We all remember that old saying “it’s not the size that counts, but how you use it”. Well, in business that hasn’t always been the case… until now.

The advent of e-commerce has resulted in a relatively even playing field for businesses. It seems that now, even as a small business, you have the same chance of grabbing the customer’s dollar as your larger competitor does.

One thing that’s misunderstood about online marketing, is that you don’t need to have the most flashy, graphics-driven site on the web. What you do need though is great content, and to distribute it through the right channels.

A recent article by eMarketer talks about how online marketing is resulting in massive changes in tourist research and buying behaviour. Specifically they mention how niche travel sites are overtaking the (often larger) online travel agencies in traffic and bookings.

More than ever, travellers are looking to RSS feeds, e-newsletters and blog postings (all tools that are well within reach of even the smallest business operation) to help them make their purchase decisions. That is, they are looking for information and stories from other travellers and the small businesses that are close to the action, not the large corporations with their flashy posters and catchy phrases.

This quote from eMarketer Senior Analyst Jeffret Grau sums it up nicely (and can be applied to all industries).

“Lower industry entry barriers have paved the way for new online travel business models. In this dynamic environment, current industry players must stay alert, otherwise they risk being blindsided by new competitors that fall off their radar screens.”

Today we have more options than our brains can often handle. Take milk. Would you like that skim, light or full cream? More calcium or less sodium? Strawberry, mint, chocolate, banana or vanilla? Would you like that in a carton, a bottle or a jug? Powdered, fresh or long-life? Will that be paid by cash, cheque, credit or savings? Paper or plastic?

When your prospective customer is standing at the proverbial milk section, gazing at the seemingly endless options, what makes them reach out and grab yours? Essentially, you’re just a carton of milk; like the carton next to you, and the carton next to them and all the other cartons around you.

But there’s something unique about you. Sure, you’re a carton of milk like everyone else, but you offer something more. Your customer knows that when they’re pouring you on their cereal or in to their morning coffee, they’re pouring in added calcium, or a 10% saving, or the peace of mind you get from knowing that the cow this milk came from was grazed on environmentally-friendly grass in a big green paddock with absolutely no performance pressure at all.

Think about your competitors. What do they offer in addition to their core offering? Why do people by their product or service over everyone else’s?

Now look at your product. What is it that makes yours different to everyone else’s? Is it something customers would find valuable? And do they know about this unique trait of yours?

With so many options available, it’s nearly impossible to differentiate yourself based purely on your core offering. Very few people today buy purely to fulfil a practical need. Sure, that practical need gets them to the milk section. But it’s your unique selling proposition that moves them to choose your carton of milk.

Small businesses have special reasons to consider blogging. A business blog is a special tool for small business in particular - is it relevant for yours?

Something very significant happened with the Internet.  Businesses can only sell to customers in their addressable market.  Usually, this is a geographic distance from your outlet, and expansion means branch offices, distribution centres, franchises - whatever it takes to get your product or service in front of your customer.  Trouble is, our customers aren’t necessarily evenly spread (so surf stores are in range of a beach, in other words, near where their customers are).  The range of products and services that could be profitably carried depended on having enough customers within your addressable market. You don’t see surf stores in Alice Springs, and you don’t see book stores that sell just Noddy books.

The Internet really changed things for small business. A lot of the change is to do with the size of market that can now be addressed.  Small business has the opportunity to choose its audience - the more specific, niche and high value the better.

Interest in blogging is rapidly growing, and in all the rush its possible people aren’t tuning into the extraordinary opportunity that business blogging represents for many small businesses. Why is it an opportunity?  Well, Business Week describe why  it in Blogs Will Change Your Business.

You have an amazing advantage. Seth Godin makes the case that small is the new big so well that I suggest you read it right now.

A blog is a way to establish a conversation with your audience. Five years ago, even though the Internet let you establish a ‘global’ presence, acquiring a customer base was tough. Blogging has changed the game - cost is no longer the barrier to entry, content is.

So, you need to find out about business blogging. If you have a small business with a product or service that is of interest to a market outside your own geographic area (and you can see a way to sell your product / service to them), then you will be amazed at what you find.

I was in Borders on Saturday, first time in their new store. What they do with email marketing is a great example for any business.

At the checkout, I was asked if I wanted to join the email list as they sent out offers from time to time. Simple, and effective.

On Monday morning, this arrived in my email:

What I really like about this approach is:

• it was quick and easy to get involved (I just told them my email address and they wrote it down for me)
• the turnaround was excellent
• the offer itself was simple and powerful - 20% off another book, if I update my profile with favourite subjects

So they make me an offer in return for getting better information, that they will use to personalise their email in the future.

