Marketing is the lifeblood of every business

Marketing is the lifeblood of every business.

If you look at all the successful businesses, they have one thing in common, no matter what niche or industry they’re in: they all have an excellent marketing system that comprises many different steps implemented in several different media.

Unfortunately few business owners realise this and instead view their whole marketing strategy as a necessary and expensive evil, and seem unable to make the connection between it and their profits.

Most of them realise in some fashion that their profits depend on marketing in some way, but few grasp the reality and essential simplicity of it: marketing brings in prospects, and your profits are dependent on converting these prospects to customers and clients in the sales process.

The bottom line is your business is absolutely dependent on effective marketing – and it’s much easier than you think, because effective and profitable marketing is a learnable skill that depends on following three simple rules:

It Must Be Direct Response Marketing

Most marketing you see is “image marketing” and is predicated on the idea of growing “awareness” of you, and your products or services. There’s arguably a case for this with big brands, but for the overwhelming majority of businesses, it’s just a big waste of time and money.

In contrast your marketing as a small business owner must be upfront and unambiguous in its purpose – typically at the end of every marketing piece you will have an explicit and unambiguous action you want the reader to take, whether it’s to buy something, call in to make an appointment or to leave their contact details in return for something of value so you can begin marketing to them over time.

To make it effective, you’ll sell your products and services on the emotional appeal of solving problems for your buyers, and not immediately on the features themselves. This almost always necessitates the use of long emotion-inducing copy and means your ads and marketing pieces will look very, very different from the normal examples you see.

It Must Be Measurable

Marketing is obviously intended to make you money, but the only way you’ll know if your Marketing is working, is by putting in place mechanisms that allow you to take any given sale and track it back to the marketing effort that brought it in. No system is ever going to be perfect, but we can come close.

Most business owners don’t understand how important this is, and even when they do, they’ll often give up in despair thinking it’s too complex.

In reality measuring is easy, especially online, where you can direct visitors to a known URL and then use automated (and free) software to track what they buy. Even offline marketing is easy to track if you’re prepared to take the time and make the effort to use unique phone numbers and website addresses in your ads and direct mail.

It does take some work, but it’s always worth it.

It Must Be Constant

Once you get someone’s name and contact details, you must begin marketing to them until they buy, die or tell you to stop. Most business owners simply give up after just one or two contacts, and then move on to the next name in the list, thus losing the investment they made in getting the prospect’s details in the first place.

Smart marketers, on the other hand, realise it can take a long, long time before a given person will buy, and the more times you contact them, the greater the chances of finally making a sale.

Written by Chris Cardell of Cardell Media