Archive for January, 2010

In starting a business, you’re going to find that there are many different plans that you’ll have to put together. While it may seem tedious, having a well-formed plan is crucial towards helping guide the direction of the company. The most obvious is a business plan, but you should also develop a marketing plan that will be a guide on how you reach out to your audience – what’s your selling point? Communication strategy? Budget?

So what is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a written document that details the necessary actions to achieve one or more marketing objectives. It can be for a product or service, a brand, or a product line. Marketing plans cover between one and five years. A marketing plan may be part of an overall business plan. Solid marketing strategy is the foundation of a well-written marketing plan. While a marketing plan contains a list of actions, a marketing plan without a sound strategic foundation is of little use.

Now let’s look at what goes into a marketing plan:

First you’re going to need to research the market. This goes into your situational analysis, which is basically research of your competitors, any trends in the industry, sentiment, market forecast, segmentation, customer information/demographics and a market needs analysis. Perhaps the biggest part of this section of your plan is the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis. By doing a SWOT analysis, you’re going to be able to assess what advantages and disadvantages you bring to the table and look at what opportunities & threats await you in the industry.

It should be noted that at this point, you should be looking at the 8 P’s of marketing:

1. Price – The amount of money needed to buy products
2. Product – The actual product
3. Promotion (advertising)- Getting the product known
4. Placement – Where the product is located
5. People – Represent the business
6. Physical environment – The ambiance, mood, or tone of the environment
7. Process – How do people obtain your product
8. Packaging – How the product will be protected

After the situational analysis, make sure you cover the marketing strategy. This section of your marketing plan focuses on your mission statement, objective and focused strategy, including market segment and product positioning. While this may be similar to the situational analysis, one thing to keep in mind is that this area centers on the company internally. The situational analysis will examine your industry and external factors. The marketing strategy should be focused on what YOU can control and bring to the table. It’s all about your company and brand here.

Your sales forecast will be the next section in your marketing plan. Perhaps more mathematical in nature, this area will be devoted to track sales month by month and follow up on plan-vs.-actual analysis, specific sales by product, by region or market segment, by channels, by manager responsibilities, and other elements.

Lastly, you’re going to have to include an expense budget, which will be a gauge on your total marketing spend to promote your product. It includes a plan-vs.-actual analysis which looks at what you think you’ll spend versus the actual amount spent after a project/product is completed. It also includes specific sales tactics, programs, management responsibilities, promotion, and other elements.

While this may seem rather tedious to include in a single document, rest assured that if you have this, you’ll be fully prepared for what lies ahead and that you won’t be surprised about anything that comes up. Being prepared is a great strategic goal and you’ll be able to account for any issue over the long-term.

For more information on a marketing plan, you can check out the following resources:

• Wikipedia
• The essential contents of a marketing plan - Young Money
• How to create a marketing plan - Entrepreneur.com
• 5 Easy Steps to create a marketing plan - Microsoft Small Business
• How to create a marketing plan – eHow.com

During the most recent GrowSmartBiz conference hosted by Network Solutions in Washington, DC, a great presentation was given by our very own Steve Fisher on 10 rules for creating killer business cards. When starting out your business, you’re going to be networking with a whole lot of people and one of the key leave-behinds will be your business card. Sure, you can create one straight off of your printer, but what exactly are some tips that will get people to remember who you are and your brand?

