Like most attempting to run and manage a business, I’ve had triumphs and failures in marketing my business and building awareness for my product offerings. Much like the Cobbler’s children with no shoes, as a Digital Marketer by occupation, I’ve found that many times my own marketing efforts get placed on the backburner. That’s why I wanted to put together a simple checklist for marketing a micro business. But first, let me speak to the obstacles that a micro business face in their marketing efforts:
- First and foremost, resources are nonexistent. There is no room financial experimentation. Any hit, hurts
- Like many micro businesses, my own is extremely niche. My market is small and therefore, my messaging needs to be pinpoint targeted
- With a single employee, every effort made is my own. This is always taken into consideration when contemplating a new marketing channel
These elements make a micro business unique and marketing effectively and efficiently no easy task.
While I’m using my own micro business CruxSax Chalk Bags, as a basis for this post, the tips below can be adapted for businesses of all sizes as it’s easy to loose touch with the basics as growth occurs. Its important to remember where you started and the fundamentals that got you to where you are today. So with that, let’s look at some ways to efficiently (and frugally) market your business.
Determine your marketing budget before you start spending
Financially, do you have any room for marketing spend? If so, how much can you afford to spend on promoting your business? This can be determined by calculating your raw ROI (without any marketing), then deciding an acceptable ROI, a return you can live with to accommodate marketing spend.
Simple economics will tell you to take the gain from investment (price point of your product) less the cost of your investment (this can be the cost of raw materials + the effort/time spent making the product), divided by the cost of investment. Let’s see this in action with an example:
- I sell my chalkbags for $20 + $5 for shipping
- An average bag costs me $5.50 in raw materials and takes me about 1.5 hours to make.
- Total shipping cost is $3.25 + .5 hours of my time packing, making labels and running errands to the post office.
You have to place a value on your time but for illustration purposes lets say $1/ hr
This would look like this:
In this example I have a raw ROI of 133% – so now ask yourself, what is an acceptable ROI? For me an ROI of 75% is acceptable. This would put my total cost of investment at just about $14.30/ unit sold in order to maintain a ROI of 75%.
Take your total cost of investment ($14.30) and less your raw cost of investment ($10.75). This would mean I can afford about $3.55 in marketing spend for each unit sold. If I sell 2-5 units a month, my monthly marketing budget is somewhere between $7-$18 per month. This may not sound like much but keep in mind that the internet offers many ways to inexpensively market your products and the goal is to be as granular and targeted as possible.
Give your customers the option of paying by credit card
If you have a website, you can do this through PayPal. There is no monthly or set up fee. So how do they make money!? Well, if your monthly sales are less than $3,000 then they charge 2.9% fee per transaction + .30 cents.
If you don’t have time/ ability to create and maintain a website then my preferred option, (if you make handcrafted items or sell vintage finds) is setting up a shop on Etsy. For those who many not be familiar, Etsy is a marketplace where you can buy or sell all things hand-made or vintage. Etsy charges $.20 cents to post a listing and transaction fees are 3.5% of the item price. If you use their direct checkout which gives you the ability to accept credit cards, there is also a processing fee of 3% + .25 cents. Yes, total that’s 6.5% + $.45 cents per item sold but you can off set this by including the fee amount into the item price.
Create a unique Gmail account for your business and signup for AdWords
If you don’t already have a separate email account for your business you should obtain one. And why not, it’s free and keeps your personal emails separate from your business emails.
AdWords has been an extremely successful marketing channel for me. As a micro business owner the trick here is to make your ad groups and keyword selection as targeted as possible. The funds aren’t available to target broad keywords that aren’t converting. Be specific, make use of long–tail keywords, which may not have a high search volume but are detailed descriptions of your creations.
Money $aving Tip: Take advantage of Google Reps & their knowledge as it’s unenviable that they’ll contact you after initial set up of an Adwords account. Don’t be afraid to ask for a voucher. They often give these out to new advertisers and it can save you big bucks for a little investment (e.g. spend $25 and get $100 in free advertising).
Use social media to your advantage
Announce shop happenings, new creations or product offerings to your social following. Not enough time to manage a Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc. etc? That’s ok! Set up your twitter account to additionally post updates on your Facebook. I’d only recommend this tactic if your following on the two networks is different audiences, as it can be repetitive and create a bad experience for your fans.
Don’t have a social following? Well, Facebook ads can be a good place to start. Target by interest, demographic, or target followers of other brands or groups simular to your shop. Sponsored Stories ads are really successful at garnering page likes. You can set a daily budget to run through a determined period of time to manage spend and stay within a pre-determined budget.
NOTE: I do not recommend Facebook ads for conversions or sales- only to increase your social following. Having a social following can though, lead to sales.
