The internet can be a real advantage for your business.

Marketing for micro and small businesses is key to their success. And you don’t need any investment to understand the market, learn digital marketing and start applying simple and effective techniques. Just take some time and effort. Believe me, every minute will be worth it. Every day new opportunities would come up for your internet business.

Tip 1: Research the Opportunities:

Find out who your customer is, what they are looking for, what their expectations are about the brand, where they are and why they need your product.

The internet offers thousands of tools that can help you collect and compile this information quickly and accurately. These tools can even help you create new products.

Knowing this, you won’t waste time and money trying to sell something to someone and you don’t need to have a secure decision-making foundation.

Tip 2: Build Your Online Presence:

If your business does not have a web page or profiles on major social networks, yet,  then it is time to take action. Consider creating an urgent website.

More and more people are buying and discussing brands and products over the network, and companies that are left out of this movement will lose new consumers.

In addition, through social networks, you can listen to customers, find points for improvement and make changes in the business following the demand of those who buy.

Tip 3: Make a Practical Marketing Plan:

The marketing plan is as important as the business plan and the tax.

The first step is to analyze the external and internal factors that may influence company performance. Understand how customer buying behavior works and know other players well in the market well.

This helps define company positioning and outline marketing strategies and goals. Every marketing plan must have a schedule that assigns a responsible person for each action.

Tip 4: Consolidate your brand into a potential market:

Even if your business does not become known on a large scale, it is important that you consolidate yourself in the potential market, whether in the city or region.

To do this, once you have created your page, look for strategic partnerships and outreach on pages other than just through your own, to make it easier for your audience to reach you.

Having your profile linked to other recognized names, for example, gives your brand trust and credibility.

Tip 5: Sell Benefits, Not Just Products:

Once the potential customer becomes aware of your brand, it is essential that they have good customer service during and after the sale.

The impression a customer makes is just as important as their satisfaction with the product itself.

This can create a competitive advantage to exploit in your campaigns and generate positive engagement from your online community.

Think about the importance of brochure printing when trying to sell your products and services. High quality brochure printing is a great way to communicate with your customers.

Tip 6: Calculate Marketing Return:

One of the biggest advantages of digital marketing is the ability to measure clearly and accurately the return on your investments and can be quickly perceived in the course of business. Before an action, accurately define who your audience is and what the expected effect is.

Have an organized spreadsheet that compares the purpose of the new strategy with the result achieved. Also, compare the figures from the previous period to calculate the impact of the effort made to publicize the brand.

Tip 7: Be careful of ignorance!

What drives many micro and small business owners from the internet is the lack of information on how digital marketing works.

If you have no business education or in-depth marketing knowledge, the internet provides a wealth of content to inform you about news, trends, and tips.

Be sure to devote a few hours of your time to this. Surely you will see results in the future!

Tip 8: Build a schedule and record all results:

Set deadlines for the design, implementation, start, and end of all actions and, most importantly, gather all possible data about them by tabulating everything. Use tools like Google Drive to help you organize and share files, MindMeister to help you visualize and create a plan, ZeroPaper to manage the financials of the company, and Business to give you a free, basic Marketing report.

This data will be of utmost importance for future decision making, including helping to determine the direction of campaigns and the life of products.

Tip 9: Don’t lose count!

One of the most common marketing phenomena is the appropriation of terms, concepts, and techniques from other areas – and ROI is one such case, coming straight from the world of finance.

The acronym stands for “return over investments” which means “return on investments”. This is exactly what it seems to be: yield from a given amount of invested resources – a prime tool for knowing with high accuracy whether your actions are succeeding or not.

ROI is widely used in internet marketing and communication campaigns, especially sponsored links, because they are actions whose nature allows almost total measurement of their results.

Tip 10: Know your competitors:

Find out who your competitors are: what they do, what they sell, what they earn and what they lose. It is very important to “calibrate” your activities with the market and understand how the segment behaves in general. So you must find out what your competitors do. So search over the Internet about them and evaluate competitors – their websites, social networks – and contact them for all the alternatives (email, phone, chat) they have given, in order to know how they behave.