Germinate an idea, plant a seed- and reap the rewards! Any SME can sow a giant crop with these powerful marketing tools.
- Make sure your product is the best it can be – no amount of marketing will float a dented boat.
- Start off small – do not make unnecessary investments until you are up and running and plan well for your sme finance when needed.
- Learn about marketing for free – there’s a wealth of free help online and on foot – check out UK charities such as the Nominett Trust, colleges such as Bolton – and in the Middle East There are business skills academies launched by many financial institutions such as NBAD’s SME Academy with the purpose of driving growth in the SME sector.
- Find your USP and brand personality- look at your competitor’s USP and find a different track, e.g. not just a dentist but also one that is gentle with nervous adults and children. Make a strong, simple logo that reflects “Mr Smiley’s” personality.
- Know your target market. For the dentist, ask, “What makes a child tick?” What are their favourite cartoon characters and games, their lingo – and the same for parents – what makes them mad/ happy/ sad – especially when it comes to their kids? Keep researching and never stop!
- Use ALL social media, not just Linked In, Facebook and Twitter – get a profile on Business Week, Entrepreneur and Inc. magazine communities. Post reviews on Yelp!, Merchant Circle and CitySearch as well as Google, Yahoo and Bing reviews. Be consistently on brand – and blog blog, blog! Mr Smiley could blog tips for oral health – eg that fruit contains sugars too, or that growing teeth need good fats, not just calcium – or he could post a humorous history of the tooth fairy, things to tell (or not tell!) your child before a visit to the dentist etc..
- Embrace technology and power-up your office with these free (or inexpensive) apps. Mailbox is an easy way to mark and organize mail – and with Infusion soft you can see which customers are opening your promo mails – and thus build a customer base to keep targeting. For larger sends check out Pushover.
For video meetings, conference calls and file sharing Skype is still the most used – but for more options and power consider Fuze or Webex. You can also streamline your payroll with Zenpayroll and track your expenses with Expensify, which leads to our last point.. - Do not be sloppy or lazy with accounts! Make a budget and stick to it. Use an MS Excel sheet and set aside time every day / every week to note and fix any leaks in your financial forecast – at once!
Thanks to the internet, SMEs are the fastest growing business sector today. So, don’t just sit there, grab granny’s really hot raisin and radish relish recipe, find your USP- and give your target market a blast!
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