Page 153 - DMGT310_ENTREPRENEURSHIP_AND_SMALL_BUSINESS_MANAGEMENT

Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management

Notes Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. The selection of target market is a very important …………….. for a firm.
2. Target marketing allows a small business to develop a product and a marketing mix that
fit a relatively ………………….. part of the total market.
3. Producers can also change the ……………….. or durability of the goods or provide different
levels of follow-up service.

4. There are infinite ways to address the wants and needs of a …………….. market.

10.2 Market Strategy

Small Businesses can gain a competitive advantage over larger competitors by tailoring their
products or services to meet the demands of the individual customer. This tailoring can be done
through the means of the product/service offered, price, promotion, and distribution. The above
are known as the marketing mix. Another advantage is that small businesses offer a more
personalized interaction with the customer.
First of all, a marketing strategy that you should take advantage of both offline and online is
networking. This is probably the single most important strategy you can look into. As a small
business, you will find that one of your first and most important hurdles is simply getting
people to know that you exist. If people don’t know you’ve started a small business and that you
have amazing widgets or services to sell, they’re not going to ask to buy those widgets or hire
you for those services, regardless of how wonderful and amazing they might be. So your first
job as a small business entrepreneur will be to get the word out.

Caselet mGinger

inger is the first of its kind opt-in permission-based mobile marketing platform
in India. mGinger is a service providing targeted advertisements on mobile
Gphones. The advertisements are targeted on a consumer base who have opted-in
to this service. The consumer base is built through a registration process in which the
consumers specify their commercial interests, maximum number of ads they would like
to receive in a day, convenient time-slots and their demographic information. Apart from
getting information related to their particular interests, the consumers also receive
monetary incentives for every ad they themselves receive and for each ad received in their
network upto two levels of referrals. Advertisers leverage the service to search for and
select consumers based on their commercial interests, location, demographics and other
criteria and send specific advertisements to their target audience. And all this without the
fear of incurring even a single consumer’s wrath. The mGinger platform solves critical
problems like content composition, cost of campaign and return on investment
measurability for advertisers.
Source: Janakiram.B, (2010). “Role and Challenges of Entrepreneurship Development”. Excel Books Pvt. Ltd.
Beyond online and offline networking, another avenue for marketing in both venues is promoting
your business through ads. In the real world, this can be done through print and flyer ads,
stationary, vehicle tags, and window displays, while on the internet, you can pursue things like
pay per click marketing.

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