Small Business Marketing Tips & Local Business Marketing Advice at http://onepercent.marketing - President Brian Tucker highlights challenges many local small and mid-size business owners face with marketing their business online. He offers insightful ways to get online and the get the phone ringing fast. One Percent Marketing is a next-generation marketing and sales improvement firm. Brian can be contacted through the website for questions, speaking engagements and help with marketing your business and improving your end-to-end sales capabilities. ++++++ The following is a partial transcript +++++++ So that’s some of the things that I’m going to talk to you about today, that’s going to be local marketing in an online world. Let’s face it, more and more everything is starting to move online and for a lot of smaller business owners, local business owners, especially those in smaller communities – it’s difficult to grasp working and getting your business online because you’re so used to doing things traditionally in smaller towns, and all of that is changing. We’re going to go through a little bit of that, today what I’m going to talk about is how and why marketing is changing for local businesses. What I mean by local businesses is business owners just like you, this is happening everywhere across the world and it’s a big problem. A lot of these are big problems that business owners are struggling with, that they’re facing right now and they’re not really sure what to do, they don’t have the capability, they’re not sure where to go. I’m going to talk a little bit about where marketing for local businesses is heading, five years, ten years in the future. How you can potentially start future proofing your local business right now, and I’m going to give you a six step plan quickly of things that you can do over the weekend, and by Monday have some of these things done and up and running for your business that will absolutely help you right out of the gate. First thing I just want to set the stage with is one of the things that I run in to a lot with business owners, they don’t really understand what marketing is, they’re used to hearing the word advertising and traditionally in smaller local businesses, mid-sized businesses, there’s this mindset about advertising. An ad salesman comes to you and sell you some advertising, you buy the advertising, you put a newspaper ad and you go a radio ad, you do a television ad and you hope the phone calls and that you convert it in to a sale. Advertising as you’ll see on the right is just one small subset of marketing. Marketing is a full process and a full strategy that businesses use to grow what their business is long term. To kind of put it into perspective, advertising if you look at this wheel right here, it starts at the top with marketing and works its way around. Advertising is really in this step right here, what happens is a lot of smaller businesses start here and don’t really have a strategy, they haven’t put a tactical plan together, they really don’t have a marketing plan and they just kind of take chances and say “Well I’ll try this, maybe that will work. Maybe I’ll try this type of advertising and that will work”. I had a client that called me yesterday and he said “Brian, I’ve tried everything. Radio, TV, newspaper, billboards – I can’t get anything to work. I’m really not sure what I’m doing.”. He’s just trying everything that he possibly can. Well, this is a type of person that doesn’t know there’s actually a strategy and there’s actually a system behind that, that you can put together long term that will help you strategically grow your business. With that in mind I want to put things in to perspective, so when I talk about how things are changing for businesses, how things are moving. Some of you may be old enough to remember when the telephone was fairly new, some of you may remember it as a kid. To put it in perspective, it took 75 years for the telephone to reach 50 million people. You look at the radio, you look at television, it came along, technology progressed much faster. Then we started to get in to the early days of the internet and as you can see, it took about four years for the World Wide Web to catch on and hit 50 million people. Now, as you go down the scale what you’ll see is Facebook hit 50 million in three and a half years, and then we get in to things like apps that come out for your iPhone or iPod, these things can hit 50 million users in less than two or three weeks.

• published: 08 Jan 2015
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