Marketing Essentials.
Marketing is the most important thing you can do in your business. It’s the one thing you probably don’t ever want to outsource to someone else or, if you do, ever let outside the scope of your control and oversight. You must at the very least have a regular marketing report.
Why?
Because it boils down to this: if you don’t have any marketing, then you pretty soon don’t have any clients or customers. And if you have no clients or customers... you don’t have a business at all. That’s why you must treat it as a priority and always be aware of how it’s working... or not.
Yet most business owners I come into contact with treat their business marketing as a side issue, as a necessarily “evil” addition to their business operation, like filling in tax-returns or doing a stock-take.
But in truth, it’s core to your business. In many ways it is the business: because no matter what the “thing” is in your business, your real business is the marketing of a “thing” business business.
The good news is developing an effective and efficient Marketing strategy is a whole lot easier than you probably think. If you don’t know anything about it yet, that’s fine. You’re not expected to, because very few people do, even those who’ve been in business a long time.
Most marketing experts and marketing magazines will tell you it’s about “branding” and “image”, but this is misleading. The marketing magazines are mistakenly taking big business marketing ideas and trying to stretch them to fit the small business owner.
And it’s completely inappropriate. Unless you’ve got endlessly deep pockets and a genuine brand for people to be aware of, it’s a waste of time. Your brand recognition comes first from recognition of your quality and service.
So it’s important to get the marketing fundamentals and your marketing mix right.
One other thing to remember, before we get into the details, is your marketing must always be measurable. It’s no good putting in a lot of effort to get your marketing mix right if you then don’t measure the results with a marketing report or other tools.
I like to think of marketing as being anything visible in your business. Your Marketing strategy must take this into account.
Anything anyone outside your business can see gives out a message. It says something about you, your business and, implicitly, the kind of quality and service your customers and clients can expect from you.
It’s not limited to the things you’d like to think of as marketing, like advertising or direct mail.
Like it or not, even the things you do in your private life affect your business, and so you should consider them as part of your Marketing strategy (if you doubt this is true, think for a moment to what happened to Gerald Ratner after his ill-considered remarks about the quality of his own company’s products at a private dinner).
Business marketing is not something you can do in isolation from the rest of your business.
That’s the first thing to get your mind around: everything visible about you and your business is part of the whole marketing mix: the state and condition of your premises, the car you drive, how you and your staff dress, the image you give off... it all goes into the mind of your prospects, customers, and clients and helps them decide whether or not they want to buy from you.
So if you’re one of those people who believes you don’t market yourself, because it’s all done by referral and word of mouth, even if you don’t ask for the referrals, then the very fact you’re serving your customers and clients to the extent they want to pass your name along is... all in the marketing mix.
Whether this is “right” or not isn’t the point. It’s how things are and if we want our businesses to flourish, then we need to be dealing with things as they really are not how we want them to be or think they ought to be.
Finally, the marketing magazines will try to dazzle you with “clever” ads, lots of whitespace, funky graphics, “branding”, and their awards. Don’t be deceived: the aim of your marketing is to make you money, not win awards or impress people.
The only way to ensure this is to use direct response marketing with testing and measuring and careful analysis of your marketing report.
That’s an overview of marketing in a nutshell. Take a look around the rest of this site, and get into some of the detailed strategies you can put to work for you right now and have them making money for you by tomorrow!
Happy Marketing!
Chris Cardell
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