marketing gurus recommend what they call customer-centric sales and marketing. This means helping potential customers before asking anything of them. Customer-centric marketing provides numerous items or bits of information for free, thus enabling clients to try your product or service before buying. Today’s online buyers expect free things. It has become a part of internet marketing.This isn’t a bad thing, especially if what you are providing for free is information. It costs you nothing to give it, yet helps to build a potential client’s faith in you. Many of today’s web gurus offer free classes or seminars, where potential clients can become convinced of their expertise before hiring them.
These techniques are the wave of the future, so the sooner you learn to properly target your market, the better. Remember that last year’s methods may have worked fine last year, but every year brings new challenges, so small business owners need to stay on top of all the new developments, including marketing challenges.
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