Small Business Marketing

Think of Social Networking as like owning your own electronic newspaper. Your own electronic niche ‘newspaper’. A paper where you do all the jobs.

As the Distribution Manager, you decide who you want to receive your newspaper. You also control which distribution media you choose to get your paper to it’s readers—but it’s all the same words, just on different media (with social networking the media is endless: LinkedIn, Twitter, blogging, YouTube, Delicious, Plaxo, and another page full of names!). As the Editor, you have the final say in what your audience gets to read, listen to or watch. As the Journalist, you do the research and decide what stories you will write. And the Editor can of course hire other journalists (writers).

And as the Finance Director you decide how much time and money you should spend to make your newspaper profitable. How much to spend to generate leads and raise the profile of your small business.

Now our work is all about lead generation for small business, for SMEs. With our clients we don’t care about the social aspects of ‘Social’ Networking. Care zilch about getting more friends and spending hours ‘chatting’ online—if you need more friends, the bookshops are stuffed with books on how to find them!
Our whole approach in my book on small business marketing is about first defining your niche. Your gold clients. The ones you want more of. It’s all about business networking.

Well, knowing your niche is absolutely fundamental to Social Networking. How else can you create a ‘newspaper’ of value? Can you write content for everybody? If you did, would they be interested? No! More importantly, how can you select who to send it to? How can you build a circulation list?

If you don’t have a niche, you might as well stand on 5th Avenue in the Big Apple or George St in Sydney with a loud hailer, calling people to gather around you. And then try and collect all their business cards.

Utterly useless.

Social networking is about bringing people together and it has many business applications. Particularly in generating leads for small business—it is just one more form of internet marketing, and increasingly becoming the most important.

By creating a profile on a major social networking site, adding people and having them add you, you can use this media as a way of staying in contact with existing clients and also to generate leads. It’s also great for optimising your website so you rank more highly on Google and become more visible online.
Most importantly: SMEs and small businesses can build a high profile in this new media at a price they can afford. Particularly the early adopters as there is currently so little competition from other small businesses as nearly all see it as new and scary.

Advertising small businesses is what we do for a living, we’re damn good at it and I don’t just say so myself—click here to see what other business owners say.

Using my own experiences with small business marketing and advertising, my team and I have written an extensive book available on Amazon – click on small business marketing solutions.

As our gift to you, download the chapter outlining Social Networking by clicking on Small Business Marketing Strategies, which will give you more of an idea of our unique approach.