Wasting time and money on marketing efforts that don’t provide a return on investment drives huge numbers of hard-working professionals out of business every year. Every dollar you spend on marketing your local business should eventually pay off in your bottom line. Over the past twenty years as a marketing consultant, I’ve consistently seen small business owners feed their precious resources (cash & time) into the shredder. These owners are great at what they do – building software or unclogging drains – but they don’t have the marketing expertise they need to grow their businesses efficiently. Check out the list and stop wasting your time and money.
1. Using a stop-and-start marketing approach
It’s typical for a business owner to jump on a marketing idea that sounds good, but doesn’t produce immediate results. When the phone doesn’t ring from the initial effort, they abandon the idea. Six months later, they try something else that doesn’t work. They give up. Business gets really bad and they are desperate. Then, they do it again. A marketing professional develops a solid marketing plan, implements consistently, evaluates their results and adjusts accordingly.
2. Trying to sell to everybody
Despite what your Uncle George says, your market is not everybody. Sure, everybody has a toilet, but not everybody in Lakeland wants or needs a plumber. And, you don’t really want just anybody as a customer. Some people just can’t pay you and others are more trouble than they are worth. Solid marketing research shows who your best customers are: people who want and need your product or service, will pay you, probably buy again and refer others to you. Target your best prospects to make money.
3. Using left-overs for your marketing budget.
When I ask “What’s your marketing budget?”, I typically get a deer-in-the-headlights look from owners. Turns out that a struggling business will think of marketing as an extra expense and only spend money when they have some ‘left-over’ at the end of the month. That’s bass-ackwards. If you want to have a profit, plan on spending a certain percentage of your sales goal to get the customers to spend money with you. For example, successful consumer goods manufacturers spend 50 percent of their anticipated net sales to promote a new product, then settle in at about 8 percent for an established product to keep sales going strong.
4. Thinking this is about YOU
Your marketing message is not about you. It’s not about how great your product is or the cool tools you use. Your customers don’t care that much about YOU. They just want to know what YOU can do for them. We call that WIIFM – What’s in it for me? Tell me how I can do it faster, easier and for less money. Tell me how I can be cool or get a date on Saturday night or that you’ll come over right now to unclog my toilet and clean up the mess in my bathroom- then I’ll spend my money with YOU.
5. Playing it safe
Albert Einstein said that insanity is doing the same things over and over again expecting different results. Small business owners find themselves facing tough economic times, shrinking revenue and increasing costs yet they keep their marketing spending limited to the same newspaper ads and yellow pages listings they have always used – usually with diminishing returns. Why would anybody do that? Because it’s ‘safer’ to stick with what you know. If you want more customers, you are going to need to do something different. Like maybe using internet marketing to drive traffic to your website so that cash customers buy from you and not the franchise down the street.
6. Keeping your business a secret
Unless you are on the run from the law or engaged in international espionage, you should be easy to find on the web. I recently looked up an Auburndale air conditioning repair business up by name on the web to get their phone number because they didn’t show up in the Google results of local A/C contractors. Their most successful competitors showed up in the top listings, but I had to get dig to find this company. The guy spent money to have a great sign painted on his truck, but who writes down the number when they are driving through traffic? I don’t call you when I can’t find the number easily online. We search the web and click on the top three results to find a local contractor.
7. Portraying a false image
Some entrepreneurs who work out of their home try to look like a big business by putting skyscrapers and corporate boardroom pictures on their marketing materials. If I wanted a big, national chain, I’d go to them. Sometimes I want a small business who will treat me like a person. Your strength might be that you are small enough to give great service to a little guy like me. Maybe you’ll come out to fix my roof on a Friday night after a storm. Let me know upfront who you really are – after all, I’ll find out eventually.
Which of these blunders have you made? I’ve done them all at one point or another. Marketing mistakes kill thousands of small business every year.
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