So which is it: “Good enough” or “Good enough never is”?

Over the years I’ve appreciated how often my dad was right, and there is certainly a time to do it right. There is however, a time for good enough too (there is also a time to be born, a time to die, a time to plant and a time to reap – but that’s a different topic).

This is true for companies as well as individuals. Companies go through transitions in their life cycle when investing on infrastructure makes sense, and other times when it does not. Early stage companies in particular may take an approach of ‘good enough’ when they are printing their first set of business cards and brochures. A good quality printer and a trip to Staples can outfit a bootstrapping business with the initial materials they need to do business. At Vista Consulting we printed the first batch of business cards on our trusty HP color inkjet printer before settling on a design and making the transition to having them professionally done. We still print brochures ourselves since our usage is rare and we continue to change the look and refine the message.

Website Design Options

Building a website for your business presents you with some similar choices. A website is a prerequisite to participate in any of the Internet marketing activities mentioned by Debra in this month’s article. If you don’t have a website yet (and some statistics put the population of small business without a website at over 50%), you can hire some one to build a professionally looking site for you. If you’re not ready to take that plunge however there are a number of options available to build it yourself. Certainly one path is to learn the tools of the trade – but being able to use FrontPage doesn’t make you a web developer anymore than swinging a hammer makes me a carpenter. Sometime a little bit of skill is dangerous, whether it be with a web development tool or a hammer. (Ask me sometime about the time I took down a piece of molding and had half the wall come with it.)

Prefab websites

An alternative to building a website from scratch is to explore the plethora of hosting companies with tools to help you “build your site in 5 minutes”. I’ve looked at a number of these prefab websites and some are quite good. Are they as good as what a professional developer could do? No. Are they good enough? For a young company without an Internet presence, the answer is a resounding yes. A few words of caution as you look at these tools.

Understand your domain name options. Stay away from providers that only offer domain names like “yourcompany.theirname.com”. This makes you more difficult to find, and worse yet, locks you totally into their solution.

Look for offerings that allow you to use design wizards to start, but use HTML editors to fine tune.

Remember that using a wizard does not absolve you from the responsibility to write good content. No wizard in the world can make up for bad website copy. Be sure you spend the time to ensure that the site reads well, is free of spelling errors and typos, and is logically put together.

The clear advantage of these tools is they get you in the game easily and affordably. As your company’s Internet marketing transitions from its initial experimental stages to a larger part of your marketing mix, you may find that you outgrow the wizards and templates. Going through this transition may signal the time to spend additional money on your web infrastructure. After all, as I’ve gotten older I’m more likely to call a professional carpenter to come do the job right rather than attempt one of my ‘good enough’ projects.

This quote – attributed to William Wrigley Jr., the founder of Wrigley Company – dovetails with a point that my colleague Debra Murphy recently made. In her Vista Viewpoint article entitled ‘10 Strategic Marketing Mistakes’, Deb makes the case that companies need to continue to market even when the economy is bad. Sounds great, but how do you do it when money is tight?

Much has been written about how businesses can promote themselves without buying Super Bowl ads or hiring Tiger Woods as a spokesperson. “Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World” by Shel Horowitz and Nancy Michaels’ “Off the Wall Marketing Ideas: Jumpstart Your Sales without Busting Your Budget” are just two examples of the many books written on this topic. Less has been written, however, on what to do in those times – such as the end of the quarter or end of the year – when you have put your marketing budget on temporary hold but still need to make the most efficient use of your marketing resources.

So, with apologies to Fleetwood Mac, this article will explore ways that marketing organizations can keep “thinking about tomorrow” even when they are at a phase without a budget to work with.

Know Thy Customer

How well do you know your customers? Wouldn’t it be nice to know how many of your customers are financial services companies with under 50 employees, or how many customers purchase products A &B but not C?

