Small Business Marketing Rules of Thumb

Here are three Rules of Thumb for small business marketing that you'll find useful. If you're in charge of marketing your small business, try following these rules of thumb:

• Buzz marketing trumps traditional advertising every time - Recent statistics show that the marketing strategy called "buzz marketing", and consists of word-of-mouth marketing, buzz marketing, and viral marketing, commands a larger share of marketers attention and spending dollars. In recent years, according to the Blackfriars Report, companies' spending on advertising has dropped from 31% to 22% while spending on non-traditional marketing methods like buzz marketing has increased to an almost 14% share. I must admit I hate the term "buzz marketing". It seems to imply that the key benefit of this  approach is to create a buzz. But this misses the point. The real benefit is that others, usually  satisfied clients and customers, attach their personal recommendation to your product.  When you get a buzz marketing effort underway you necessarily get people talking about your product, service or company in the best light possible.

• 90-day Rule- Every small business should strive to be in front of its buyers every 90 days. This kind of continuous messaging establishes a healthy top-of-mind awareness for your company, while also steadily educating buyers as to why doing buwsiness with your company is the most logical choice. Sure, 90 days is a tight timeline, and it'll put some pressure on your company marketers to keep coming up with new and fresh ways to say things. But isn't that what good marketing is all about anyway?

• Write it once, use it thrice - Marketers are just too busy these days to craft original content whenever they park themselves in front of a computer. Given the swirling pace of work these days, the best advice I can give small business marketers is to write a certain piece of marketing content once, then try to find ways to use it three times. So you could  1) write a blog entry for your company blog, then 2) add it to your website's FAQ page and  3) work it into an article that you write for an online site. This forces you to not only be efficient with your time, but to also choose your subject matter and content keywords carefully.

In future issues of my Marketing Tips and Tools e-newsletter, I'll cover several more of these Marketing Rules of Thumb, but for now, these will get you started...