According to the Small Business Administration, over 650,000 small businesses are started per year. To keep your business in business, you need to constantly promote your business. Jan B. King, President and CEO of The King Group, a business planning and strategic people management consulting firm, stresses the importance of constantly promoting their businesses. Consumers have new choices available to them at all times, which makes marketing and promotion for businesses so vital. Reminders of what each business does best will keep consumers coming back to their place of business. King suggests business owners, at the very least, specifically devote one day a month to marketing for the upcoming quarter. “When you are low on customers and realize you need to do marketing, you will be playing catch up,” says King. The best way is to stay ahead of the game and to promote your business at all times.

King says the most important factor in promoting businesses is to constantly understand the needs of target customers. Customers who have positive reactions to your business are those who will help out your business in the long run, as they will spread the information about your business to others. The target customers you make happy will keep coming back to your business, which is important in these economic times. Building a customer base is essential to stay afloat. King suggests keeping in mind these questions when thinking about your target customer:

* Who is buying from you now?
* Why do they buy from you instead of your competitors?
* What do you do that is most significant for your customers – price, quality, selection, customization, service?
* What is coming up that will affect your customer’ businesses and how can you help them in meeting those challenges?

Marketing takes time, planning, and money. King says that the biggest mistake that businesses make when trying to promote their business is spending a lot of money on one or two large marketing efforts instead of many small efforts. Businesses which put the bulk of their marketing budget on one way of marketing their business and it fails, they have nothing to fall back on. Trying small, free, and low-cost ways to market your business is required to find out which strategy best fits your company. Once you find which strategy works for you, you can put more money towards what has worked and watch your business grow. “You need to think marketing every day and never assume you can do one big thing and you will be finished with marketing for the month or quarter of the year,” King explains.

These troubling economic times could lead to some small businesses struggling to find money to market their business. King believes that the best way to constantly promote your business is eNewsletter communications to current clients. To reach out to new clients, using the Internet is crucial. Your business’ website needs to be informational instead of just a place to sell your products and reach out to customers to create a more personal connection. “This is all a way of saying you want to tighten your connection with your customers and potential customers by being seen as friends or business associates and not as people trying to figure out a way to get them to part with money,” King says. If expensive marketing is not available to your business, it is important to stay in contact with your current customers, and keep new customers curious about your business.

King’s one piece of advice to businesses on promoting their business is “to spend as much time thinking about marketing as you do in providing your product or service.” Create a marketing plan with your entire team; with a budget, activities, and timetable, and be sure to stick with it. It is important to stick with your marketing plan, and even more important to revisit your marketing plan every month or so to make changes to help your business.