If you have a handful of customers you might know this off the top of your head. Once your customer base reaches multiple tens or hundreds or even thousands, memory alone will no longer suffice. Answering these questions – and doing analysis against your customer base – now requires a database that is populated with clean data as a critical element of your marketing infrastructure. If your company has been diligent at collecting this information all along, you may pass “Go” and collect your $200. If you are like most companies and the customer database isn’t fully populated or is out of date, now is a good time to dedicate resources to update the database. Doing so takes three steps:

1.  Decide on what information you need to capture.

The specifics on the important data to gather will vary from company to company and the process of designing the database will take some effort. Some fields to consider include:

• Industry Classification – you may want to use SIC or NAICS codes for company classification if you want to perform very fine granular analysis, however for most people a looser industry classification will suffice.  Note that if you use a your own classification system, be sure you standardize the data fields so you don’t end up with some companies listed as “Fin. Svcs” while others are listed as “Financial Services”.
• Location – neighborhood, city, state or country depending on your size
• Revenue and Profit
• Number of employees
• Product(s) purchased and Purchase date(s)

2. Have your team gather the information and populate the database.

This often times proves more difficult than it would appear. If you sell to public companies, then most of the information is readily accessible. If you sell to private companies however, some of the information will be harder to obtain. The customer web site is always the first place to start, with secondary sources like Hoovers a valuable asset.

3. Put a process in place so this information is captured at the point of sale so you don’t need to go though this again in the future.

Of all the internally focused activities you can do that don’t require spending money, this may be the most valuable. Spending time to do this can provide invaluable insights into customer buying patterns, and help serve as input to marketing and sales campaigns once you again are spending money.

Reach Out and Touch Someone

How well do your customers know you? The business world is full of stories of customers who didn’t make a purchase because they didn’t know that the company they already had a relationship with offered a product or service they needed. Regular communication with customers and prospects is one way to help make sure that doesn’t happen to you – and email marketing makes it cost effective. If you don’t have a regular newsletter, create one … NOW.

Companies like Roving Software (www.rovingsoftware.com), iMakeNews (www.imakenews.com) and infacta (www.infacta.com) have great tools for running email campaigns. Offering an opt-in email newsletter, capturing email addresses when you make a sale and providing a way to register on your website, provides a ready made list of people who WANT you to communicate with them. Note that in a world where spam is becoming a greater and greater problem, customer acquisition via email is more and more difficult – but email is proving to be an effective tool for customer retention.

Two words of caution are in order:

• If you commit to regular communication with your customers, realize that this will take resources not only in your down time, but when you are busy as well. Before embarking down this path make sure that you are committed to keep up the effort in future months.
• Make sure that you do not become an inadvertent spammer. Clearly spell out what people are signing up for, and make sure that you have an easy opt-out system for those who no longer want to receive your newsletter.

The Tangled Webs We Weave

Your web site is one of the most important ways to communicate the elements of your marketing framework to the outside world. However, most websites grow organically over time and do not always contain the latest company messages. For example:

• Product pages get created and forgotten about.
• Customer success stories are written and left alone.
• Company information pages get stale.

Does this describe your website? If so, spending time walking through the site to spot inconsistencies and dated information is time well spent. Having people work in teams and creating a small prize to the group that finds (and fixes) the most problems can turn this into a low cost way to make sure your external image is as consistent as possible while at the same time building team unity.

People – Your Most Valuable Resource

Down times are excellent times to focus on staff development. While you may not have a budget for external training, having the team cross train each other can accomplish several objectives. Having people explain their job function to a colleague forces them to think deeper about how they do their job. Unthreatening peer review can provide food for thought for employees on how to do things better. Structuring this training in a presentation format gives people additional presentation and public speaking experience – something that is valuable for everyone. Lastly, having people better understand the functions of the entire organization can give you a deeper bench, better able to respond when people are out of the office or leave the company.

Don’t Stop

Don’t stop, thinking about tomorrow,

Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here,

It’ll be, better than before,

Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone.

Marketing needs to lead the campaign for building long-term loyalty-based relationships with your customers. If your messages are the same as your competitors and do not light a fire in the minds of your prospects, you will never get them to even consider your product or service, let alone buy.

All people make buying decisions based on emotion, not logic, even in high technology purchases; therefore your marketing must use emotion to sell what people want, not what you think they need or want them to need. Although you as a marketing professional may feel passionate about your product, you must move beyond the traditional “feature and benefit” approach to marketing and include emotion into the marketing mix. As much as business people pride themselves on logical, rational behavior, they are still human. They like to buy from people they like and they can make product decision on things that you think are pretty silly. Customers will only buy what appeals to their emotion and satisfies their wants and needs. Logic does play a part in justifying the decision after we have made it, but emotion is the core ingredient.

