Lately I’ve written a lot of posts about marketing and I’ve provided you with a lot of tips on marketing strategies, including:
- Marketing Tips For Small Businesses On Profiling an Ideal Client
- 5 Marketing Tips on Communicating With an Ideal Client
- 5 Marketing Tips to Build a Referral Based Business
- 4 More Marketing Tips to Build a Referral Based Business
- 5 Marketing Tips for Successful Follow Up
While all of these tips can help you build a successful small business, there are some marketing tips and strategies that every small business needs to understand — The small business marketing basics if you will. The 5 marketing tips I outline below can help you avoid marketing disasters and set you up for marketing success:
Marketing Tip 1: Marketing takes work & commitment. “Set it and forget it” will only get you so far
Marketing is not a one time event. It’s not a one time strategy. Marketing is something you will be responsible for throughout the life of your business, until you close your doors or sell it to someone else. Marketing takes planning, strategy, research, action, testing, and measurement — and then you must rinse and repeat, over and over again. If you can’t commit to your marketing, hire someone who can.
Marketing Tip 2: Don’t try every marketing strategy at once. Choose 2-3 that fit your audience & goals, & stick with it
Biting off more than you can chew is an embarrassing disaster. When you take way to big of a bite at the table, it’s embarrassing. Everyone is looking at you while you are trying to chew, you mouth can’t close all the way so you try to cover it up with your hand or napkin, little bits of food may fall out of your mouth (even more embarrassing), and you want to just give up and sit it out. Through the whole ordeal you wish you’d taken a smaller bite. Marketing works the same way. Don’t try to implement too many different marketing strategies at one time — or you’ll be stuck trying to pull them all off while everyone is looking, and when you stumble you’ll be embarrassed and at times you’ll want to quit. Instead, pick one or two to implement at a time. Once those become habit and all the kinks are ironed out, add another and repeat.
Marketing Tip 3: Trying something once isn’t good enough to determine whether or not it works
When consulting with our clients about their brand marketing strategy or website marketing strategy, I’ll sometimes get the response, “I tried that already and it didn’t work.” But when I dig deeper, I find out that they only tried the strategy or idea one time, and because it didn’t generate loads of money or lots of new clients immediately, they gave up. The problem is that trying something one time doesn’t give you enough information to know if it doesn’t work. Maybe it was the headline that didn’t get their attention? Maybe it was the day or time the marketing piece was sent out? Maybe the call to action wasn’t strong enough? Maybe your copy stunk, or your design was bad? The point is, you don’t know if a strategy works or not until you’ve tested it and it’s variables over time.
Marketing Tip 4: There is no magic wand to instantly gain success, it take time, focus, commitment, and desire
I know everyone wants to find that magic pill, the one you can take to instantly become successful — and I know that it seems like some people have found it and that they seem to have risen to success overnight. But it just isn’t true. Most “overnight success stories” have been in the making for 5, 10, or even 20 years. You just didn’t know about them before. You didn’t know them when they were hustling at local networking events and working with beta clients for free. You didn’t know them when they were struggling to make money just like you and they launched a product that flopped. But they were there, working tirelessly to reach their goal. If you want to reach your goals, you need to be focused, committed, and relentless, and you can’t ever give up, no matter what.
Marketing Tip 5: Want your marketing messages to have an impact? Focus on one thing and the single next step you want people to take
The best sales pages focus on one thing, on one action, on one product, program, or service. Why? Because it makes it easy for the reader to know what to do next. Think about all of the ads you see in magazines and the commercials you may fast forward through on television. Every ad focused on selling or promoting one thing. You rarely ever see an ad that features multiple products because they know that readers are busy and in a hurry, and they can only focus one thing at a time. If you want your marketing message to have impact, you need to focus the message to one thing and the one action step you want people to take.
What about you? Do have additional marketing tips for small businesses that you’d like to add? Have you found success with one of these strategies? I’d love to hear about it below!
