The Small Business Development Center of Hampton Roads, Inc. is the service provider of first choice for the region’s small business community. By offering free, confidential one-on-one business counseling, low-cost training, research through SBDCNet and referrals to top-flight service providers, we assist in maintaining and growing this vitally important segment of the region’s economy.
Small business owners have limited time and resources to market their companies. In an ever-increasingly competitive arena, there are severe penalties for getting it “wrong”. Using a “Star War” analogy….just like “The Force”, Marketing has both a “good side” and “the dark side”. The “good side” will give you customers and increase your sales and is difficult to learn while the “dark side” will cause you to spend limited resources (time and cash) and not give you anything in return. Just like “The Force”, it is easy to get seduced to the “dark side”.
Business owners must work to achieve an overall balance with their efforts in this arena. This is done by designing complementary strategies and mixing/matching different tactics and timings with each. This is done by looking at Objectives, Strategies and, finally, the Tactics necessary to realize the overall Objectives.
Objectives are the business owner’s goals within the market(s) in which he chooses to compete. What are needed here are clearly defined and quantitatively measureable goals. It is one thing to say that the owner wants to “achieve market dominance”…but just what does that mean? When a business owner places numerical goals (increase market share by XX% or increase sales by $XX, there now is something that can be measured and what gets measured is going to get monitored.
Strategies are the plans for achieving the Objectives. When developing these, the small business owner is laying out his or her plans in a clearly understandable manner. Strategies show how the business owner is segmenting customers into target groups and then how he or she will position the business to achieve competitive advantage.
Tactics are the actions that are created to implement the strategies. This could be the message(s) selected to communicate, the channels in which it will be transmitted, pricing, packaging, promotions, distribution outlets…any action(s) necessary to achieve the overall objective.
Throughout the process, each area has to complement the other so that:
