What three important ingredients do you need to market your small business? Here’s a recipe for success:
- A Plan
- Focus
- Patience, patience, and more patience
“Failing to plan is a plan to fail” and that couldn’t be more true than in marketing your small business. You can throw thousands of dollars into a marketing budget and not a single client will walk through your door. Without a well-structured, thorough, and focused plan, you’re efforts are for not.
How do you create a plan? First, there are some questions you need to answer. Answering these questions will allow you to formulate a plan on paper and will help focus your plan and refine your message. Click here to download a list of questions.
Once you’ve answered these questions, you should begin to see the direction in which you should travel. These questions are designed to help you evaluate your current marketing efforts, identify areas for improvement, and identify opportunities you aren’t utilizing.
A successful marketing strategy contains many areas of activity. I like to call them “spokes” or initiatives. These should include: prospecting, client communications, public relations, research and analysis, social media, and many more. Inside each of these spokes, you create specific initiatives to carry out these areas successfully. For example, deciding how you will prospect and attract clients could include seminars, public speaking opportunities, direct mail, etc. Once you’ve identified the way you want to attract clients, assign specific benchmarks to track your progress and success throughout any given month, quarter, and year. This process should be carried out for every “spoke” in your marketing plan.
Once you’re ideas are organized, it’s time to put them on paper and create the plan. There are many templates available online that serve as a good reference to help you begin to formulate your marketing plan. I would suggest Gazelles One Year Strategic Plan as a good starting point.
Your finished template is your compass, your guide, and barring some extreme and extraordinary circumstance that would change your strategy, you should look at your plan every morning. Remind yourself of the measurable goals inside your plan and prioritize your efforts accordingly.
Focus
Business owners are entrepreneurism and entrepreneurs are creative at heart. They are at their best when they’re thinking of new ideas, considering bold opportunities, and have the bigger picture in mind. This is the time many business owners are also at their worst.
I’ve watched many business owners and decision makers mistakenly and unintentionally throw their organization into shotgun mode. The ideas spew forth so fast that those responsible for seeing ideas to fruition find themselves utterly overwhelmed by the disorganization this creative, yet destructive process brings to their business.
As business owners and marketing professionals, we must ask ourselves if the ideas and opportunities that present themselves on a daily basis are in line with our strategic plan. This can only be accomplished by reminding yourself and your marketing department of the goals you clearly defined in your plan. We must approach our plan with a laser, not a shotgun.
Patience, Patience, and More Patience
Good things come to those who wait. I suspect the reason for high rates of failure in marketing small businesses can be attributed primarily to two issues:
- A business owner who has unrealistic expectations
- A marketer who fails to properly set expectations
These two go hand-in-hand. As you can see it’s all about expectations. Everything worth doing takes time and everything worth doing right takes patience. Marketing, at it’s core, is an investment. Think about it this way. You buy a home (pre-recession), make modest improvements, and after a year, put it back on the market and ask twice the amount which you paid for it. What’s your probability of success? Zero to none. You’re expectations are unrealistic.
The same is true in marketing. You throw money into a marketing strategy, maybe hire a marketing assistant or outsource to an agency, and within a year, you’re wondering why you’re not Neil Armstrong taking the first step on the moon. A plan takes patience.
“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
This was President John F. Kennedy speaking at Rice University in Houston, Texas on September 12, 1962, a year after he declared to a joint session of Congress the same goal.
Kennedy first introduced the moon-shot on May 25, 1961. It wasn’t until July 20, 1969 that man set foot on the face of the moon. What an audacious goal. Kennedy pegged the “blue oceans” concept before the book was written. Did Kennedy call the director of NASA a year after he declared the US would go to the moon and ask if we were ready? The answer would have been, “we’re making progress Mr. President, but it’s going to take some time.”
The same is true for your marketing plan. Success is not built overnight and return on your investment in marketing your business will take time.
What are your thoughts about important ingredients to successfully marketing your small business? Chime in!
About the Author
Brooks A. Brown is the founder and principal of Shout Out LLC, a Knoxville, Tennessee-based marketing, public relations, and communications firm serving clients throughout the nation.