1. Tell me what you do…quickly! We all have short attention spans. While you may have more than a few minutes to talk about what you do in person, when people are parsing through their stack of business cards they received at an event/conference, it’s probably helpful to make it readily apparent what it is you do so people won’t have to struggle to remember what’s so special about you. Just having your logo and nothing else won’t work – unless your logo explicitly states what it is your company does.
2. Include the ways you want to be contacted. Just because you have a mobile, office and home phone doesn’t mean that you need to include all that information. Find out which ways you prefer to be contacted and list that on your business cards. Don’t make people guess which number is the best. If you have your home number on there below your office number, I’m going to make the assumption that it’s alright to call you at your home. And if you’re using social media as a form of communication, do you want to have your Twitter or Facebook profile listed? Is that something you’re open to sharing?
3. Don’t use your personal email address. If you’re handing out a business card, it’s time to make sure that your email address reflects your professional status. No longer should you have shinykitty@yahoo.com on that business card. Instead, try and use your actual name: first name + last name @ gmail.com or something to that extent. To make it even better, purchase your own domain and have your email address be name@name.com.
4. You can be cool, but be relevant to your audience. Your business card design should definitely stand out, but before you make it uber shiny and creatively spectacular, it should be relevant to your audience. One example that Fisher gave in his presentation is a food company having a chef’s hat graphic and a “bite” taken out of it – so people who are interested in food, would remember what the business is all about.
5. Business cards make great promos but promos do NOT make great cards. Making your business card graphically appealing and promotional is great, but if you’re trying to promote your product or brand, make sure that it’s sensible – not everything can be made into a business card.
6. Make it scannable. These days, with people using Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, or other desktop email programs, it’s crucial that you make your business card flat and able to be scanned. Make it too complex and you run the risk of your information not being entered into their address book and being lost. You always want your information readily available.
7. Have an area on your card with some writeable space. We’re told in the beginning of our career that when you get a business card, make sure you write down some information immediately after meeting someone so you have a means of remembering where you met them – trust me, you’re going to meet a lot of people so it’s hard to remember everyone. Make sure that while design is important, there’s white space that people can jot down quick notes.
8. Avoid glossy or weird material. This goes with the above rule. Make sure that while it’s appealing aesthetically, it functions the way that you want.
9. Use a professional printer. No, your LaserJet does NOT count. If you’re going to be a professional and show you mean business and want people to take your brand seriously, then make the effort and go after a professional printer shop to have them make your cards. Anything else is second best – anything worth doing, is worth doing right and properly.
10. Give out two business cards. Often when people want to share your cards with their colleagues – whether of interest or possibly to network with others, don’t let them suffer without a card. Give them two cards so that they’ll always have one to themselves. The other one can be shared and your brand gets more publicity. Everyone wins!

These rules are just some of the key things that business professionals can do to make an impact at an event, meeting or conference. How does your business card truly stack up? You can view Steve Fisher’s presentation on Slideshare by clicking here.

Your brand is the most important part of your business. It is the first thing that people will think about when you tell them about your business. The impact of it can have some serious implications on whether you are successful or not. So while you might think it’s easier to come up with a brand name, there are some things to keep in mind. Here are a few tips on how you can create a good brand:

Brainstorm - think about what you’d like to name your company. Jot down any words that come to mind on paper and then look back at your thoughts and see which ones make sense.

Reflect & relate – your brand needs to be reflective of key elements of your company. Make sure that when people say or read about your brand, it is obvious what it is your company or product does.

Research other names – find out what the name of your competitors are and then analyze what the strengths and weaknesses of each brand is.

Prioritize - now that you have a bunch of words or names for your possible brand, you should review that list and sort which ones make more sense.

Make it pronounceable – any name that you can’t easily say as the name of a brand is weak. You should find one that anyone can say without any problems. Also, if you’re planning on being international – and in the days of the Internet, it’s always going to be global – then you might want to make sure your brand is easily pronounceable or at least translatable into other languages without being insulting.

Consider the logo and the sound - while you have a brand, remember that it’s not just a word. There’s a logo that is your “symbol” of your company. Don’t forget the graphical element of your brand. If you have a great sounding brand, you can’t rely on that. Make sure your graphic of your brand (aka logo) is equally as impressive.

Got Trademarks? – don’t forget that just because you have a name in mind, everything will be fine. You should check on trademarks and make sure you’re not violating any patent or trademark laws in choosing a brand name.

Find domain name – in the Internet age, you should make sure that you have the right web address. Using a domain registrar like Network Solutions, you should be able to find out whether a web address that matches your brand name is available. If it isn’t available, using a WHOIS directory on Network Solutions should help you find out who owns that domain.

Check company names – If you’re planning to incorporate, check with the Secretary of State (or other appropriate office outside the US) of the state you’re planning to incorporate in.

Protect your brand – A US trademark or service mark costs $325. While it may not be important for small businesses, this may be something that is advantageous to check out.

By following these tips, you should be able to have the beginnings of a great brand for your company. Through your brainstorming and research, you should be able to develop a strong brand.

Source: SmallBusinessBranding.com and About.com

Photo Credit: Jan Willem Geertsma

Have you just started a new business and have no idea what tools are out there to use? Well, many people have asked the same thing and these last few years have brought us some great hosted web applications that serve various purposes like invoicing, accounting, project management, lead generation, email marketing, etc. The only problem is that these applications were usually built by different companies and didn’t talk to each other. This slowly was solved by those companies opening up their API (programming interface) so other applications could integrate. For example, you add a client to a project management system and track time there, it would be great to pull in the client info, project data and import the time data for billing and generating an invoice. You get the picture.