Boring Marketing is Ignored Marketing

In today’s overcrowded market, it is very hard to get through to your prospects and partners. You do not get many chances to get your prospect’s attention, and to spend your time and money on boring marketing programs is definitely a sin. The world is a busy, cluttered place with advertisements and messages everywhere. You have to find something that excites your customer and market to all of their senses. Strong marketing should communicate your company’s personality. Think of your marketing in terms of how you would describe your company in a personal conversation to someone you just met. Chances are it will include not only the facts, but also the emotional elements as well.

Add Emotion To Your Marketing

To capture your customers and build a long-term profitable relationship, you need to understand the effect of emotion in purchase decisions when building your marketing strategies. Marketing needs to begin building the customer experience that is rich and diverse in the way you interact with your prospects. Figure out what your customers love, and what they hate, what keeps them awake at night, what gives them heartburn and what events they dread. If you know what aspects of their job that they are the most concerned about and design your products, services, and marketing to address those concerns, then you will begin to build the customer experience that will form into a lasting relationship. Think about your marketing messages and see if they simply push your product or if they incorporate the entire customer experience. Once you capture them emotionally, your chances of successfully selling them your product or service will be much greater.

Business Case for Emotion-based Marketing

To increase the appeal of your marketing, you need to provide both rational and emotional elements in your messages to your prospects. When your customer makes a purchase decision, they use both rational and emotional elements in their decision process. The rational elements are things like pricing and product quality. Pricing needs to be competitive, but can be easily copied. Product quality and selection are critical, but product innovations also can be replicated. There are few competitive advantages in terms of product or price today. On both counts, sustainable differentiation is difficult to achieve.

The goal of emotion marketing is to develop an enduring connection with each customer that nurtures loyalty and results in repeat business. When you put emotion-based marketing principles in action, they lead to strategies that are almost impossible to replicate. This provides a powerful competitive advantage since it is one area your competition cannot duplicate. Appealing to your audiences in terms of emotional engagement will comprise a growing proportion of the value being exchanged between you and your prospects.

Emotion in High Technology Marketing

Do you think emotion has no place in high technology marketing? Does your marketing have to be features and techie jargon? The 4P marketing strategy of yesterday is no longer effective in today’s connected world. The new marketing strategy of the 21st century is emotional and experiential marketing. As marketers, we have gone from marketing products and services to building a total customer experience. To remain competitive, marketing must try its best to win the hearts of prospective buyers. The physical appearance of a product alone is not enough. To be able to lure a buyer, a product must be marketed in a fashion that touches a buyer’s emotional chord. Introduce creative, passionate marketing programs, give your customers a pleasurable experience doing business with you, and watch your sales increase.

Not Developing a Marketing Foundation

Many folks want to jump right into marketing programs, not establishing a solid foundation before they do. The result – ineffective programs that waste the marketing budget.

Deploying a Marketing Strategy that is Not Focused

A company must pick a marketing strategy and then stay focused. Constant change to compete with the latest fad does not breed success. Figure out who you are and stick with it.

Not Clearly Defining Your Target Market

Trying to be everything to everybody means you are nothing to anybody. Choosing a target market enables you to develop marketing messages that hit home with your audience by addressing their specific concerns.

Delivering an Inconsistent Marketing Message

If each marketing program delivers your message differently, your prospects get confused and your results are poor. The continuity and consistency of message and brand across all programs will increase your chances of breaking through the marketing clutter to really reach your prospects.

Believing a Second Rate Web Site Works

This is one of my biggest issues. So many web sites are just plain horrible. Many companies forget that perception is reality on the web and people are not going to do business with a company that does not have a decent Web site – period.

Sticking With An Ineffective Marketing Strategy

Don’t get caught up in the idea that ‘things will get better’ if you’re not seeing results with your current marketing strategy. If you do the same things, you can expect the same results.

Changing Your Marketing Strategy That Works

On the other hand, if you have a winning marketing strategy that consistently gives results, then why change it? Experiment with small changes that can improve your marketing and keep it fresh and effective.

