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Category - Marketing

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1
Managing a Mature Business – Marketing For Continued Growth
2
Growing Your Business With A Marketing Plan
3
A 5 Day Marketing Challenge For You!
4
10 Marketing Strategies You Can Use Right Now
5
Market To The Right Customer!

Managing a Mature Business – Marketing For Continued Growth

Welcome to our continuing series on Managing a Mature Business.

Last year we published two series of articles on Starting a Small Business, and on Growing Your Business, and we started this current series on Managing a Mature Business. We finished the year with Managing a Mature Business – How to Keep Innovating and in this article, we move on to discuss how to market for continued growth. If you want to catch up, all the articles in all three series are available at Teik Oh Dot Com.

As we have seen before, the challenges in a mature business are different from those of a business startup or a growing business. Activity has plateaued. Your product may have been superseded nor the market may have changed. Following our earlier articles on managing cash flow and continuing to innovate, you may have changed your product or business model and have to attract a new target market.

As you try to reinvent yourself so that you can start the cycle again with a new growth phase, you can no longer rely on past reputations and previous histories with your old customers. Even if you are continuing your marketing activities – these may need to change.

So, what do you have to do to continue effective marketing for continued growth?

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Growing Your Business With A Marketing Plan

Many small business owners, even after the excitement of startup and in their growth phase, don’t realise the value of having a marketing plan.

I think deep down inside they think that marketing is something that “happens” when they start their business. They have something good to sell. They believe in the vision and values of their business. Build it and they will come – and if they don’t come as quickly, ok, then we might advertise.

But advertising is not marketing.

Marketing is a whole system of supportive components around your business that should be designed to attract customers who are the lowest hanging fruit. Advertising is only one component and is part of the message that you broadcast. A marketing plan designs that system to work together and the reason you need a marketing plan is to make sure that you design the system right. You need to aim with a precise focus on your target customer, not fire off a scatter-gun and hope you hit somebody!

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A 5 Day Marketing Challenge For You!

If you are a small business owner and you are not marketing, or marketing effectively, then you cannot grow.

Sorry to be so blunt.

Perhaps you will grow to some extent because you have a group of loyal customers, or you have a great product. But at some stage, unless you market your business, you will hit a very uphill slope to grow any further. In the business life cycle, this is called the “plateau” stage, and small businesses that do not market themselves get to plateau a lot earlier than other mature businesses.

The crux of the matter is that even as you grow slowly now, you cannot meet your own expectations – that dream you had for your business when you started it.

The answer is, you have to market your business.

But it need not be a massive project or an expensive affair.

Marketing is all about understanding what your product does for your target market and then telling them in an appropriate way.

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10 Marketing Strategies You Can Use Right Now

In the last few weeks, I have written about how marketing is really all about helping customers solve their problems. You can go to the blogs at Teik Oh Dot Com to catch up.

However, I thought this week I’d give you some marketing strategies you can use right now.

But don’t get me wrong – these aren’t copy-and paste-strategies, and you do have to do some homework yourself on how you can apply this to your situation. However, if you spend just a little time to fine-tune these ideas for your business, I’m sure that you can use some of these strategies immediately.

Here we go!

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Market To The Right Customer!

Here’s a shocking fact – most small businesses don’t do any marketing!

Hoping for a word-of-mouth referral is not marketing.

Sticking an ad in the classifieds amongst all your competitor’s ads is not marketing.

A sandwich board outside your shop is not marketing.

Marketing is about focusing on what you sell, who you should sell it to, what they like to hear, where they want to hear it from, and how to consistently move them from “interested” to having a “conversation” to being a “buyer”.

Because small businesses who do try to implement some marketing are not focused on this, here’s another shocking fact:

Most are marketing to the wrong customers.

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