Marketing in a small business is possibly the most misunderstood, poorly planned and under budgeted aspect of the small business planning effort.

Marketing is not just advertising it includes advertising. The words “sales and marketing” are often used together, however marketing strategies need to be developed and in place first in order to compliment the sales effort.

Give serious consideration to what business you are really in. It is not always the obvious. This is one of the first processes, which will help you to “position” your business.

Positioning your business is really a matter of first doing a market assessment and then deciding where you want your business to fit in the marketplace. It means providing your target market with an offering (product or service) they may be likely to buy. Some fine-tuning may be necessary once the program is underway.

Consider these possibilities. How would you like your business to fit into the marketplace? It may be more profitable to position your business at the high end of the market than to be competing with the low-end, low-margin, high-volume companies.

What does your business look like? Your stationery design, the packaging of the offering, signage and advertising approach may need to be redesigned to fit your new target market.

Marketing is:

• Getting the attention of the market you want to sell to
• Generating an interest in your offering
• Being accessible when and where the market is ready to buy
• Making the sale
• Monitoring the competition
• Following market trends
• Follow-up and tracking your customers to encourage repeat business

Remember the objective is to sell something. This means it is necessary to ask for the business. Something I have noticed often with small business is a reluctance to ask for the business. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

Decide what you are going to offer your market and attach pricing to the offering. Be confident, passionate and proud to present your offering. Don’t be shy about it. Yes, sometimes it’s necessary to be flexible but you have to start somewhere.

As business owners we are managers of impressions. The impressions we give to our market, our suppliers and even our competition are critical to our success. Creating not only a good impression, but also an impression that fits with our overall marketing effort can be challenging.

Carefully review all the things people will see, hear, feel, smell and taste about your business. Get help from friends, relatives or a professional. Above all, you need honest, objective and constructive suggestions.

You don’t need to act on all of them, but the feedback will be very helpful and may surprise you. In many cases a marketing professional will save you time and money.

In order to improve sales, it is necessary to make marketing a priority and ask for the business.