I hope everyone managed to find some quiet time this weekend to spend with their family – whether Easter is an occasion you personally celebrate or not, the long weekends are always a great excuse to step away from our businesses and put in a little concentrated family time to rejuvenate. Personally I find that a break away from directly thinking about my business and my clients’ businesses often gives my brain some subconscious power to ponder the vast amount information I absorb each day. Tonight I find myself reflecting on the many challenges small business owners face with their marketing, which has of course been the focus behind these articles since I started them. What is the answer? What can fix the constant struggle to obtain your piece of market share? I wish there was a magic solution, the “here’s the one thing you need to do to fix it all”. But as I’ve said before, it really isn’t quite that simple. However, I do think that many business owners make it far more difficult than it needs to be. There are some proven strategies that when applied consistently and with thought and planning really will make a notable difference that, to many, will seem like magic.
- Know where your customers hang out when it comes to media – I really can’t stress this enough. It’s human nature that if an ad isn’t working for a business they automatically blame the media of choice. If you’re ad isn’t working, then you probably need to fix your ad… “media hopping” won’t make a bad ad better.
- Make sure your ads contain the key ingredients:
a. An outstanding headline that grabs attention and evokes an emotion.
b. Imagery that tells a story.
c. Less is more – cut back on the words and get to the point, generally speaking, people won’t read a cluttered ad.
d. IF your headline and imagery gets their attention then they will stay with your ad and continue reading.
e. Make an offer that’s worth your customer’s time.
f. With the right headline, imagery and offer in place, now you can consider the “body” of your ad copy – the information/detail. But remember, interest them first, without the interest, the body won’t even get read. - Make sure you give your ads enough time to actually work. Every form of media has it’s “tricks” to optimize usage of that media and the representatives of each media will (or should) know what those tricks are – so ask for guidance and then figure out how to adjust your planning and budget to work within that guidance.
- Don’t forget that all marketing is a building block process. There is no “fast food” recipe for effective marketing and as any good chef will tell you, good food takes time to prepare – the same holds true for your marketing. Be consistent, be repetitive, be patient – it’s worth it in the long run.
- Track it – test, measure, repeat. Be cautious and don’t do your marketing blindly without tracking, measuring and following up. But don’t forget, simply asking your customers “where did you hear about us” is not effective tracking – put simply, the answers to that question cannot be trusted.
- Remember the purpose behind marketing. Your ad – regardless of the media you choose – is not a “sales person”. An ad is not intended to “close” a sale. An ad is a “lead generator”. The only purpose behind an ad is to generate traffic, to generate interest, to solicit a response. If one person contacts you because they saw your ad – your ad is working. It’s up to you to build on it from there, to tweak and improve it to encourage more people to contact you. Then it’s up to you (or your staff) to turn that contact into a sale and hopefully a repeat customer.
At the end of the day, creating effective ads is a profession within itself. There are people who are very good at creating effective ads that will work. Unfortunately, many small business owners make the assumption that the people who work for a particular media (radio, TV, print, online) are the people who should know how to do this. 99.9% of the time that is not the case. The staff of most media are trained to offer a vehicle for your ad, a place for your ad to be seen or heard publically. Even in-house “designers” or “creators” are often simply people who are capable of operating the programs required to achieve a desired concept envisioned by someone else. Coming up with the right combination of words, images and/or sounds that are built to really “sell” should be done by the professionals trained to do this. If you don’t possess the necessary skills to develop your own effective marketing then you’re going to have to be prepared to pay for the service - developing a marketing plan and strategy that will actually work for your business and then developing effective ads to implement with those plans takes a great deal of time and research. So think of it like this, your fridge breaks down so you call a repairman, you don’t expect him to fix your fridge for free, so don’t expect someone to fix your marketing for free.
But it’s a difficult expense for many small business owners to justify. They simply don’t put enough emphasis on their marketing to understand the importance of paying that bill. But at the end of the day it’s an investment, not an expense item, which should take a higher priority than payroll and rent. You need to market to generate leads, without leads you can’t have conversions, without conversions you won’t have sales, without sales you can’t pay the rent or payroll.
Don’t underestimate the power of your marketing – it’s the front line of your sales and it’s the most effective means of fixing your bottom-line.
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