Marketing

No one wants to be sold to. So how can a small business get the word out to its target audience without turning them off? Two words: content marketing.

“Once we have enough revenue, we can invest in building a brand.”

Sound familiar? It’s common for small business owners to think this way, if they think of brand identity at all. Some think they don’t have the time to worry about brand in the startup phase of a business. However, skipping the important work of brand identity usually causes more time-consuming challenges in the long run.

A buyer persona (also known as a customer avatar) is a fictional representation of your company’s ideal customer. Personas can help you customize marketing efforts to specific audience segments; by understanding the concerns and motivations of your buyers, you will be able to tailor your marketing messages and provide better solutions to their problems.

When it comes to assessing the effectiveness of your business’ marketing efforts, not all metrics are equally valuable. For startups, one metric that is particularly useful in measuring marketing effectiveness is customer lifetime value.

Customer lifetime value (CLV) indicates the average total revenue a business can reasonably expect a single customer to generate over the course of the business relationship. The longer a customer continues to purchase from a company, the greater their lifetime value becomes.

Operating a business without a strategic plan is like piloting a boat without a rudder. The business might be going somewhere, but no one knows for sure where or why, or if it is a good destination. Strategic planning is the process of assessing where the business is now and setting a path for where the business will be at some point in the future. In setting that path, the strategic plan should consider specific goals and establish actions that will help accomplish those goals.

In the NaperLaunch Academy workshop series, participants learn principles known as Professional Selling Skills. This sales approach could also be called “need-satisfaction” selling. The foundation of the workshop was developed many years ago and is based on scientific observation and analysis of successful salespeople. It was discovered that all successful salespeople automatically perform these basic skills almost flawlessly every time they engage in a sales interaction.

In a previous post we described the process of creating a unique value proposition. Your UVP is a natural starting point for creating your marketing messages because it clearly identifies your target customer and explains the end benefit of using your product or service and what makes it unique and different from the competition.

Have you resolved to start a business in 2020? The NaperLaunch Academy can help you achieve your goal!

The NaperLaunch Academy is a free, 17-week business curriculum designed to help entrepreneurs develop fundamental business knowledge, improve salesmanship and leadership skills and learn the “lean startup process.” Through courses on business ideation, planning, marketing and sales, support from SCORE Mentors and all of the resources available at the Naperville Public Library, we empower entrepreneurs with everything they need to be successful.

Marketing is just one of the many responsibilities that the average small business owner juggles every day. InfusionSoft’s 2017 Small Business Marketing Trends report found that almost half (49 percent) of small business owners reported handling the marketing for their business.

One of the most significant changes in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will be a 20% deduction for all pass-through businesses. (Businesses that pass income to the owner to pay the income taxes.) This means, as an example, if your revenue in 2018 was $500,000, you will pay taxes on only $400,000 of that revenue. In a 15% tax bracket, the savings will be about $4,500 on a gross basis and even on a net basis the savings will get your attention. It is anticipated that this will impact roughly 95% of the small businesses in the United States.