This is where a lot of my students get mixed up in the hype of Internet Marketing. It is essentially a mirror of a bricks and mortar company online.

Basically, you might look at marketing as the wide range of activities involved in making sure that you’re continuing to meet the needs of your customers and are getting value in return.

Marketing analysis includes finding out what groups of potential customers or target markets exist, what groups of customers you prefer to serve (target markets), what their needs are, what products or services you might develop to meet their needs, how the customers might prefer to use the products and services, what your competitors are doing, what pricing you should use and how you should distribute products and services to your target markets.

Various methods of market research are used to find out information about markets, target markets and their needs, competitors, etc. Marketing also includes ongoing promotions, which can include advertising, public relations, sales and customer service.

How do you grab people’s attention, arouse their interest, trigger their desire, and motivate them to take action? Answer that four-part question correctly and you’ve identified the secret to achieving tremendous sales and marketing success in your chosen business or field.

To complicate matters, however, the potential answers are as numerous and multi-faceted as the growing number of niche markets, products and services, and marketing trends in our culture.

While not all inclusive, the following list of priorities, marketing strategies, marketing tools, and small business marketing tips can help establish a marketing framework that can put your small business on a faster track to growth.

*Gain Customer Confidence*

Customer indecisiveness, skepticism, indifference, or confusion are among the top sales killers in the business world. It’s up to you to project an image of experience, quality, dependability, excellent customer service, and/or added value to your prospective customers in order to win their confidence. If you haven’t clearly communicated the advantages and solid reasons for them to do business with you, then they’ll be hesitant to commit and the sale will go to elsewhere.

Penetrate awareness of your target audience by using some form of integrated marketing. In other words, the more ways the public hears about you, the better your chances are for achieving brand recognition, credibility, and greater market share.

Effective marketing is partly the result of exposing your target audience to your name and your selling points (unique selling proposition) as often as possible(frequency), in as many ways as possible, and as cost-effectively as possible.

Sincere enthusiasm, in both print and in person, is contagious (and I’m not talking about using multiple exclamation points after sentences!!! That detracts from your credibility and perceived professionalism.) If you deeply believe in your products, services, your company, and yourself, then your prospects will pick up on that passionate attitude and feel confident and optimistic about buying from you.

Purchasing is an emotional decision. Instill in your prospects good feelings about you and your products, your relationship with them, and how you can improve their lives or solve their problem.

Accomplishing that is at least as important in the sales and marketing process as focusing attention on product features and benefits and any SEO etc you feel is needed.

Gain customer confidence and overcome potential feelings of distrust by offering written guarantees of satisfaction whenever possible, customer testimonials, references, and by joining respected and well-known forums like Warrior Forum. Try to stay away from those just hanging on Adsense where quality is not their primary focus.

Impose a deadline. Counteract one of the biggest obstacles to closing a sale known to all;

PROCRASTINATION!!!

To overcome the natural human tendancy to postpone, and delay, it’s often necessary to inject a sense of urgency into your ads, sales presentations, and marketing messages. Whether supplies are limited or prices are going up at the end of the month, some prospects need to have a deadline or an incentive to motivate them to take action now.

Time sensitive!

Create a marketing plan to identify and capitalize on your strengths and opportunities. Your marketing strategies should also take into account factors such as your weaknesses (and possible remedies), external threats (competition, economic factors, etc.), your marketing mix strategy (products/services, promotional goals, pricing strategy, and distribution decisions), media strategy, sales and expense budgets, target market analysis (know your customers), and readily available marketing tools, as well as marketing tools that you need to research or acquire.

Run the SWOT test on your Online Business.

Strengths - Weakness’ - Oppotunities - Threats

So, what is marketing? Marketing is the process of interesting potential customers and clients in your products and/or services.
Researching, promoting, selling, and distributing your products or services.

Essentially marketing involves everything you do to get your potential customers and your product or service together.
When you’re putting together a marketing program for your business, concentrate on the marketing basics, the four key components of any marketing plan:

Products and Services
Promotion
Distribution
Pricing

The name of the game in marketing is attracting and retaining a growing base of satisfied customers.

As you can see Marketing is one half of “Internet Marketing”. You should treat the two equally.

To improve your knowledge you will need to get a book or two on small business marketing to get a fresh approach to your online business instead of reading through tons of mostly junk ebooks copied and refreshed to your inbox.

Get serious about your business and get professional.

YOUR CUSTOMERS WILL LOVE YOU FOR IT.

Ashley Banfield

P.S Laura Lake, a -REALWORLD- marketing expert, helped in writing this post.