And if you think this type of email marketing must cost a bomb, it doesn’t. Small companies can start using email marketing just as effectively. Sure Borders have some fancy graphics, but that isn’t really that important. They’ve put together a good offer, targetted at the right person (me!) and executed with speed.

Small business has a fantastic opportunity with email marketing - are you building your own verified opt-in email lists and using email marketing effectively? If not, its a great time to look into it and perhaps start a trial.

David Meerman Scott, one of my all time favourite bloggers, has recently posted about his experiences with Apollo moon mission. Its a great post - have a read of it over at The Long Tail of Marketing and Apollo Moon Mission Artifacts

David provides a great example of how the Long Tail creates opportunities for small business. The small business involved? A Space artifact dealer. For Farthest Reaches, all they need to invest to start a global business? A website, and content that connects them up to their community of interest. A blog is a great way to do this, however as you can see in this case, it isn’t necessary.

The key point from David’s post for small business owners is this:

“The space artifact dealers, for example Farthest Reaches, couldn’t have done business prior to the Web. The owner, Steve Hankow, could never find his market and we space collectors couldn’t find him. Now it is simple to market to people like me.”

When you reflect on what Farthest Reaches might mean for you, consider two different perspectives:

• Existing businesses may have existing niche products or services that can be marketed online, and/or sold online. Online marketing is possibly the first step, online selling can follow.
• Or maybe you can see the opportunity to find a new niche you can sell to.

The space artifacts segment is hotting up - time to stake your claim to the next big (small) segment

“It must have taken a brave person to discover that frogs’ legs are edible.”

I came across this recently and thought - yeh and what about snails, and witchetty grubs? Bravery probably wouldn’t be enough. You’d need to be pretty hungry too.

In fact when you think about it, any new business enterprise takes these two qualities - bravery and hunger. Without these, success may well remain just out of reach.

You don’t literally need to be hungry (although you may be at first!), but you need a hunger for something, whether it be seeing your ideas come to fruition, fulfilling a need, reaching your potential, or success itself - whatever that means to you.

And bravery will see you through the doubts, the dips in confidence, criticism from the unenlightened - all those (and there will be those) who say ‘it can’t be done’.

Of course there are other qualities you need - but these two apply to every entrepreneur in every walk of life. And you need them right from the start. Others can be learned or acquired - persistence, pragmatism, confidence. And you can bring other skill sets into your enterprise as you grow.

But bravery and hunger must be yours from the word go.

Without them, frogs’ legs would still be attached to frogs, we’d still be communicating by snail mail, and no one would have heard of iTunes or amazon.com, or dreamed of flying into space or diving to the oceanbed.

Are you hungry? brave?

Thank you - the world would be a dreary place without you!

I read a great review of World Wide Salon Marketing in My Business Magazine this month. It’s a perfect example of a long tail services business addressing beauty salons, day spas and hair salons. From their base in Perth they now have clients in fourteen countries. They help businesses market themselves by sharing marketing ideas.

As well as boasting a seven figure turnover this company is operating with a staff of six. Another online success story. Have a read of their website - they have a range of long copy sales letters, supported by information about how the business works in their About page. This is an inspiring example of what a small business can do online.

If you like the combination of doing AND teaching, you’ll love hearing that Kicking Ass is More Fun.

What Kathy Sierra (one of the wonderful Creating Passionate Users team) is describing is a great way of thinking about our own businesses. Can we extend what we do to educate others? This hones our own skills, and creates a strong positive feedback loop.

I came across this post thanks to Lorelle VanFossen, herself a fount of inspiration if you are in the business of blogging with Wordpress.

Are you taking advantage of the online opportunities for your business?

With Christmas just around the corner and the New Year nearly upon us, why not review your business strategy. What are the online opportunity areas for your business exactly?

Today, your small business can probably address a much larger market online than offline. And this usually means access to potential customers who may never have had the opportunity to buy your product or service before.

Work through these six areas and see how many opportunities are open to you.

1. Sell online

Are your products or services available for sale online in Australia? If not, should they be? Researching search traffic can be a good way to identify what kind of demand there might be for your products, and of course you can research your online competitors relatively easily.

Ok, so you think there is demand, but you’re concerned about the startup costs? Well, you’ve got some low-cost low risk options. You can start selling online using eBay, use a hosted online store and just pay a commission when you sell, right through to setting up your own eCommerce site. Even the last option - which used to be very expensive - is within reach of most small businesses. So if you think the demand is there, what are the real barriers to getting started?

2. Market online

If they are being sold online, are your products or services being effectively marketed online? Can new niche audiences find you?

You don’t have to actually sell online to benefit from long tail opportunities. If you can’t sell your products online, are there opportunities to market online – perhaps to find latent demand in niche export markets?

