Claudia Perez Riva, October | 2024

My dear readers, owners of small and medium-sized businesses: Today, I invite you to discuss some theoretical knowledge, practical tools, and general skills from the world of marketing that are considered relevant when it comes to increasing the visibility of your businesses and, therefore, contributing to their success.

Some of you may hire teams or marketing specialists to handle everything related to promotion, market research, and sales. Others, perhaps owners of smaller or newly started businesses, will have to take care of these tasks themselves. In any case, knowing these marketing tools provides a lot of information on how to grow our business through our own efforts or how to better understand and contribute ideas to the marketing team we have hired. Remember, dear reader, that no one will know your business better than you, and no one will know your goals better than you.

With this in mind, I present to you a list of some knowledge and skills necessary for the effective implementation of marketing and promotional strategies for our businesses:

Theoretical Knowledge of Interest:

1. Understanding the Purposes of Marketing Communication: It is important to know what we aim to achieve when we communicate in marketing, what goals we pursue, and to understand the connection between communication goals and the conceptualization and design of marketing messages.
2. Understanding the Different Modes, Platforms, Formats, and Elements of Marketing Communication: This tool is really important because it allows us to understand the different channels and ways to communicate our messages, as well as identify the best platforms to carry out our marketing strategies according to our audience, content, and goals.
3. Brand Categories: For a marketing professional or someone responsible for marketing tasks, it is essential to understand the concepts and terms used in this field. It is crucial to know what a brand is, the difference between brand and brand identity, what brand loyalty is, or what brand equity means. If we are not able to understand these concepts, it will be difficult to make informed decisions about how to develop a product or how to better facilitate the connection between brand and product, increasing its competitiveness in the market.

Practical Skills:

1. Creating a Website: In today’s world, this is one of the basic tools, as it increases the visibility, reach, and accessibility of our business, while also giving us credibility and boosting customers’ trust in our business or brand. Learning to design and edit our own website is really necessary, especially for small businesses that manage their own digital presence.

• Generating and Managing a Google Ads Campaign: This is considered a highly valuable tool, as it allows our ad to reach a massive audience, increasing business visibility, attracting interested customers, generating traffic, and driving conversions. One of the most important aspects of this tool is that you can segment by location, keywords, or language, which allows you to better reach a specific audience.

When I explain this tool to my clients, I use the example of a food business located at the corner near my house. The business sells takeout food and also offers coconut water and Guarapo (a traditional Latin American sweet drink made from sugarcane juice). I’ve noticed that people passing by are amazed by the business and its offers, often stopping to buy. However, I never see many people there, and that’s because its reach is local, depending on the passersby. I’m sure that if the owner used Google Ads efficiently, the business would thrive much faster and could even grow beyond what the owner imagines.

• Understanding the Functioning of a Sales Funnel: This tool has both theoretical and practical elements, but it is essential for improving the efficiency of our marketing strategies. It allows us to understand the journey of our customers, better manage the sales process, segment and personalize our service or product more effectively, and measure results for better decision-making.

• Conducting an Email List Compilation: This tool is important because it allows us to connect with current or potential customers, being an effective communication channel that contributes to increasing sales. Sometimes, we underestimate the use of email and think it’s a dead tool, which is an incorrect and reductive analysis. One of the great advantages of managing our email list is that it allows us to become less dependent on platforms and social media, and become the captains of our own ship.
• Building and Expanding a Contact Network (Networking): This tool is often complex and takes time to develop. It is a skill especially necessary for marketing professionals or business owners, but it is useful for everyone and is not exclusive to the professional environment—it is perfectly applicable in everyday life as well. Expanding our networking is crucial because it allows us to extend our professional reach, that of our products or services, and create job opportunities or future collaborations, which are essential for success.

Other skills that are extremely important, and which I recommend you keep in mind, my dear readers, are time management and task organization. It is essential to set priorities and specific deadlines for the execution of our tasks, according to their level of complexity. Similarly, if you plan to create articles or posts, it is relevant to think about clear structures before starting to write. On this subject, you can find more information in my post: Do You Organize and Visualize Your Strategies and Content Before Writing? Lastly, I recommend doing an exercise in introspection and forward thinking, in which you determine elements like: Where am I now, and where do I want to be in the short, medium, or long term?

Remember, my dear readers, that my goal with these posts is to talk about smart marketing, lessons, and tactical tools within this field, which contribute to achieving better results, optimizing resources, and ensuring the success of your businesses. With that, I say goodbye for today, but I extend the invitation for next week to continue discussing this fascinating and wonderful world of marketing.