Marketing Research for Small Business Owners

Welcome to the Marketing Research for Small Business Owners website!

Who We Are

We are a company that was created in November, 1999 and which has this mission: "Helping Small Business Owners Attract More Clients, Increase their Satisfaction, and Make More Money".

What We Offer and Why

We are offering you FREE Small Business Marketing Education in the form of easy-to-read publications written in laymen's terms that will help you to do what has been stated above in our mission.
Why? Because it is the way we attract business. A percentage of the business owners that are helped by our free resources turn to us for some of the business marketing and management solutions that we provide.
You will be receiving the five following valuable  PDF documents from us FREE. (After you complete the survey, you will receive 1 confirmation phone call from us and 1 email with a link for you to follow to download your FREE marketing education resources.)
The Small Business Website Self-Evaluation Guide    Read Intro

Retails for $29.95 at http://www.a1smallbusinessmarketing.com/website_self_evaluation_guide.php

The Top Ten Marketing Tips for Small Business Owners   Read Intro

Your Marketing Message: Words That Work Wonders   Read Intro

Six Keys to Closing More Sales   Read Intro

The Top Ten Website Tips for Small Business Owners   Read Intro

Why You Need It

Marketing is not equivalent to advertising. Advertising is simply spending money. You can "market" without spending anything. Advertising is simply putting your message out in front of potential customers. Marketing involves knowing how your potential market thinks, what influences their buying decisions, how to attract their interest, win their business and retain them as customers.
You need education in marketing to be able to effectively advertise your products and/or services in the right way to the right audience.

How To Get It

Yes, there is a "catch." We want to "trade" our valuable resources with you for your valuable input in the form of a marketing survey. We need to continually update our data. We need to hear from you. Your responses to our survey determines the products and services that our company develops. We need to create what you need. We cannot do that if we do not know what it is. We cannot invent a better way than to simply ask you!
We are asking for 2 - 5 minutes of your time. How long it takes depends upon how hard you think and how fast you type. We know your time is valuable (as well as your input), and we will reward you for sharing it with us.

Privacy Policy Promise

We will use your responses to our questions to generate aggregate data only. (Just collective numbers) We do not share (give away or sell) your personal and/or business information with any one, and we do NOT send you unwanted email. How about that for a promise?
You will receive one phone call from us and one email from us and from then on, contact must be initiated by you.
--------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Small Business Website Self-Evaluation Guide
- an introduction ...

1. Is Your Website VALUABLE?

That is, does your website offer real value to your current clients and potential clients that visit your website? It is important to remember the origin of the world wide web. It was first an information portal before it developed into the e-commerce giant that it is today.

The exponential growth of the internet owes its exponential growth to the age, "the information age" that we live in. It was the convenience and free access to information that launched it, and the desire for free, valuable information still permeates the market.

First Value Point—It is important that your website is not static.

You should change it as often as you want your clients to revisit it, monthly would be a minimum. If your website is not important enough to you to change it at least once per month, you need to reevaluate how and why you are marketing on the web. If you are going to say, no one ever comes back to it again anyway, you have just answered why. You didn’t expect them to!

Be sure that you don’t give them a reason to NOT BOOKMARK your website, and a changeless website loses value to browsers. You need to give your browsers a reason to come back!

You want to continue to sell to your clients, knowing that the very best person to sell something to is someone who just bought something from you. It is easier to "resell" an existing customer than to collect a new client.

There is a universally accepted principle in sales: the more you give away, the more you will sell.

Here are a five examples that demonstrate how it works:

------------------------------------------

The Top Ten Marketing Tips for Small Business Owners
- an introduction ...

1. Always Keep the “4 Cs of Marketing” in the forefront of your mind when you are considering anything that touches on effectively marketing or managing your small business.

• Consumer Confidence
• Client Convenience
• Customer Choices
• Constant Communication

These four simple things will almost always be the unseen guide that leads consumers to action when it comes to the purchase of a product or service. They forge a powerful, yet usually subconscious criteria that greatly influences the buying decisions of American consumers.

Anything that you can do that will increase and/or improve any of the “4 Cs of Marketing” will reward you with more business.

Your Marketing Message: Words That Work Wonders
- an introduction ...

When you are hoping to engage a potential client, you’ve often only got a few seconds to engage the mind of your prospects with the hope of turning them into clients. A few seconds means just a few words, so you want them to be powerful. You need to successfully arouse their interest and arrest their attention. This is why you must create and hone your marketing message!

This is never more true than when someone lands on your website. I know that it just doesn't seem fair, but you've got about 8 seconds to captivate their attention, and you need a clear marketing message that greets them when they land.

Your goal is to either get them to continue to read your marketing material or start asking you questions about your products or services.

How do you do this?

1. Forget about yourself.

Your potential clients are not really interested in your business. They are interested in themselves. You are interested in your business, the features of your products or services or the processes that you use.

If you love what you do, (and you should, or you should do something else) you may even be excited about the details of why and how you do what you do. Your prospects don’t care so much about this. It may even bore them.

Your prospects really care about themselves.

So, the first step in getting their attention is to talk about them. What do you do for them?

------------------------------------------
Six Keys to Closing More Sales
- an introduction ...

Are you making deadly mistakes in your sales attempts? Do you want to close more sales? Are you becoming discouraged because you have been told “no thanks” a lot lately? Did you know that there is an unseen “1-2 punch” that you need to learn to cunningly throw make “knock-outs”? Take a few seconds to read this article and get back into the ring!

1. Someone has to have a PROBLEM.

You are in business simply because someone has a problem that you can solve. The #1 job of marketing is to clarify the problems that you solve for your target market.

Your potential clients or customers are not so concerned about your credentials or the procedures that you use in your business. They want to know what you can do for them. Can you solve their problems?

I think that the biggest mistake small business owners make in their marketing is focusing too much upon themselves instead of their customers. Use your marketing efforts to tell your clients what you can do for them instead of telling them so much about yourself.

The Top Ten Website Tips for Small Business Owners
- an introduction ...

1. Plan your website well. Let us start with a plan, plan our work, and then work our plan. Take out a notebook or notepad or use the supplied blank pages and begin answering the following questions:

1) What do I want my Website to do for me? Do I want it to advertise my business? Educate my customers? Take care of some customer service issues? Do I want it to sell products, services or information for me?
2) How do I want people to find my Website? Do I want them to find it through search engines when people are searching for keywords related to my products and services? Do I just want people to find it through other conventional advertising, such as business cards, brochures, newspaper and magazine advertising, radio and etc.?
3) What is my budget for Website construction, development, hosting and promotion? Are you planning on doing it all yourself, or do you plan to hire a professional to do it for you? Your Website may include all of the following elements: photography, copy writing, art/design/construction, programming, hosting and promotion.
How much should you budget? It is hard to say, because you can get the exact same Website created by two different companies and the prices could be dramatically different. We have had clients that paid as much as $10,000 to have a Website developed that we would have done for $500.
You’ll need to do your homework if you want someone to design your Website for you. Ask for many references of customers they have worked with, not just to see the Websites that they have constructed.
4) What do I want my Website to convey and what images and art am I going to need to get ensure that my Website gets that message across?