Your business has needs, and we need to talk about them.

When it comes to marketing your small business, there are some basics that must be in place so you’ll have a firm foundation under your marketing efforts.

If these needs aren’t met, you can’t move on to more advanced (and effective) marketing techniques.

It’s like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Remember that from Psychology 101?

If humans don’t have their basic physical needs met — needs like food and shelter — they can’t focus on anything beyond that. Achieving their full potential as people isn’t possible if they don’t have a roof over their heads or they’re hungry.

And so it is with your marketing. If you haven’t figured out marketing basics, you can’t fully realize your business’s potential.

Start with the basics

Meeting your basic marketing needs includes:

• Identifying your ideal customer
• Honing your business tagline
• Crafting a message that expresses what makes your business unique

These elements are at the foundation of your business marketing. Without them, you shouldn’t be making any kind of long-term plan for your marketing. These pieces will influence everything that follows.

Build on the basics

Once you have the basic elements in place, you can move on to:

• Learning about marketing tactics that are available
• Deciding which ones will work for your business
• Making a long-term plan for your marketing

This is where the rubber meets the road. These steps will have a major influence on how you market your business as you go forward.

Before you can plan your marketing strategy, it’s important to understand what marketing tactics are available, and their benefits. With your ideal customer information in hand, it will be easy to recognize which tactics will work best for your business.

Once you’ve made it through this intermediate step, you can move on to an element of marketing that will supercharge your efforts.

Add design to the mix

Here’s where you can make your business stand out from the competition. Learn about and apply good design principles to the marketing materials you plan to create.

Good design gives your business authority. It builds trust. And it makes your business look attractive and professional.

When you understand enough about design that you can put together simple marketing materials yourself, you’ll be free to create promotions on the fly and respond quickly when a marketing idea comes to mind.

And recognizing good design when you see it helps you hire and supervise designers when you decide to leave some elements of your marketing to the pros. 🙂