Small Business Marketing: More Rules of Thumb

Following up my post on Small Business Marketing's Rules of Thumb, here are three more Small Business Marketing Rules of Thumb to follow in the year ahead:

• Be satisfied with a response of one - There's a myth that's been widely propagated among B2B marketers  that any response rate of less than 2% is unacceptable. This myth arose from the consumer direct marketing days where companies mailing for consumer product sales (e.g.  magazine subscriptions, credit cards) routinely saw response rates in the neighborhood of 2%. But B2B marketers have to understand that in the arena of larger-scale service purchases, a response rate of only one can generate a more-than-acceptable return on investment. Think about it; if your small business offers architectural design/build services for major construction projects, you only need one big project to result from a marketing effort to generate a very acceptable ROI.
• Concentrate on starting and sustaining dialogues - In the post-war and pre-Internet days of marketing, we focused on delivering one-way messages. So, a television commercial for a breakfast cereal sought only to drive consumers to the grocery store to buy a box. Today, with the Internet dominating the marketing landscape, we have to find marketing programs that move buyers to start a dialogue with our companies. More often than not, these buyers can find most of the relevant information they need about making a purchase well before they identify themselves (e.g. a home buyer surfing the net for houses in a price range and specific neighborhood). But they will still have questions about their purchase that only you and I as marketers can answer. If we give them a taste of the information they crave, and then provide follow up details (e.g. "If you have specific questions about buying a home in this neighborhood, check out our online forum. Your question may have already been posed and answered there"), we position ourselves as the "helpful expert".
• Cater to anonymous shoppers - Given this transformation to a self-serve society, where buyers identify, compare and shop by themselves, the role of the intermediary is disappearing. Just look at the rapid rise of comparison shopping sites like PriceGrabber.com and Froogle.com. Sure, these are consumer products sites, but there are also sites like AllBusiness.com that provide B2B product shopping for the do-it-yourself-shopper. The lesson for the small business marketer? You must 1) have a website 2) make that website approachable enough to generate dialogues and 3) ensure that website contains a wealth of information so that you are perceived as the go-to expert.

In future issues of my Marketing Tips and Tools e-newsletter, I'll cover even more of these Marketing Rules of Thumb.