And I'm going to make another assumption (two in one day is hard on the ol' noggin, but here we go). That assumption is that although you know marketing will help your small business succeed, you have no idea how to go about it.

What I want to say might be overly simplistic because there's more to marketing than can fill hundreds of pages like this one. But, we all have to start somewhere don't we? What I want to do is to simply give you, the average small business owner, a few things to think about.

1. Find you target market.

There's old marketing wisdom that goes something like this: "if you target everyone, you really target no one". There really is nothing that doesn't have a target market. Ok, that's a double negative - might be a little confusing. Let me rephrase: Everything - every product and every service has a target market. And you can't have much of a message if you don't know who you're talking to.



2. Know your target market like the back of your hand (actually, better than that).

Once you figure out who your target market is, you better know them well. You might want to make it a goal to get to know him or her better than your competition. Cuz that'll give you a pretty good advantage.



3. Know your competition like the back of your hand too.

See them as "the enemy" (metaphorically of course), and we all know, the better you know your enemy, the fewer surprises they can pull on you. And if you know them well enough, you'll soon figure out how to exploit their weaknesses to your own advantage, won't you?



4. Spend some time discovering your benefits.

There's a benefit hiding behind every one of the features your product or service has. Because it's the benefits that your clients are interested in. Not the features. And that's particularly true if your market is consumer-based.



5. Differentiate or die.

Quite the gloom-and-doom statement, that one. Problem is, it's true. There's either tons of competition for what you do, or there's going to be. I don't care if you've just invented the newest and greatest thing-a-ma-bobby of the century. If you don't have competition right now, you will. And soon. Because if your invention is so great, somebody's going to come along who'll figure out a way to make it even faster and better than you did. So if you want to keep your business doors open, better figure out a way to be different from your competition.



6. And while we're talking about competition, which of your benefits makes you unique?

What do you offer that nobody else does? And I don't want to hear you say you're more affordable, or you offer high quality either. These days, that's a given. Your unique benefits need to be something far more...unordinary (if that's actually a word). The more unordinary, the better.



7. Those unique benefits are your competitive advantage, and form the bones for the meat of your marketing message.

They're what you use for your main theme for every piece of marketing material you send directly to your target market or put on your web site.

Knowledge is power. It doesn't much matter whether you start at one end or the other of that list. Figure out your target market first, or sit down and write out a list of benefits for every feature you have, and then figure out who your target market is. The point is, spend some time working through those steps. Your chances of success will go way up.



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Eve Jackson owns Details Small Business Solutions; a company dedicated to helping small business do big business. We've developed a marketing program specifically for small business that does just what successful big businesses do, with one big difference - affordable strategies. We'll help your small business succeed by helping you identify all those things I've just talked about, and then we'll help you develop and implement affordable strategies that'll work for your small business. www.detailssbs.com, info@detailssbs.com