Do you spend enough on your marketing?

by marlowpro

Do you spend enough on your marketing?

I’m always amazed at how little small business owners spend on marketing their business.

Often, once business owners have done the basics of a website, the odd bit of advertising and maybe sponsoring their local football team, many see any further spending as a waste of money. 

The first place to start is to write a simple one-page marketing plan, starting with what you are trying to achieve. Then you should specify what your ideal customer looks like and where they ‘shop’. You are then suitably prepared to select the right medium to place enticing messages in your prospective customer’s line of vision so when they are ready to consider their options your business will be front of mind. That’s when you strike up a dialogue to convince them to trust you and give you a try.

It’s a funnel that you’re trying to build, a bit like a Venus fly trap. Know who you want, make your offer attractive and reel them in to a position where your proposition is too tempting to resist.
Most small businesses rely on the good old word of mouth i.e. referrals which incidentally brings in a large proportion of our new business as the potential clients have had a golden seal of approval from a trusted friend or acquaintance that we do a good job. But if you want to grow your sales faster than relying on this you should also use marketing strategies to attract new business leads.

It’s true it’s hard to know which of the many strategies will work best but that’s where testing and tracking comes into play. Before rushing out and blowing your budget on one idea before you know if it will work you run a small sample for a restricted time and track the results. If it doesn’t work you move on.

For us our monthly newsletter is our best marketing asset as we re-use the articles in the newsletter on our social media accounts and we also post them to our website’s blog to help ramp up the website page 1 ranking without paying for outside SEO services.

You may be in the great situation where you don’t need to do any marketing as you’re in a niche sector or you have more than enough referrals coming in already. But if you’ve decided you are missing out on untapped business and want to explore the idea further and want someone to talk to please feel free to give us a call as it’s something we take very seriously in our business.

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