3. Existing products, new niches

Are there profitable niche markets for your existing products and services you are not addressing?

Would expanding your addressable market for your existing products find new, profitable niches? Imagine running a gift store in a country town. Now move that to the busiest shopping precinct in the country. All of a sudden you can stock a much wider range of goods, because there are more customers and more diverse interests. The same thing happens online - all of a sudden, there are lots more consumers out there, so items that were too niche to think about before might now be in demand. Think of it as latent demand, just waiting for you to address it.

4. Services for niches

Services on the web are still in their infancy. If you are a service provider, can you offer online services to niches that have not been well serviced? In Australia? Overseas? Like products, some niche services may also be in demand once the larger addressable market online comes into play.

Can’t offer your service online? What would you need to modify so you can offer your service over the Internet? How could you specialise and just deliver a part of your service online?

What latent demand exists in niches for existing or new online services? In Australia? Overseas?

5. Knowledge products

Can you convert aspects of your products, services or knowledge base into a niche knowledge product where there is latent demand? Could you make this knowledge available online through training products or e-books?

Or can you use your knowledge to educate others and interest them in your mainstream products?

6. Less generic, more specific

Looking at your existing products or services, how could you make them less generic and more specific so they become relevant for niche markets where latent demand exists?

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I hope this gives you plenty to work with, and helps to inspire your business planning for next year. I’ve written an article that goes into a lot more depth about latent demand - what has caused it, and how it can be addressed. If you’re interested, drop me a line at glenn@publicityship.com.au and I’ll shoot you a copy - would appreciate your comments.

I’m really excited by the opportunities the Internet offers small business. What’s changed in the last decade? It’s the ease with which we can now offer goods and services to broader markets. What’s changed just in the last few years? Well, the investment required has dropped, and is now easily within reach.

So many small businesses have responded to the opportunity by getting out onto the web. But what are the results? Effective marketing has such an influence on ANY business. So if the results from a web presence aren’t strong enough, sooner or later the conversation turns to … online marketing.

Marketing online is similar to marketing ‘offline’ in some ways, and very different in others. One familiar truth remains - there are a seemingly endless variety of marketing strategies and tactics that can part you from your cash (at an alarming rate).

For example, could your business gain from effective use of … pay per click advertising, search engine optimisation and organic search rankings, link-building, email autoresponders, web copywriters, affiliates, keyword analysis, content marketing? The list goes on, and you can spend a lot of time just trying to figure out what is involved, let alone how much it costs and what benefits it might offer you.

Its not even a case of some marketing approaches are better than others - like any marketing, it depends on what you want to achieve and how you go about it. There is also a strong element of personal choice. For example, some business owners instinctively avoid the more direct forms of marketing, and prefer to focus on permission based marketing or influencing based strategies.

Whatever your personal preferences and circumstances, small business owners are going to benefit if they can sift through the options and identify what will work most effectively for them. The good news is, just because you are online you don’t need to be a technical guru, and you don’t need to learn everything at once.

Overall I’m asking you to consider this question - are you marketing effectively online? If not, could you benefit by learning more and applying specific strategies and tactics to improve your business? My take is that as the Internet continues to mature, the businesses that are good at online marketing will reap substantial benefits. So its worth putting in some effort in this area.

No doubt you’d like to be inspired rather than confused. To understand complex areas, I always find it useful to have a strong framework to organise my thoughts. So for online marketing, I propose this framework to you:

Presence	Optimise your presence on the Internet.
Traffic	Build traffic for your web presence.
Interest	Interest your prospects and engage with their buying process.
Conversion	Convert interest into sales.
Follow Up	Follow up your customers and prospects appropriately.

You won’t find this approach in any marketing text books. I’ve developed it because it helps a small business owner to look at their business online, while mapping strongly to the way ‘offline’ business works.

For example, your business will have some kind of presence (such as retail premises, office or physical catalog), and you need traffic. Once potential customers express interest in your product or service, you need to respond with appropriate information to help them decide. At some point, you succeed in converting interest to a purchase. Following up includes both customers (for after sale service or referrals) and prospects (who may still be interested in your products). The same model is very useful for an online business, although the strategies and tactics at each stage may vary substantially.

I’ll be posting more about online marketing for small business, using this 5 part model to put it all in context. Perhaps you will be inspired to step back and update/develop your Online Marketing Plan (or e-Marketing Plan). Or perhaps you’ll identify a few tactics you want to start with right away.

For those interested in going into this in more detail, I’m cross-posting to my blog at PublicityShip. At some stage I plan to offer an email based course for small business owners - if you have ideas on what you’d like to see covered, please leave a comment or send me an email.