What small businesses and non profits need to know about building awareness for their organization

There is no royal road to getting the world aware of your organization. Technology can help, but only when you already have a good plan for your business and/or product development.

I was recently poking around the internet, while waiting for a large file to download and I found a thread that led me to a conversation that seems to be an open debate.

What’s the single best way to promote or build awareness for your business?

• Is it Advertising?

Well no, it’s too expensive by itself.

• Is it Public Relations?

Well no, not by itself either.. as you can’t control who will pick up “your” stories, and you can get into a “wag the dog” situation if you key off just what the media is interested in.

• Is it Direct Marketing?

Well, for small businesses and startups it’s not, cause they don’t have enough relationships to directly market through.

• Is it Interactive / Viral marketing?

Well, as a technologist there is a tendency to shout “Yes it is, hire me to do it!” but it’s really not enough for a small business/startup. Most small businesses and startups need to find and meet the needs of their first clients to survive. These first clients won’t do the viral marketing for you if you’re just doing whatever they tell you to do. Doing exactly what your client asked you to do is not interesting enough, or to quote Seth Godin, remarkable enough, to comment to others about.

So the short answer is, there is no single best way to promote your business.What is required is an intelligently integrated mix of advertising, Public Relations, direct, interactive and viral marketing. You can certainly hire someone to do that for you. But it’s not cheap, and it needs to be done by someone who knows your business at a very intimate level.

I can’t stress enough that to do this well, you must have a very strong, in fact intimate is a better word here, working knowledge of your short term and long term business plan. Armed with this knowledge, you, or your Marketing and Communications consultant, create a marketing and communications plan for the next year, and especially for the next two quarters. (I’m assuming here that you know what a successful one looks like.) Armed with this plan, you are now have one of the three core building blocks require to create growth opportunities for your business.

So here’s what you need to do.

1. Figure out if you have time and the skill to create and execute a successful Marketing and Communications Plan on your own.
2. Create a Marketing Communications Plan with realistic costs and financial expectations
3. Figure out what to measure and start measuring it right away
4. Include your technologists in understanding your Marketing and Communications plan

This balanced Marketing and Communications plan alone isn’t enough

This marketing and communications plan should be complemented by two other plans.The Business Plan (ideally with both a short term and long term view of goals, objectives, tactics, and measurements). And an operations and fulfillment plan. We’ll cover both of these in a future post.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 19th, 2006 at 1:32 pm and is filed under Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.