What Works: Marketing Your Small Business

Sumer Morenz: We’re at the 2010 AdTech Conference in San Francisco, California, and we asked some professionals, what is the way to market your small business? Here’s what they had to say.

Rob Leathern: So my name’s Rob Leathern. I’m the CEO of XA.net. We’re here in San Francisco and we help companies buy media. We’re the easiest platform to buy any online media. I started coming here about just over two years ago. Based on my experiences in trying to buy media as an advertiser, I just found it very difficult. It seemed like there would be a need for a system that can help advertisers do it much more easily.

Sandy White: My name is Sandy White. I’m from LinkedIn, which is based in Mountain View, California. LinkedIn is the largest professional network in the world, with over 67 million members. It started six, almost seven years ago. It was founded by Reid Hoffman, one of the original investors of PayPal and it came about so he can manage his contacts within the Valley. You use LinkedIn to market your small business and to reach people for advice that you might not have access to because you have limited resources.

Sandy: What works is going to be different for every business, every small business. Nut something that is really important is to know who your customers are and to have a strategy going in, especially with social media, and to know exactly what you’re looking for and what kind of response you want to get before you set up your marketing program.

Rob: You try to engage the user and get a little more information. You get them to kind of engage in the whole advertising process. I think that’s…you’re not really putting up billboards anymore and trying to get people to notice your message. You’re giving them the opportunity to interact with your brand, to interact with your message.

Sandy: What typically doesn’t work is an abuse of the form that you were given, so going in and spamming users and going in and sending the same message over and over to people that have indicated they’re not receptive to that message really doesn’t work and is actually a detriment to your business.

Rob: I think one thing that I think is very important, I think it’s important to, from my perspective, to start having kind of pending conversations with your audience or your client. And so I think ideas like having a blog and a Twitter stream and posting stuff about yourself on Facebook and so on, just to even get the people who know you to start realizing that you’re doing a certain business in their area, their neighborhood, whatever it is, I think creates a lot of relevance and you get a lot of ideas from friends, family, your people that you’re kind of lightly connected to. So I think using LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, these types of services, I think is very important. And then I think it’s also important to give a lot of opportunities also on your website or what’s in your product, if you have software. So, I mean, give opportunities for audience to give you feedback.

Sandy: For small business, definitely you can get a lot of marketing and advertising for free just by having your profile really complete and up-to-date and engaging in these free communities that are available online, like other social media networks. For starting out without budgets, you can do direct ads through LinkedIn and through other areas where you can set up daily budgets and actually you can do pay-per-click and things like that. Once you get beyond that, you can move to more email outbound marketing, display advertising, and brand building online as well.

Sumer: I hope you came away with some creative ideas to market your business. I’m Sumer Morenz with D&B Digital TV and I’ll see you next time right here.