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What Do Marketers Do?

Considering that “70% of small businesses are operated and owned by a single person,” the question arises: Who is doing the marketing?51

Find at least two small service businesses, one that you know to be successful and one that might be hanging on by a thread (hair salons, dry cleaners, mechanics, party planners, florists, etc.). Call and see if you can arrange a time, either on the phone or in person, to ask questions about their marketing efforts. You might want to do a bit of homework before you do. Here are questions that will help you gather information:

  1. Do they consider what they do to promote their business as marketing?
  2. Do they have someone who helps them?
  3. Do they have a website or Facebook page?
  4. What are the main activities that they do to market their business?
  5. Do they have a formal business plan? A budget?
  6. How do they figure out what their budget should look like?
  7. Are there efforts that they consider successful and anything that seriously did not work?
  8. Do they respond to the marketing of their competitors?

Of course, there are additional questions that you can ask as time permits. The idea here is to get a good look at what the challenges are to marketing a small business. Is this something that you see yourself doing—perhaps even as a business of your own?

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