Week 1: So It Begins.

What is a social media marketer’s favorite snack? Well, insta-graham crackers, of course!

Starting this off on a strong note, as you can see. To those of you who don’t know me, hi, my name is Maya, and I’m really excited to share my ideas with all of you through this blog. I hope that together, we can delve deep into the world of marketing and help struggling local small business owners.

What?

Good question. To fully explain why I started this, I want to share some big, scary numbers. Did you know that 65% of all small businesses fail during their first ten years of existence? It’s a hard-knock life out there. Why do they fail at such high rates? Well, this is an interesting question to ask. When a business is first starting out, their priority is not making a profit or anything finance-focused. Usually, that occurs naturally as companies stay in operation and grow. So what are their goals in the first few years of operation? Generally, they’re looking to establish themselves in their market. They want to get their name into people’s minds as a business that can provide quality goods and services in whatever industry they’ve entered into. In other words, they want to market themselves and scrape out some customer mindshare.

Therein lies the problem. When businesses are just starting out, they naturally don’t have many employees, and they tend to limit those that they do have to administrative and perhaps finance roles. At least for the first few months or years of operation, businesses don’t usually have designated marketers. Without professionals, though, they end up making a variety of marketing mistakes. For instance, some ‘shotgun’ by attempting to use every platform available to man. They try social media platforms, ads in print and on television, physical flyers and billboards, and who knows what else. It’s, frankly, a waste of resources that rarely yields results, but they tend to not even realize that because they have no effective metrics to track the success of each individual platform. Yet other businesses rely far too much on word-of-mouth marketing. While WOM is certainly quite beneficial to smaller businesses, it cannot be the only method used unless other aspects of the business are optimized for that strategy. In fact, 91% of businesses rely mostly on referrals and WOM to gain customers, and 80% do not use content marketing at all to support their efforts.

Enough fearmongering for now. What does this have to do with me? Well, I want to do something about this. Small businesses are incredibly important. They contribute heavily to local economies, provide employment for thousands of people and allow customers choice in a world full of monopoly and oligopoly industries. I believe that far more of them would stay afloat if they had some marketing guidance in their first few years. Something as simple as collecting data that suggests that certain platforms have historically been more effective or giving them examples of content that is effectively designed and connects with target audiences could be all they need to succeed in a market where they may have failed otherwise.

That’s what I plan to do. If businesses don’t have the bandwidth to figure out their own marketing strategies, I’ll do it for them. I’m going to determine a way for small businesses to market their products more effectively and efficiently by looking for trends in the marketing challenges that small businesses in the Bay Area face and creating a plan/framework to help them as well as other newer businesses handle those issues.

How?

I’ll be spending my first few weeks reaching out to various businesses and requesting interviews with employees. I’ve already figured out my primary search criteria (more on that later). Because of business confidentiality, the vast majority of the information I’ll be able to collect will likely be verbal, qualitative information (such as “There didn’t seem to be too much interest in the Instagram competition.”) I’ll also collect qualitative data if I can find metrics (such as “the number of views on social media posts” or “the amount spent on x marketing campaign”).

Once I have all my information, I’ll use coding techniques on the qualitative data and comparisons (such as ratios) on the quantitative data to determine what types of problems pop up most frequently. From that point onwards, my next steps get a little fuzzier, given that the solution I end up implementing will depend heavily on what exactly I identify the problem to be. For instance, if I notice that there’s a universal struggle with marketing plan organization or coordination, I might work to produce an app directed at making that process easier. If there’s a struggle with making effective content, I can produce some templates or themes. If they’re primarily shotgunning or not advertising effectively, I’ll come up with an analysis on the strengths and uses of various media/platforms. It really depends.

Now?

So far, I’ve done a few things. First of all, I’ve looked through some literature on my topic, really examining what kind of problems small businesses tend to face as well as marketing strategies and techniques that are useful as a whole. Most of this knowledge will be helpful when it comes to determining what kind of solution I want to build or produce.

For instance, one of the articles I read talked about how the Bay Area’s entrepreneurship culture is unique in that it encourages innovation for social good and ESG-conscious governance within businesses. It’s interesting that this kind of social justice focus is mostly limited to the Bay Area, since I thought it was universal to some extent. This is definitely useful information to consider later on when I actually build my solution, since I want whatever I create to be relevant to the Bay Area but also useful to the rest of the world. I’ll have to keep it in mind.

I’ve also worked to significantly narrow down my business search. ‘Small businesses in the Bay Area’ is a large ask, so I’m going to break down my search field into eight specific industries. This way, I know what kinds of businesses to look for, and I also can compare industry trends against each other. (This is not a final list. It may be added to or (more likely) cut down based on the number of businesses I am able to interview within each.)

I’m looking at: restaurants, snack services (coffee/tea shops, snack shops, etc.), ‘tangible’ services (graphic design, personal training, etc.), ‘intangible’ services (tutoring, event planning, etc.), beauty/nail salons, nonprofits, childcare/daycare

The difference between tangible and intangible services doesn’t really exist. I’ve just artificially created it to make my job a bit easier and make this all more organized. I’m also going to focus exclusively on B2C (business-to-consumer) businesses, since B2Bs have entirely different marketing processes.

I also have to choose exactly what I define as a ‘small business.’ In this case, I’ll define such to mean a business that makes less than $100k in revenue a year and was founded in the past fifteen years.

Okay, I’m finally done.

Given this post is about twice the recommended length, if you’re still here, I’m impressed! Hopefully, my posts in other weeks will be significantly shorter than this one. I hope you guys find my project interesting enough to follow along 🙂 (Is it just me or does that smiley face look incredibly menacing to you guys?)

~Maya

Sources:

Tanimoto, K., & Doi, M. (2007). “SOCIAL INNOVATION CLUSTER IN ACTION: A CASE STUDY OF THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA.” Hitotsubashi Journal of Commerce and Management, 41(1 (41)), 1–17. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43295008

https://www.lusha.com/blog/50-marketing-jokes-to-make-you-giggle/ (I’m uncreative.)