Still there was a problem with so many applications, some integration and no real place to find them. Well five companies founded an coalition called “The Small Business Web” and here are the founding members:

1. Michelle Riggen-Ransom of BatchBlue Software
2. Sunir Shah of FreshBooks
3. Ben Chestnut of Mailchimp
4. Sonny Byrd of Shoeboxed
5. Paul O’Brien of Outright

Here is what they mission is straight from their web site:

The Small Business Web is a movement to bring together like-minded, customer-obsessed software companies to integrate our respective products and make life easier for small businesses. While there are many products available for small business owners on the Web, the approach we’re taking is to use each others APIs to provide a high-level of integration between these applications and create a more seamless experience for our customers.

Pretty cool.

They launched last year at SXSW and now there are like 30 other companies in this coalition. So if you are looking for good low cost applications to power your business and that will integrate with one another in some fashion making your life easier, you can find more info about the small business web and all the companies that are part of it at http://www.thesmallbusinessweb.com/

In future posts we will profile the companies in the small business web and talk about how they can help your new business, how they integrate and how that helps you.

When starting a new business, one of the biggest things that you might need to do is set up a website. In this day of age, companies must have a web presence in order to be found and do business. But while having a website now is no longer a question of whether you should or shouldn’t have one, it has become one more closely aligned with the question: just how much should I spend on a website?

The answer to this question really depends on your business objectives and the interest you place in having a strong online presence. What we’re going to examine in this post is the practice of having a free website, a templated website and a custom website – just which one is more appropriate and the right fit for you?

The free website.

While we no longer have sites like Geocities anymore, what we do have are free hosting providers that will gladly let you use their servers to host your site.  Some advantages of using these services is that you can easily set up a website in mere minutes all by yourself and have no costs to worry about. However, the downsides may far outweigh the advantages – for a free service, you’re going to have to get used to the fact that it’s ad-supported. Also, while you might expect to have at least hundreds of megabytes of space, you will ultimately wind up with something to the amount of 20 mb – which would probably only allow you to do some limited work.

Sure, you could easily pay for a subscription model with most free hosting providers, but you would still be given less features than if you bought it from a regular hosting provider. As it relates to websites, these free hosting providers will allow you to do limited things with your website – basically set up a non-dynamic website complete with HTML and/or Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), but probably will not give you a database so you won’t be able to build any complex site. Essentially, the free website is giving you the liberty of building your own site without paying for hosting (except through the banner ads) and with limited feature support. Network Solutions has a free web site offer that is a great way to get started and see where your business goes. If you are homepreneur, this a great solution to start out with as well.

The templated website.

This is probably the easiest way for you to put up a great looking website. You can start with hosted models like nsHosting where you can find pre-designed websites that you can either purchase exclusively or not-exclusively. It will definitely give people the impression that you have a well executed website and take more pride in displaying your wares. Most of these template websites will gladly give you search queries that you can search for designs based on your specific industry, whether it’s a cafe/restaurant, business, exterior design, sports-focused, real estate, etc. But while you can buy the templates for cheap, you will need to spend more money to make sure that a specific design you choose will not be used by anyone else. Having a template could mean also that you have a great looking website, but since someone else built it, you don’t know the intricacies of it so there’s a huge learning curve on how to make any changes to the template. And since it looks good, does it mean that it’s going to be a great fit for your brand/company? Aesthetically it looks great, but might not be entirely what you need for your business.

The custom website.

Probably the most common type of websites out there – simply building a website that will match your needs right from the very beginning. With a custom website, you can tailor it exactly the way you want it. If you want to have it in a blog style or perhaps match your branding or even have a custom application on your website to track surveys or a specialized feature, then doing a custom website is the way to go. Sure, it will wind up taking you longer to implement a custom site, but the reward is that customers will find your website very professional looking and know that you have a great way of displaying the information they’re trying to find online.

Having a customized website is preferred because of the scalability that you can have versus the other two. If you wanted to have an e-commerce website tied into a blog with a survey tool, then this is probably the way to go. You have more control with what your business is more aligned with than compared to a template or a free website.  On the other hand, while more control is guaranteed with custom sites, the one thing that you shouldn’t forget is that you will pay a cost proportional to the scope of your website. More complicated and advanced means a more expensive cost paid to your contractor and/or team.

Whatever your option, the main focus is getting a website set up for your business so that people will be able to find information about your business. In the past few years, a website has essentially become as important as business cards in the way things are done – if you don’t have a website, how else are people going to find you? Make sure that the one you choose meets the needs of the company, both from a sales and discover side to the financial one.