1. Assess your market: You need to get a very real picture of the marketplace that you are going into. Things you should seek to uncover in your assessment of the market is how big of a market is it. The market need to be a large enough to support the type of business you want and also the entrance of other players into the market. Is the market growing or declining? You also would want to know if there are segments of the market that are being underserved that perhaps you can serve effectively. If you business is going to be effective in a market the more information you have about the seasonality of the market etc will allow you to market most effectively in that market.

2. Describe your customer: How well do you know your customer. Sure, you must know the demographic traits of the customer. Additionally you must also know what they want in a product or service like yours? Every customer will have a goal that they are trying to achieve or a need that they are trying to accomplish with your product? Do you know what that need is? The company that is able to identify, express, and meet that need will win the business of the most customers and be a success in business.

3. Pick your first target group: We have established that the marketplace is big enough for us to grow and succeed. Now we must decide on the part of the market that we will capture first. We must pick a group to go at first. You need to focus your resources, your time, and your attention on a specific group of the market. Before Amazon became The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon  they were the best book-sellers in the world. You have to start with a single target group, and dominate that space. To determine who to start with you can begin with your most profitable group, those you have the most experience with or you can follow a proven model.

4. Develop your marketing message. You need to have a message in your marketing, that days of just having a snazzy logo and slogan are over. You need to be able to clearly share what you offer to the market. I recommend that the three ways you must have in place to share that message is a “sound byte” aka audio logo that you use at networking meeting to answer the question “what do you do?”. You need a USP that can be used in selling situations to differentiate you from your competition in a meaningful way. Lastly you need a Value Proposition that is used to demonstrate to your prospects and customers what you offer and the value they can expect from doing business with your company. It includes your value statements, your evidence, your sales presentation and other messages that show the value that you offer.

5. Pick your media. This can be the easiest of all the steps, because once you have your message and your audience, finding them is easy. There are literally dozens of ways and thousands of media outlets to share your message. I had a vendor offer the opportunity to have my logo printed on the back of a receipt at a grocery store. But do not skip the previous steps and go looking for a place to but your messages until you have created and engaging marketing message as discussed in step four.

6. Set your marketing goals. If it is not written down it is a wish and not a goal. But if it is written down without being measurable and quantifiable it is an idea. You must write down goals that you can look at to evaluate whether it was met. Great marketing goals are to increase your email subscribers by 500 people in the next 45 days, meet 10 new business owners this month. Create a salesletter to send to customers by next Wednesday. Call 50 people this week in your target market. These are valuable goals to set and they are measurable. What are you goals? I keep many of my goals easily accessible in tools like Evernote or Google drive to review and update, you can also keep them in front of you on your whiteboard in your office.

7. Create a marketing budget. Your small business needs a marketing budget. You need to have money set aside each month to generate leads and attract attention to your business. How you use that budget will depend on the media that you have chosen in step five and how quickly you can monetize the leads that you are attracting. That is the topic for another day. But to make your marketing a priority money must be allocated to it. Some of your budget can be allocated to marketing automation software like Infusionsoft or LeadOutcome to help automate some of your marketing and some of your market must be directed to lead generation activities.