Introduction

Small businesses are independently owned and operated businesses by entrepreneurs. They usually require less capital and less staff. Their net sales and profits are not as much as highly operated businesses. Small businesses like local grocery shops, medical shops and But in order to survive they need a strong marketing or promotional strategies.

Regardless of what the company sells or does, it’s important to learn about who your consumer is so you can effectively target them with your promotion strategy.The nature of most people is if they don’t know the product they won’t buy it. The more they see the product through social media or television advertisements the chance of buying that product is high. Like wise a small business being established will not easily reach to success point. The owner should implement the most effective promotional strategies for that particular business.

Marketing strategies are one time process, they have to be unique and different each year. Now according to the research article by (Alexey, 2015) when a company improves its promotional activities they gain more customers and increase sales.

Promotional strategies

Events: these small businesses can organize, sponsor or participate in fair exhibitions, college promotions, and charity programs where they can directly interact with the customers. Through these kind of events they can provide an opportunity to know about customer feelings and experience of the product.

Website: this promotional tool is efficient, cost effective and can be reached easily by any age category. Even for a small business, they can create their own website and promote their business. Being on social media is the most effective way of reaching to the customers easily.

Direct-Marketing: this is also a reliable tool as there will be no middlemen and they can reach to the target customers directly. It avoids excess cost of post, direct mailing and tele calling.

Advertising: this the most frequently used promotional tool by many small businesses. They believe that this is the best medium for promoting their products as it’s flexible and they are selective in nature. Advertising is also cheaper considered to other types.

Sales Promotion: the owners of the small business can offer different choices on purchase of a particular product; like discount, price off, gift coupons, vouchers, free samples etc. this is a direct approach but it is for a short term. Many of them provide these kind of offers on different occasions like ‘Eid, different festive, new year, Christmas etc.

Market positioning of “Rene”

In order to understand the direction of promotional strategy, there is a need to reveal what position the company occupies on the market and in customers’ minds. According to Ries & Trout (1981), the company’s market positioning refers to its unique position in the audience’s minds, connected to a very specific and differentiating set of associations.

“Rene” positions itself as a high quality product provider and sets a relatively high price on it. It is obvious from the map that “Rene” takes a distinct place among the competitors on the market and in the customer’s mind. Therefore the promotion strategy has to be individualized and focused on its uniqueness and high quality of the product.

Research data collection and Analysis

In the article selected the whole process of choosing data collection method and implementing is based on Mirola’s (2014) lecture notes on “Planning and Implementing Marketing Research”. For the research of “Rene” the company they selected, the qualitative research method is selected by using questionnaire and personal interviews for data collection.

For the first question only 24 people answered it. Among them 10 were regular customers, which is almost half of them. There were 4 people who visit the shop 1-2 times a month. Having a small research group it can be said that either the company is highly ranked or there are more strong competitors.

Question 2 is very important to know how to attract and target the customers. But here none of the promotional techniques attracted the customers. It shows that 14 respondents attracted to the way they displayed that is the showcase. 4 of them said they knew about the shop from internet. This means that they need to concentrate more about promoting their business on social media.

In question 3 when asked whether it is convenient to receive information about sales and upcoming offers via sms, almost all of them (12 people) said yes. According to the research article customers who were at the shop first time said that it will be more comfortable form them to get information on e-mail. But one customer wanted all the information to be received through a personal call.

Question 4 shows the effectiveness of the company’s website. Majority of them do not use it. But there are 6-7 people who check it at least once a month. This clearly shows that they need to upgrade their website and need to include website promotions in their strategic plan.

Question 5 was about customer feedback about the shop assistant’s performance. The customers have responded it with only 4 and 5, this was a result they didn’t expect. So this means that the representatives of “Rene” knows how to keep their customers satisfied at a highest rate.

Conclusion

The various constraints have shown that small firms also can use their own promotional strategies according to their target customer. In some places small businesses gain a special position in the industrial structure because of their ability to utilize labor and create employment. Therefore small it has become a source of employment for those in need. Other than that the small businesses need to work on the discussed promotion plans and keeping their customers satisfied.