Marketing for starting small businesses
The balance between simplicity and effectiveness...

If you think about marketing for starting small businesses or just marketing probably you are thinking about sales and advertising right away. Although these are important components of a marketing plan, don't represent the whole concept of marketing...

The comprehensive concept behind the word: marketing

Marketing for starting small businesses or bigger businesses is the same (only at a different scale). A marketing plan tries to answer two fundamental questions:

1. What benefit does your product, service, etc. offer to the costumer?
2. How your company will be better than the competition? Which additional benefits are going to deliver?

Preparation of a marketing plan

A marketing plan can be prepared in three stages:

1. Analyze the market and the competition
2. Choose your target market
3. Determine your marketing strategy

We're going to talk about the first stage in this article and about the others in the next one.

1. Analyzing the market and competition

Here's where the economic law of demand and supply plays an important role. Successful starting small businesses test the market before to start anything as well as big businesses does.

As we mentioned the difference is in the size; big businesses sometimes count with an onerous budget just to know what the market wants. They hire firms and companies or have their own research division to make this research.

Small and starting small businesses simply can't afford it. This represents a big limitation to start a business because you don't have idea about what the market wants or if there is a lot of competition. Also, this weakens your persuasion power in front of a possible team or potential investors.

So, how could you simplify the process and make a serious market research at the same time?

Use the internet, use the information.

Did you know that every search you run through a search engine is stored and can be used latter? The terms you enter for your search are called keywords.

Keywords' number of searches (demand) and sites that have content related to the keyword (competition) can be showed to you instantly with a simple query.

This is a huge, huge, huge advantage of the online world for starting small businesses.

Services you can use to make your market research

There are some respectful paid online services that can help you to get keywords and numbers of demand and supply. Those services allow free searches too. We want to share with you a useful tool that has a selection of the best services on the internet for different purposes (market research among them). It's name is Search It! Click here to start using it.

If you're starting small businesses or want to boost your existing ones online, you can use Search It! to brainstorm ideas about keywords without the need to visit each site like Google, Wordtracker, etc. every time you want to make a query. This saves you time and makes you more efficient indeed.

To research demand, just select "Brainstorming" In step 1, choose a source in Step 2, follow the instructions and viola! If you have any doubt just click the help buttons. They are very helpful.

To research competition select "Competition" in step 1, choose a source un Step 2 and follow the instructions.

What are you waiting for? Search It!

SBI! has another tool named Brainstorm It! that makes this process even more efficient. For more information about this and another tools click here.

This is just the beginning about marketing for starting small businesses, in our next article we're going to talk about the next stages of this plan.

Now let's back to the main page of this section to learn more about how to make extra money as a first step to improve your personal finances. Just use the links below:

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