Is Your Small Business Marketing Strategy Killing Your Profits?

by Charlie Cook
©2006 In Mind Communications, LLC, all rights reserved.

With the wrong small business marketing strategy you could be killing your profits and limiting your business. Your small business marketing strategy is like the driver in a car, with marketing tactics being the engine. If you know where you want to go and how to get there, your small business marketing tactics will help you attract many more clients, if not you could crash.

Every business uses one or more of the following tactics to attract clients; mailings, advertisements, phone calls, networking, promotional events, a web site and sending email. If you use any of these and aren’t attracting as many new clients as you want or making as much money as you’d like, the problem may not be the tactics. It's your marketing strategy that needs attention.

Without an effective offline and online marketing strategy you won't achieve the results you want, no matter how much time and money you spend. A high profile radio ad campaign won’t help you grow your business unless it includes a message that attracts your prospects. An article about your firm in a newspaper can bring in business or just be a conversation piece. Email messages you send can end up in your prospects' delete bin or prompt them to contact you.

Mailings, radio advertisements or web sites are only delivery vehicles for your marketing message. They are the tactics you use to implement your strategy. Are you using the right offline and internet strategy to market your business?

Ready to stop wasting time and start making more money? Discover how to attract more clients with a comprehensive small business marketing strategy. Discover how with "The Insider Secrets to Highly Effective Marketing" manual."

"The ‘Insider Secrets to Highly Effective Marketing’ work! I’m getting many more leads and new clients since I started using the ideas from the manual in my ads and mailings. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to put their marketing on track and sell more. This is one investment that has already paid for itself."
Myra Shelton, Realtor

What are the fundamental principles of your marketing strategy? If you can answer this question, you're among one percent of business owners who can. Most people think only about their marketing tactics or vehicles and wonder why their profits aren't growing as quickly as they would like.

Business-Building Marketing Strategy
To grow your business you need to:

Define Your Goals
Identify where you want to take your business and what you want to achieve. Other than making more money than you are now, have you written down a vision of what you want your business to be two years from now? Five years from now?

Target Your Marketing
Most small business owners waste their time and money pitching too broadly. Do you have an effective method for identifying the people who want your products and services?

Use a Problem Solving Approach
Over 95 percent of small business owners focus their marketing on the reasons people should buy their products and services, not on their clients. Is your small business marketing focused on client's concerns and problems or on yours?

Demonstrate Value
Getting your name in front of people is a first step in marketing, but if your prospects don’t know what you do or how you can help them, you haven't achieved your goal. Past clients and prospects may have only a limited idea of how you can help them. Do your prospects understand the range of problems you solve and the solutions you provide?

Build Relationships
Every past client and prospect who has shown an interest can help you grow your business. Most service professionals know this but waste this resource through lapsed or infrequent communication. Do you have a method for staying in touch on a monthly basis with every person who could help you grow you business? Do you have a strategy for growing the number of qualified prospects on this list each week?

Many people find that defining their marketing strategy is the hardest part of their job. So hard that many small business owners use a tactical approach instead. Don't make this mistake!

Once you have clear business marketing goals and a well-defined strategy, your marketing will be more focused and you can make more effective use of appropriate marketing tactics to grow your business. Shift to strategic small business marketing and you'll turbo charge your marketing and your business.

The Top Reason Most Small Business Marketing Fails

by Charlie Cook
©2006 In Mind Communications, LLC, all rights reserved.

Is there something missing from your marketing? Is your small business marketing on target? Or could you be generating ten times as many sales?

Most small business owners know that to grow their business they need to generate interest and sales. Sounds simple enough. Then why is it often so difficult to do? Why aren’t you selling ten times as much as you are?

Selling is essentially a simple transaction. Your prospects give you money or a credit card to pay you for a product or service that they want to buy. The question is, how to you get more of them to do that?

The answer is simpler than you realize. To convert more prospects into clients, give them the marketing information they want. If you’re not generating a steady stream of sales, it may be for the top reason that most marketing fails; you’re not giving your prospects the information they want and need to become customers.

Do you know what your prospects want? Do you know what information to provide to convert them to clients?

Before a prospect will purchase from you, they need to;

• Want the product or service you sell,

• Know you exist,

• Like you and

• Trust you.

Most small business marketing is focused on getting attention and getting right the sale. This approach doesn’t help prospects determine whether they truly want the product or service or whether it solves their problems. It doesn’t help them get to know you, like you and trust you.

Imagine a determined young man looking for true love and marriage. Looking for immediate success, he decides to stand in the center of the local mall, jumps up and down and yell, “Marry me!”, “Marry me!” at the top of his lungs. Yes, he gets plenty of attention. But no customers (and he only needs one). No woman in her right mind would marry someone they didn’t know, like or trust.

Your clients are making a commitment when they make a purchase, exchanging their hard-earned dollars for your products and services. Before they plunge into this relationship, they’ll want to know you and trust you too.

Ready to find out exactly what to do to get more clients and customers? You could keep marketing the same way you have been, but you’re going to get the same results. If you’re serious about growing your business, discover how. Use this link to get the details >

Want more clients? Here’s how to get them:

1. Provide a product or service that people want

If you want more people to buy from you, do a better job of communicating to them through your marketing that you have what they want.

Use your lead generation system, ads, web site and mailings to get more attention by focusing on your prospects’ concerns and interests. Speaking to their needs will motivate them to contact you.

2. Help more people get to know you

Did you assume that sales would start pouring in because you sent out that mailing or took out that ad touting your product or service? If you did, you made the most common mistake made by small business owners.

One time ads or mailings rarely work to generate sales. People need to get to know you before they’ll do business with you.

Fortune 500 companies spend hundreds of millions dollars a year helping their prospects get to know them. If you had a marketing budget of a hundred million dollars, you could do the same.

If you don’t have that kind of cash on hand, focusing on building your brand image is a waste of time and money. There are other ways to help your prospects get to know you and buy from you that cost little or nothing and will get you the results you’re looking for.

Use your lead generation system to prompt prospects to contact you for your expertise, a free consultation or report. Then build on this first contact by continuing to provide your prospects with helpful ideas that will help them get to know you and like you.

3. Help more prospects trust you

The two best ways to help your prospects learn to trust you are to regularly help them by giving them information they want and have others vouch for you by using testimonials.

What’s the key to helping prospects trust you? Follow up! More than 80% of sales are lost due to lack of simple follow-up, calls, emails, and letters.

To get the clients you want, start by giving them the marketing information they want. Once you do, you’ll see your sales increase by two to four times or more.

How You Could Have All The Clients You Want
Selling more isn’t about luck. Truly successful business owners don’t turn prospects into sales by magic. They understand – and apply – a few simple marketing principles and techniques to pull in hungry prospects and convert them to clients.