Start a blog and become an expert in the field
Beeswax candles to business consulting, whatever you are selling, you should become a go-to resource for that topic. One way to accomplish this is by starting and regularly updating a blog on your topic. There are so many blog platforms that are free and give you the freedom to customize the look and feel, and add branding. Make sure to optimize your blog for search so people can find it when they are looking for resources on that topic. Don’t forget to add FASS (fast action social sharing buttons) to your blog in order to streamline all your customer touch points. Additionally, regular updates are essential to keep readers coming back. Also, it’s important to mention that your blog shouldn’t be a big call to action, BUY NOW. It should be a resource on the topic and not a place where you necessarily sell and promote your business or products.
Use these tips to accomplish blogging that that will Blow your Readers away!
Branding is key
If you want people take your business seriously and ultimately purchase your products, branding is critical. If you don’t have the design skills to develop a logo, propose a trade of your product to a friend or family member that does. Even something simple that you can add to a tag will give your products a tailored and refined look. Once you have a logo, get a custom stamp made, (there are many inexpensive places online) and use it for your tags. Since many inks are water-soluble, make sure to use a varnish spray to keep the ink from bleeding.
Don’t be afraid of the some old school promo methods
Some of my easiest (and cheapest) sales were obtained through flyers placed in local climbing gyms. Never under estimate the power of a strategically placed printed flyer. I like to include pull-tabs on the bottom so those interested can simply tab a tab with my Etsy shop URL. It also feels great when you check out the flyer and all the pull-tabs are gone (bonus pat on the back).
Having a successful micro business is no easy task.
They say if you make a good product or offer a valuable service then it will sell it’s self. Well, to be frank that line is crap. You first need to market your business successfully, create awareness and THEN if you make a quality product, you will retain your customers and gain repeat sales.
Small business to enterprise, or any size in between- one thing we can all learn from a micro business is that generally people enjoy encouraging and supporting the passion of a real person. What ever your size- love what you do and be real in your outreach. Give your business a face and remember that above all else, the support of your customers is what fuels your business and inevitably supports your passion.
Please feel free to add your own experiences as a business owner as I look forward to learning about your frustrations and most importantly your successes.
Luckily, for people like me, content creation comes easy because I love blogging. For me, blogging is an incredible creative outlet. The very nature of a blog allows an author to tell a story, give their option, ask a question, or share knowledge without the associated hassles of any of the mediums that came before it. Before, we could only dream about writing a book or getting published in a magazine. Now, we can just hammer out 500 words on WordPress and click “publish”. It’s tremendous creative freedom. It should surprise no one that content marketing relies on content, but, as it turns out, blogging is the perfect method for creating that requisite content. That’s one of the reasons I love blogging; it makes big ideas in inbound, social media, and SEO possible.
The first reason is that blogging requires a great deal of creativity. If a blog post is going to be worth reading, you have to get creative with it. Nobody wants to read that 5,323,494th post on using the AdWords Keyword Tool for keyword research. If you’re addressing a topic that’s been discussed at length, you need to use creativity to bring a unique perspective to the table or present that topic in a new way. Alternately, you need to think of a topic that hasn’t been covered before. Either way, writing a successful blog post requires a lot of creativity, and that alone is daunting to many would-be-bloggers.
By putting out blog posts often and doing so on a set schedule, you condition your readers to expect your site to have new content at regular intervals. Ideally, you want people to keep coming back to your site to read your content. When we started to take our blogging seriously, we initially set out to do just four posts per month. That’s all that it took us to achieve some sizable gains. I’d recommend posting between two times per week (which is what we aim for now) and once per day at the maximum. While I could be run out of town for saying this, I strongly feel that publishing more than one post each day dilutes the value of blogging. How much attention can one blog post get when it’s only the newest post for a few hours? And quite frankly, I have never seen a site that’s been able to produce HIGH QUALITY blog posts on a schedule that frequent. Back to the point though, blog frequently, at a pace that’s good for your organization, and condition readers to expect new posts on certain days.
It’s not enough to simply establish a content calendar and demand that your team crank out blog posts. A little incentive goes a long way. At SwellPath, we give a monetary bonus for every blog post a team member writes. Having blog posts up on the site is an incredible lead gen tool and allows us to show our clients that we’re at the forefront of search marketing. The ROI of blogging more than covers the monetary incentive.
Search Engine Opportunity Gaps! This tips focuses on finding opportunities in search that no one is taking advantage of. To get started, head over to Google.com. Start typing something, like “social media for” and before you hit the Enter key, see what Google returns in the drop down. This is Google’s autosuggest feature and guess what. It’s based on actual searches. Google’s trying to anticipate what you’re looking for based on what it knows others have already been looking for. This means you if you write blog post centered on something you see here, you already know there’s an existing audience for it.
For the uninitiated, Google Authorship is Google’s program centered on highlighting content authors in search. In short, Google has found that its users trust content that they can tell was written by a real person. On top of that, they’re also operating on the assumption that if you’re willing to vouch for your content by tying your online identity to it, you’ll be motivated to create better content.
99% of bloggers know that you’re supposed to include meta data, but is everyone doing it consistently and effectively? Probably not. Moving into 2013, there are three main pieces of meta data that you should be including with every blog post that goes out the door.
