The key element of your small business strategy is effective marketing.
If you only ever pay heed to one thing I share with you, then let this omne thing be it.
If you’re serious about being successful with your small business marketing, it’s important to have a plan and a strategy. The way most business owners approach their small business marketing is shameful – they do it only when they can be troubled.
The furthest most of them go is to have some fuzzy notion about the need for more business, and then to leave the rest to chance, hoping, wishing and even praying for punters to walk through the door or hit their website and buy something from them. But hope is a lousy strategy for success.
But, as I say often: marketing is the most important thing you can do in your business. Because no marketing means no clients; no clients means no revenue … and no cash flow means you rapidly have no business left!
If you want to enjoy the of a profitable marketing system, you need to understand most of what you hear, believe, and probably think you know about marketing and small business strategy is incorrect. The business world is dominated by marketing myths, and they serve none but a few phonies.
Small business strategy tip # 1: Marketing makes money
Most small businesses operate with a marketing budget. That’s mistake No. 1, and a very dangerous small business strategy. Yes, you read that correctly: I am saying you should be willing (and even eager) to put in a limitless sum of money in your marketing.
Here’s why: marketing is expected to make money. If it doesn’t, you shouldn’t be doing it. So, if it makes money, then from that it follows for every pound you put in, you get more than a pound back, right?
We call that your ROI Just like the bank paying you interest
Small business strategy tip # 2: see your marketing system as a money machine!
So, imagine you have a marketing campaign or system you can “crank the handle” of, and discover, to within a few percent, the Return on Investment you’re going to make. Sounds good, yes? (Any business can do this, and every business SHOULD).
Given the above … if for every groat you pump into your marketing system, it turns out a groat and a half, or two groats or ten each time you press the “go” button, then would it be the action of a normal person to restrict the number of times you push that button just because of some daft “budget”?
Nope. If you had any sense at all you ‘d keep pushing that button like a rat with an electrode in its brain applying the shots of “happy juice”
This is just how a good marketing system in a rational small business strategy works.
This is one of those “too good to be true” things that absolutely IS true. Deal with it.
Small business strategy idea # 3: Look before you jump
But, be intelligent about this. Start with small tests and monitor responses like a hawk watching a mouse. And even when you have a certain method that works, don’t gamble more than you can tolerate losing, because the unpredictable happens, and you don’t want to be cleared out by ill luck falling on bad judgement.
That’s why you should specify your “budget” as a portion of turnover, but always be prepared to change the figures as conditions dictate.
More than once small business owners have said to me they can’t do any more marketing this year since they don’t have the budget for it, even though their marketing is making them a profit. Some years ago, right at the beginning of the 2007 recession, I heard a real estate agent say she was stopping all of her advertising, even though it was the only thing bringing in business. Now THAT is insane..
Outrageous.Downright insane and a small business strategy beneath contempt.
Small business strategy idea # 4: make sure your marketing pays (here’s how)
Precisely how do you know when your marketing is working?
When it’s profitable.
How do you know that?
By ruthlessly and religiously recording and measuring everything you do.
And this is where the troubles stem from for small businesses in their marketing: their marketing isn’t measurable. They emulate the big-business marketing and throw away their money on useless “image” ads which don’t bring in any business.
So the “key” here is to ensure your small business strategy is fashioned in a way to let you track every sale to the marketing activity that brought it in. Right down to every email, postcard and sales call. You can never have too much data about this, because it’s the difference that’ll make you wealthy.
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