Marketing entails wide range of activities with the ultimate aims of making sales. Marketing is a strategically planned activities advertising inclusive.

Many Small Businesses are fascinated about making sales thereby skipping some essential aspect of marketing. Some small businesses can't clearly tell the difference between marketing, advertising and sales.

Based on a recent research findings, about 42% of small businesses which failed said it's is due to lack of market for their products.

Identifying marketable products that will be widely demanded is the first step in every marketing activities.

It could be via qualitative or quantitative research.

Part of product research activities includes checking out your competitors to see what they are doing. It's crucial to identify the strength and weakness of your competitor's product to gain insight into what an ideal product should be using strength weakness strategy.

It's also crucial to research new markets for expansion purposes.

This could be an improvement to the existing products, packaging or a new product which should be as a result of research findings.

Product design activities goes beyond physical products. It includes quality, class and prestige, convenience of delivery, environment and location etc.

The product design strategy could be for High Class Market Segment like luxury cars or middle and low class market segment like infinix mobile Nigeria product design strategy.

 3. Create awareness based on customers understanding

Promotion entails every other effort at promoting a product other than direct selling.

It could be on digital platform or Non digital platform, offline or online and direct or indirect.

The best promotion strategy should focus on the consumer. The consumers are the end users. A good marketing campaign should be in a clear and understandable language; capture their emotions, use image, video, content, podcast and the powerful word of mouth marketing technique.

4.  Ensure product availability on different channels
The internet has changed the concept of place strategy in marketing.

Product could be  available on your website, an affiliate website or an offline market.

Makes every effort to ensure that product is available in the right place at the right time.

5.  Encourage customers to get the product
Marketing goes beyond onscreen advertisement. It also entails getting the customers to the doorstep.

Direct product marketing and landing page optimization are important for closing of deals and conversion.

6. Use all the necessary tools
Customer Relationship management software aids marketing and sales efforts.

Stand alone sales crm is a powerful tool to marketers. eCommerce en-suit CRM like pipedrive is also essential for generating leads.

Marketing leads efforts has progressed from the traditional manual time wasting platform to powerful cloud based targeted automated CRM.

There are many free and cheap small business CRM for businesses that can't afford the expensive and complex CRM