Whether your business is old or new, you marketing should be dynamic and timely. Often times marketing in small business involves sending several outgoing calls and walk-in customer service satisfaction. But are these small business marketing ideas still operational today? Or is Internet marketing becoming the next norm for small or big business.

Adding to the dilemma is that, these days, the business magazines, newspapers, Internet and even your email Inbox are filled with small business marketing ideas from just anybody. Inexperienced businessmen or women can easily feel lost in these barrages of small business marketing views, advices, strategies, etc. So let me give you more centered strategies that harness one effective small business marketing strategy: Internet marketing.

Six Top Ideas for Internet Marketing

1. Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC)

For a tech-savvy business man or woman, Pay Per Click marketing proves to be a strong business marketing method. But, entrepreneurs using Pay Per Click should know what they're doing or their cost per conversion could rapidly break unknowingly. The key to a productive Pay Per Click marketing drive is continuous oversight.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Unlike Pay Per Click advertising, Search Engine Optimization pays off slowly but a lasting prospect is feasible. On average, 75% of a business website's traffic come from organic search engine queries. Remember that search engines wouldn't mind your advertising budget. What they look into is the SEO strategies you employed on your site What are important are the SEO strategies that you have on your site. 

Whether you're an entrepreneur writing a business plan or an established firm looking to introduce a new product or service, you will encounter the need to estimate the size of the market/s that you plan to serve. Market-sizing is an interesting and exciting branch of marketing research, but it can be almost as much an art as it is a science. In this article, we will go through the process of estimating market size, using the example of a financial planner looking to develop a practice in his community.

Step 1: Define your target market

This can never be stressed enough. If you don't know the type of customer you want to serve, you will waste a lot of time and money trying to get any customers. Market-sizing is easier when you know the exact group you're searching for. Our financial planner has decided that his target market will be married couples with young children.

Step 2: Determine the needs of your target market and how they create demand for your product/service

Here you formulate a hypothesis. Ask yourself the benefits your product or service offers your target customers. What problem does your product help them solve? Begin with a statement about why your target customers need your product. Our financial planner's statement might be: "Married couples with young children need my services because they must be prepared for college, as well as for unexpected emergencies such as disability and early death." This statement assumes, of course, that the financial planner sells financial products that address these needs; if the planner sells only financial plans, his statement will be different.

Step 3: Identify the information you need to estimate the size of your market

Now that you have identified your target market and hypothesized about its demand for your product, what information do you need to develop your estimates? Among other things, our financial planner would need to know:

• The age distribution within the geographic area he serves;
• The number of households with children in that area;
• The distribution of family income in that area;
• Home market values in the area;
• Educational attainment and college enrollment rates for graduating high school students;
• How many competitors, direct (other financial planners and insurance agents) and indirect (stock brokers, banks with financial planning services, etc.) are serving the market; and
• What financial planning services people buy and how much they pay.

There are others, but this list is pretty comprehensive.

Step 4: Identify the sources you need to obtain that information

So where do you find information about your market? These days, there is such a wealth of published statistics about almost every industry and market segment, that a combination of library and online research can fulfill most of your information needs. In some cases, if you are looking for very specialized information, you may need to conduct your own primary research (surveys, focus groups, etc.) to get what you need.

The U.S. Bureau of the Census provides comprehensive demographic statistics by metropolitan area, county, ZIP code, census tract, and state. Information about population, age, income, educational attainment, presence of children, and home market value can easily be obtained at any of these levels, so the financial planner would be able to answer many of his questions. In addition, the Census Bureau also produces County Business Patterns, which provides information about the activity of each industry by each of the same geographic levels listed earlier. Hence, our financial planner can also obtain the number of financial planning establishments, insurance agencies, and brokerage firms serving the area in which he hopes to establish his practice.

In addition, our financial planner may consult online data sources such as Dun & Bradstreet's Million Dollar Database and ABI's ReferenceUSA to identify specific financial planning firms and insurance agencies in his area and get estimates of their employment size and revenues.

The financial planner can also get lots of relevant information from trade associations, local chambers of commerce, Web sites of his existing competitors, and through primary research, such as surveys and interviews with experts.

Step 5: Collect the data

Now that you have identified your data sources, you need to extract the data. The financial planner will scour all the sources he identified to pull out data that meets his information needs. He will determine whether his data sources provide sufficient and useful data, or whether they provide insufficient or suspect data, at which point he may seek out additional sources to answer his questions.

Step 6: Analyze the data

Now that you have all the data, what does it mean? What is it telling you? Let's say that the area our financial planner wants to serve has 200,000 households, of which 15% - or 30,000 - are two-parent households, with a median family income of $60,000 per year, a median age of 32, and an average household size of 4. Immediately, the financial planner knows he is serving a young upscale market, and it's very likely - without looking at the number of competition - that there will already be an above average number of financial planners trying to serve them.

