Make Your Business Grow: Tips for Marketing Your Business

by David Halpern 

I’ve been involved with small business leadership for longer than I care to mention.  If you’re trying to guess how just how long, I’ll only say that in the first peer advisory board that I led, we had to kick out a Stegosaurus, because she wasn’t paying her dues.  Back then, I think we were charging 10-pounds of raw meat per lunar month.  I hated to lose Steggy, she was a marketing genius.

Anyway, between then and now, I’ve learned a few things about how to raise awareness so that you can sell products.  In this post, I'd like to convey some of the more technical aspects of Marketing.

I’ve broken these aspects into a few bullet lists. Give these lists a look, they're chock full of great information - information that is sure to help your business grow.

Keep the Core of your Statement SIMPLE:

• Determine and emphasize the single most important thing.
• Remember that you know your topic and area better than your audience, and avoid acronyms or industry/company jargon your audience may not comprehend.
• Use the names of people and companies as much as possible.

In your Presentation, People will Pay Attention to:

• The unexpected.
• Breaks in your pattern.
• Mysteries.

Understand & Remember:

• Clear ideas.
• That fables are a great way to covey your main points.
• To put people into the story – names-names –names.
• The Velcro theory of memory.  More hooks equal a better idea.

• Use external credibility, authority and anti-authority.
• Use ideas that people will believe.
• Make statistics accessible.

Make people care about the idea:

• Appeal to self interest.
• Use Maslow’s top down motivation theory.
• Try to reach individuals instead of reaching the crowd.

Most importantly, appeal to Identity- get people to act via stories; all civilizations and cultures were built with stories.  Remember that a superior marketing professional believes in themselves, and believes in their product.  Good luck!

Have more marketing advice not covered in this post? Leave it in the comments section below, or @ us on Twitter and we'll @ you back.

As an executive at The Alternative Board, David Halpern has been blazing a wide swath of small business success for the better part of three decades.  You won't hear it from him, but David has forgotten more small business success tips than most business consultants will ever learn.