Get organized and write a marketing plan. You cannot hope to market your business intelligently and effectively if you are making spur of the moment marketing decisions. Home based business marketing is no different to other businesses in this respect. Even if your marketing budget consists of the change left over after your monthly shopping, you still want to use that efficiently and to maximum effect.
Your marketing should not only be advertising. Advertising is a marketing tool that you can use but there are many other marketing tools you can use to market your home based business – and many of them will be cheaper than advertising.
Define your target market. In other words know who your ideal customer is and where and how you can reach them. Recognise that you cannot hope to meet everyone’s expectations and needs – so don’t try to. Be specific in your marketing efforts.
Make a plan to measure and record your results. What could be more annoying than having an increase in sales but not knowing why? By recording and measuring your marketing efforts you can drop those that are not working and fine tune the ones that are.
Always, always work to a budget, irrespective of how small this may be. Tie the budget into your marketing plan and stick to it. Far too many businesses (of all sizes) get burnt financially when they overstep their marketing budget and don’t get the expected returns.