If you are startup owner or own a small business, you should run into marketing concern. Many opportunities you can obtain today, there are a lot of possibilities for anyone with internet access to help market your small business.

The most important thing for startup or small business owner is performing growth hacking. It means you can get more with the less resource.

You can do a growth hacking in your marketing activities. Marketing is critical to the success of a small business because effective and appropriate marketing strategy is vital to make your startup or small business survive.

Some of the misconceptions about marketing among the small business owner
Many startup owners or small business owner think that marketing is a very simple, just placing ads in some media. This is a fundamental misunderstanding. However, marketing is broader than advertising.

Marketing includes all of the ways how you develop a product based on people's need, how to deliver your product to them, how to communicate with them so that they know your product can solve their problem or fulfill their need.

I recap the marketing fundamental above. substantially marketing is delivering a message to a customer and influencing their perceptions.

Below are the best practices for marketing activities that can be done by Start Up business Owner. Below are the details:

How do you market your product to the right customer?

Before answering the question. Let me explain you that communicating to the right people is an effective marketing strategy.

See the explanation comprehensively about market your product here:

- Goal of promotion activities is communication to prospective customers (target market or the right people): http://marketingforbeginner.blogspot.com/2011/11/promotion-strategy.html

- Market your product to right customer in the right place and a right time with the right price, and also with the right promotion: http://marketingforbeginner.blogspot.com/2007/07/marketing-mix-fundamental.html


How do you know that a group of certain people is your right customer? For knowing this, you must understand your customer. First of all, you have to understand your typical target customer in terms of some criteria (demographic, geographic, psychographic, behavior, etc.)

Some data to analyze when you do a market research:

- What are their fundamental needs, their fundamental problems, their substantial wants?
- What motivates them to buy a certain product or use a certain service?
- Why would they need your product?
- Does your product fulfill their desire or solve their problem?
- What are their alternative options for meeting their need?
- How does your target market (target customer) make a purchasing decision?
- Is your target market a price sensitive customer?
- What are your industry trends?
- Who are your competitors?
- What are your strength and weakness against your competitors?

You can read below information to obtain the answer:

- Market targeting: http://marketingforbeginner.blogspot.com/2015/03/market-targeting-concept-for-beginners.html

- Market positioning: http://marketingforbeginner.blogspot.com/2015/03/market-positioning-concept-for-beginners.html

- How to perform market opportunity analysis: http://marketingforbeginner.blogspot.com/2015/03/how-to-conduct-market-opportunity-analysis.html

As a small business owner, you must understand your customers' needs and develop a plan that surrounds those needs. The right path to grow and expand your business is by focusing on growth.

How to increase a growth? There are five steps, they are:

1. Make segmentation by search niche market.
2. Improve market share and “heart” share.
3. Get more customers.
4. Persuade customers to buy our products.
5. Persuade costumers to buy more products or up/cross selling.

Make them loyal to your products by touch their heart.

Why I put "searching a niche market" in the first step? Because it is important. The reason is that only a proportion of the population is likely to purchase your products. By taking time pitch your sales and marketing efforts to the correct niche market you will be more productive and not waste your efforts or time.

Now, we are focusing on step 2 and 3. Step 2 and step 3 is accordance, because by improving market share and heart share, you will acquire more customers.

You can get more customers by doing these things:

1. Get an extra time to focus on research and create a marketing plan.
2. Price your products and service competitively.
3. Package your product and sample product in order to give to your prospect with no payment (free).
4. Perform a marketing plan.
5. Measure the result and evaluate it.

As you know that marketing budget of start-up/small business is limited.

How can we solve this common problem (budget limitation)?

Small businesses owners have to be more creative and doing an outstanding approach because limited
budgets do not permit spending large amounts of money placing ads in  national TV commercials, etc. In addition to this, most small business owners must do a research to understand their customers, and its strengths in order to perform an effective marketing strategy (get more with less resource).

Small business owner can do one of the following:

1. Attend social and entrepreneur gathering, exchange name card with others. Contact 5 people daily by phone, e-mail, door to door, etc.
2. Persuade our supplier or our distributor and ask them to participate in collaboration advertising.
3. Advertise our product on free media such as a free magazine, free electronic magazine (e-zine), free journal, and so on.

Small business marketing tips

1. Utilizing a social media
If you are doing  general ways to market your product by communicating your message to the audiences (it means that you use general/free tools), you can do it free of charge.

Nowadays, many of your target market or target audiences use one of a social media. So you can interact with them in real time.

Tips to utilize a social media:

- Knowing your audiences what social media they use.
- Post a useful information (vary the content between text, image, video) consistently.
- Interact (active) with your social community.
- Promote your business in your social media (your page), but do not be over-promotional. Do not bombarding your audiences with your sales material. You must post more helpful content and entertaining content than post a hardselling.

2. Get active on blogging
By blogging you can write the appropriate message to your customer, such as giving a helpful answer to your customer's questions, educating the people about your product beneficial, etc.

You can also do a softselling by storytelling in your blog.

3. Try Vlogging (video blogging)
The Video is one of the ways to increase your customer awareness to your business. Research has reported that a lot of people are more likely to make a purchase after watching a video (especially story-telling video or video explaining the product).

Tell a story via video is the best ways to grab the people's attention. It can increase traffic to your website and then increase sales.

Common marketing mistakes that small business owner must avoid

1. Aimless marketing
Marketing without a plan does not result a good achievement. You must do an effective marketing with coordinated process.

You can read marketing plan article for getting more insight:

- Marketing plan basic: http://marketingforbeginner.blogspot.com/2006/12/marketing-plan.html

- Marketing plan best practices: http://marketingforbeginner.blogspot.com/2011/01/marketing-plan-step-by-step-best.html

- Create marketing plan by answering the self-asking questions: http://marketingforbeginner.blogspot.com/2013/02/self-asking-questions-which-help-to.html

2. Unorganized marketing
It means you are not tailoring your marketing to your audiences. This problem comes because you are not understanding your audiences well.

For example:
You have segmented your target market. This group of people usually use Facebook. But you are placing the ads on twitter (sometimes this happens because you do not know most of your audiences use the Facebook rather than Twitter).

3. Only relying on paid advertisement.
Generally, a small business owner wants to market their business fast. He uses a shortcut way,  paying for ads. This is okay, but relying solely on this will consume your money. Expecting immediate results is a mistake. Marketing is a long-term process. So you have to be patient and persistent. Try to perform another strategy, such as building a community, do a SEO for your website, get active in social media, grow your networking, build a relation with some influencers, and so on.

Remember, marketing is more than just placing ads. The important thing is how to communicate and deliver your message to the customer effectively. There are many media you can utilize besides paid ads.

4. Not tracking your marketing efforts.
It is important to track your marketing activities. You must track your activities to see what marketing strategy is working and which one is not.

Therefore, you can improve your marketing strategy in the future or you can enhance the current working marketing strategy.