In small business marketing books and articles, one of the first things you're told is to get out there and advertise your products or services. Even if you're not told it, as a non-professional marketer you tend to assume that this is the right thing to do.

Wrong. Of course, there are times when it's proper for you to advertise, but think carefully before embarking on any advertising expenditure. Advertising is costly. It can quickly eat up your limited resources. And it's not always effective. In fact, in many instances it can be entirely the wrong strategy for you. There are plenty of other cheaper, even free, marketing strategies that might prove much more effective.

To find out more about "When Advertising can be Bad News for the Small Business", read my complimentary White Paper on the subject.

This will help you decide if you want to use advertising and if it's relevant to you.

Hi there!

People regularly confuse the terms "market" and "marketing" research - even people who ought to know better. In this post, I want to explain to you the difference between the two.

Market research refers to investigating a particular market. For instance, you might want to look at the market for children's clothes or the market for dog food. Market testing a product, consumer attitudes, or finding out how people intend to vote at an election would also fall into that category. In other words, your research is singular and focuses entirely on your chosen market.

You might use market research if you are a new business and you want to find out if there is a market for your idea. You might also use it if you intend to launch a new product or service.

Marketing research, on the other hand, is much more comprehensive and it deals with the whole marketing process. You would apply this, for instance, when writing a marketing plan. The areas this covers include: the wider world around you (macroenvironment); your markets; competitors; customers; and your own business. From the information you gather in that research, you would develop a SWOT Analysis.

You'll see that I've included "your markets" in this list. This would involve market research. However, when your focus is marketing research, you would not normally analyze your markets to the same depth as you would when conducting market research.

If you want to find out more about market and marketing research and learn how to conduct these on your own, check out my Learning E-Manual: "How to Write a Marketing Plan for the Small Business".

Hi there!

I got an e-mail in response to one of my previous posts about the "80:20" rule, which states that you should expect that 80% of your sales will come from around 20% of your customers. The e-mailer asked me to develop the significance of this a bit further.

Your top 20% are your key customers. As such, these are your best bet for getting additional sales. These customers know you. They trust you. And they already buy from you in quantity. Thus, they will be more receptive to any offers you make.

So, make key customer management one of your major strategies. Look after these customers. Court them. Unlock the potential they offer you for increasing your sales.

There are lots of marketing strategies you can use to get more value from your key customers including: up-selling, cross-selling, offering packages, bundles, retrospective discounts, and so on. If you want more suggestions, check out the free marketing ideas, strategies and tips on my website.

In addition, read my Complimentary White Paper: How to Deliver Exponential and Sustainable Sales Growth to Your Small Business

By the way, thanks for the e-mails in response to my posts. I'm delighted to receive these.

Hi there!

I've just finished giving a training course on Online Marketing Strategies. One of the questions that came up concerned Google's so-called "triangle", which applies in PPC advertising using AdWords. Let me explain how this works and why you must be aware of it.

Google makes its money from PPC. So, it needs delighted customers who will come back and use their services again. To achieve that, the customer has to feel that Google is giving them what they want.

And what they want is for their search results to provide the answers they're looking for – accurately and instantly. To facilitate this in AdWords, Google looks for three things to be in sync: the key words the customer types in; the relevance of your advert to those keywords; and the landing page you set up for the advert.

The second point on this virtuous triangle means that your ad has to contain the key words that the user has typed in, preferably in the heading and at least once in the body copy.

The third point means that the landing page has to match the text used in the advert. For instance, if you're advert is about lawnmowers, your landing page has to be about the identical subject; there's no point in sending visitors to your About Us or Home pages. Google's spiders will actually visit your landing page and check out the language to make sure that it meets the criteria.

And the more you can bring these three points into sync, the more this will benefit you. How? Google will reward you with a higher position on the page. And you won't have to pay more this. In fact, some of the people lower on the page may even be paying more than you – because they're approach is not as focused or as relevant as yours. And thus theirs is less likely to delight Google's customers.

Hi all!

Reactivating past or non-active customers is a well proven way to build your business. It's also one of the simplest and cheapest strategies to implement. Yet many small businesses seem reluctant to pursue it.

Why not listen to my podcast on this issue. You'll learn why people leave; the most effective ways to go about contacting them again; and what to say to persuade them to start re-buying from you.

The podcast runs for about 10 mins.

When you visit the podcasts page, you'll also find a number of other free small business podcasts that should be of value to you.