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Small Business
Marketing Do's & Don'ts
Small Business Marketing Do’s & Don'ts
to Achieve Results & Manage Cost
DON’T Spend Money on Brochures.
Save your money. Remember
people who ask for a brochure are not real prospects or
interested in your services or products. If they were, they
would meet or talk with you not ask for a brochure. If brochures
worked to sell products or services that would be all the
marketing you would need. Most people buy brochures for their
business because they don’t know what else to do and it’s easy.
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DO If
Necessary, Offer Your Brochure Only Online.
If you
must have a brochure to “impress” your prospects just know that
it won’t deliver you any sales. At most, create your brochure
for online distribution only. This will save you a lot of money
and show your “green side” in helping the environment.
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DON’T
Deliver Your Sales Messages Using Mass Marketing Methods.
Save
more money. Using mass marketing delivery methods like TV, radio
or mass marketing direct mail are very expensive for small
business and akin to using an atomic bomb to kill a fly. Your
audience for your products/services is very small usually no
more than 20,000 prospects and usually less than 10,000. Mass
marketing delivery methods are for reaching hundreds of
thousands and millions of prospects. Mass marketing relies on
the law of averages to work. Meaning unless you have millions of
prospects that use and can afford your products or services you
are wasting your money.
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DO Use
Strategic Marketing Techniques & Highly Focused Delivery
Methods.
Strategic
Marketing has everything to do with what you say, how you say
it, and who you say it to. In other words, it's the content of
your marketing message that counts. The more specific and
targeted you can be in reaching out to your market the more
successful you will be in obtaining quality sales leads. This
approach also allows for small business to afford the cost to
market everyday because you are not wasting resources on people
who are not your target audience.
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DON'T Use
Brand or Institutional Advertising.
Placing
trade ads in local newspapers, or industry trade magazines is
not only expensive but it won’t result in anyone contacting you
either. Do this type of marketing when you become a large
national or global company.
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Do Use
Marketing Strategies that are Accountable.
Use marketing delivery methods that are accountable. Know what
works and what doesn't and any method that generates sales
inquiries from qualified prospects is best.
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DON’T
Use Public Relations to Build Brand Identity.
Getting a
lot of media exposure through public relations efforts that only
promote your company name will have no impact on your sales or
profits. Building brand identity takes a lot of money over time
save this form of PR for when you are no longer a small
business.
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DO
Use Public Relations as Part of Your Marketing. This is
an affordable weapon in your marketing arsenal. A profitable
public relations effort needs to be focused on developing
rapport and creditability with your prospective customers by
informing them on how you solve problems they encounter
everyday. This will result in generating sales lead inquiries
from prequalified prospects that already know something about
your company before they contact you. Yes, done right
prequalified sales prospects will contact you. Exactly, what you
need to grow sales.
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DON’T Send
One Newsletter to all your Customers.
Many
businesses produce newsletters that contain the wrong
information for their various target audiences and too much of
it. What information you send to your existing customers needs
to be very different from what you send to new prospects. Trying
to sell more or additional products or services to existing
customers is fine but not to prospects. Prospects aren’t going
to buy from you until you have built rapport and confidence.
Leave the hard, up and cross sell sales pitches for your
existing customer base. Remember, the purpose of a newsletter is
to deliver information and stay in contact with prospective
clients so you are top of mind when they are ready to buy.
Success stories or white papers of even one or two pages work
best. The content volume of your newsletter is not nearly as
important as how regularly and the content value of the
information you deliver.
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DON’T Even
Think About Telemarketing.
Have you ever heard anyone say he or she loves talking to
telemarketers? Selling is about building respect confidence and
rapport with prospective customers. not making them
uncomfortable, irritated and downright mad. Only a handful of
very skilled telemarketers are adept at using this method to
obtain prospects. Besides legitimate telemarketing, firms are
expensive, why because they use mass-market techniques meaning
they have to call a lot of people to make this work. This is not
small business friendly.
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DON’T Just
Deliver Educational Messages.
Yes,
people do want information. That's why they surf the
Internet and request free information. But simply supplying
information to those seeking and requesting information is not
sufficient to turn prospects into customers. You can spend a lot
of time and money educating people for free at your expense.
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DO
Consider
Customer-Centric Marketing Programs.
We recommend you invest in a marketing program that attracts
qualified inquiries that actually reach out to contact you. This
way you avoid creating bad first impressions on people you are
trying to develop a long-term business relationship with. When
prospects seek, you out you are no longer viewed as selling, but
a valued consultant that can help your prospective customers
solve problems this is the best way to forge lasting customer
relationships.
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