The financial planner may also find from financial planning industry statistics that 60% of families in that age group carry life insurance, and that the average policy face value is $100,000. Given the affluence of this area, the planner may reason that households in his target market have much greater assets and income to protect, so he may adjust his estimates of life insurance coverage for that area upward - to policies of maybe $250,000 or $500,000. He'll make similar estimates for any other financial products and services he offers.

Step 7: Derive your market estimate

Now that you've compiled and analyzed your data, you need to come up with an estimate of market size. Our financial planner may - through all his data sources - come up with an average and standard deviation of the policy amounts of life, disability, and other policies aimed at his target market in that area. He will then project that amount out by the number of households within that market to come up with an aggregate size of the financial planning market in that area. From there, he will build in a margin of error, perhaps using a 95% confidence interval, to come up with a low estimate, a middle estimate (which would be the aggregate size he determined earlier), and a high estimate.

Step 8: Apply your estimate

Your market size estimate is useless if you do not apply it. Once our financial planner derives his aggregate estimate, he will estimate how much of that market he can reasonably get based on his competition and the amount of money he can earn based on his commission structure. This will feed his business plan projections.

In addition, the size and characteristics of this market will help our financial planner determine how best to market his services, whether by direct mail, giving presentations, networking, or other means.

Market-sizing can be a daunting, tedious task, but the value it adds to your planning and marketing efforts can make the time, money and effort invested in it more than worthwhile.

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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Alex_Caffarini

What we now call "marketing" began long before the name was coined. In the mid-1800s, traveling salesmen dressed "snake oil" and other tonics in fancy packaging and extolled their virtues to a gullible public. New marketing applications soon proliferated in the belief that marketing could make many new things possible in virtually any business situation. For more than a century, implementation, experience and ultimately strategy have helped marketing evolve from crude beginnings into today's sophisticated practices.

Consumer product firms have been the pioneers in the marketing field and have taken the undisputed lead as the creators of marketing's best practices. While sophisticated marketing techniques have spawned consumer giants, most financial services firms had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the era of sophisticated marketing.

The Advancing State of Financial Services Marketing

Financial services marketing has, however, evolved rapidly over the last decade. As a result, the very nature of the marketing function in financial services firms is undergoing a dramatic modification as more attention is paid to marketing-driven processes that impact the entire firm. Our observations suggest that the more progressive financial services organizations are currently going through an intellectual and practical transition that is forcing the reexamination of the role of marketing within their firms. Many have begun to realize that financial marketing responsibilities include not only developing the firm's mission statement and key messages, but also defining its business focus, relevant differentiation, competitive advantages and value proposition.

At the same time, however, a number of financial services marketing directors must engage in long-term turf battles with other departments before they can implement worthy financial marketing initiatives that will help accelerate the achievement of corporate goals. In many financial organizations, the persistent problem of differentiating financial marketing from sales still remains largely unresolved. In addition, some financial services marketing directors must still enlist substantial management support just to maintain equilibrium and obtain the opportunity to accomplish even limited objectives.

Focusing on the Customer

Peter Drucker, a sage of the financial marketing discipline, discussed customer defined value almost 50 years ago. During the last decade his concept of a customer-centric focus has become part of popular marketing literature and is now the guiding principle of financial marketing. Drucker's fundamental mandate that 'the customer's interests must come first' can be summarized by the following statements paraphrased from his extensive writings:

The only valid definition of business purpose is to create a customer.
What the business thinks it is producing is not as important as what customers think they are buying; what customers consider to be value is decisive.
Every business has only two basic functions: marketing and innovation.
Marketing is your whole business as seen from the customer's point of view.

While easy to articulate, customer-centric practices are difficult to implement in most financial services organizations. Obstacles include a prevailing product-push mentality, a focus on short-term profitability, under-investment in financial marketing activities, and the lack of solid market intelligence about the needs and wants of target markets.

We believe, however, that in the future the most successful financial services marketing organizations will be those that make Drucker's principles their own through extrapolation, adaptation and creative application. As effective financial marketing evolves to a cross-functional, multi-disciplinary activity, successful firms will create a culture of customer orientation throughout the organization and incorporate advocacy for customer welfare in all corporate decision-making.

With the financial services industry currently going through a transformation, management's challenge is to provide the leadership to displace the status quo and create a culture of opportunity. Early adaptors who apply the concept of "integrated marketing" on an organization-wide basis will not only develop a customer-orientated culture, but also create opportunities for innovation, improved performance and incremental profitability.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jay_Nagdeman