Marketing Strategy – is the way of making use of the resources that you have within your business, to be best able to achieve the visionary goals you have for your business.

In developing a marketing strategy it is important to understand both where your business in right now and where you would like your business to be.

It is important to be clear about where you would like your business to end up e.g. multiple franchised operations, a single location doing well, a combined online and offline business. As you can appreciate there are many options that you have.

Knowing your current situation is important, as from here you are able to then move forwards. This is often done with knowing what resources you have, such as people, finances, facilities.

Then Marketing Strategy is developed to be able to achieve your business goals with the resources you have.

In this way your business takes on the shape that you would like it to have.

It is very interesting when talking to a business owner and ask them the following question:

“Tell me about your competition, including who they are, how do they do things differently to you?”

For many business owners usually they might know 1 or 2 names of their competitors and then that is where the sharing of information from the person I am having a conversation with stops.

Yet it is interesting when I sit down with them and begin the process of research by going to for example some internet sites that clients may go to find a business that is similar, search engines, yellow pages, look at a local newspaper.

The business owner is often quite surprised that the amount of information that their competitors are offering up on themselves is quite a fair amount and is fairly significant.

Perhaps now may be a good time to ensure that as a business owner you have a clear understanding about who your competitors are but also being very clear as to how your business is different from them.  Then by knowing this you are then able to make your business better and so more clients tell their friends about your business, leading to growth of your business.

Twitter is an online micro-blogging and social networking website.

Essentially it has been created so that people can let others know “what are you doing right now?”

This is done by answering that question in 140 characters or less.  The message that is sent can be done directly via the twitter website, via SMS (depending on the mobile phone carriers in your country) or smart phone applications.

Do businesses use Twitter for their Marketing?

The answer to this is YES!

However, in terms of the percentage of businesses that are using twitter this is very low.

The challenge for many business owners has been that they consider twitter to be a complex system, and that they do not understand it.

Yet twitter can be used to announce an upcoming sale, the arrival of new seasons stock, a special event etc.

As you can appreciate twitter can be used to announce all sorts of things to your list of followers, and this can then lead to increased profits for you and your business.