Stopping a Program Too Soon

Easily the most costly mistake is changing your marketing messages or brand midstream. Just about the time you are sick of your marketing, your prospects are just beginning to recognize who you are. Give your marketing time to work. Remember, you are constantly battling to get your prospects attention.

Focusing Too Much On You Or Your Company

As a prospect, I probably don’t care who you are or how great your company is. I want to know how your product or service is going to benefit ME. Focus on your customer. All the details about you and your company are background information, not the focus of your marketing efforts.

Cutting Marketing when the Economy is Bad

Marketing helps your sales people stay productive. Generating leads, creating awareness, building credibility, telling your prospects that you are alive and well. Cutting marketing is the biggest mistake companies’ make in tough economic times. Reducing spending is one thing – there is a lot of marketing that can be done low cost or free – but stopping marketing completely can be deadly.

Over the years, many of us have held a wide variety of jobs in corporate America. These jobs provided us with the opportunity to learn a vast array of skills. I know a number of lawyers who have worked in corporations at many types of jobs, none having anything to do with the law. I’ve met other folks that started in education and moved into sales or marketing. All of this makes us stronger business owners, with an assortment of talents to draw upon.

The trouble occurs when you try to take these unrelated skills, create a product or service offering, and market them as one business. I’ve met many business owners who give me 3-5 different services, none of them having anything to do with each other. The result is usually a lack of focus in your messages, difficulty in picking a target audience, and basically confusing those prospects you do get to talk with. If you find yourself with these challenges, read on.

Decide What Business You Are In

Before you can effectively develop a marketing plan, you need to know what business you are in. Define your focus or niche that you want to target by ensuring that there is a target market that makes entering this business worthwhile. Remember, as part of your market analysis, you need to determine:

• What business you are in;
• What products and services you offer;
• Who is your target market;
• Who are your competitors and how do you differentiate your business from theirs.

Once you have this information, then take a critical view of your product or services and the benefits they offer your very clearly defined target market. This will be the first indication if your products and services can be marketed together effectively.

Determine Your Discipline

Most small businesses should adopt one solid discipline. A discipline is a category, such as marketing, business coaching, IT services, legal services or financial services, to name a few. Staying within a discipline and building a reputation within that niche, enables you to develop your brand identity – that is, how customers view your business.

If your services are event planning (marketing) and computer software training (IT services), it is really difficult to draw a thread through these two offerings. Trying to do so will ultimately confuse your prospect. Put yourself in their shoes and ask, “What am I buying from this company”? Am I buying IT services or marketing services? I’m not saying that the types of skills can’t mix, but can you integrate the two disciplines in a way that you sell one thing to your prospect?

For example, a marketing person that has a strong technical background could offer marketing services that include set up and training of the infrastructure required to track and manage customers and leads, such as an appropriate Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system for their business.

Other skills may be combined a bit more easily. For example, you can combine event planning and photography skills. These two skills could be part of either a marketing discipline or a discipline that provides wedding services. It depends on your target and who you enjoy working with the most – brides or corporations.

Verify if these Skills Support Your Core Business

Sometimes your skills can be supporting services of your core business, even if they are not from the same discipline. Think about whether your skills can enhance your service offerings, rather than be separate offerings. Let them help you deliver a quality service rather than separating them out. Then your marketing can express the value you offer, rather than trying to explain the bits and pieces.

For example, if you happen to be good at IT services and at business operations, use the operational aspect to provide a very project-oriented service that includes developing the technology plan with budgets, purchasing options, setting up the day-to-day operations processes, etc. You help a business get their technology working for them, and you help them develop and track the operations of the business from expense tracking, accounts payable, and other operational tasks. Marketing IT services and business operations equally under the business will confuse your prospects. Who then is your target audience – the operations manager or the IT manager? Marketing one service with the other supporting it is far more focused and allows you to provide your target market with a valuable offering.

Separate into Two Distinct Businesses

If the two businesses are truly disparate, one not really supporting the other, then maybe you should consider operating two separate businesses. If you sell real estate, keep that completely separate from your Web development firm. The questions you need to ask yourself are:

• Which is the primary business?

  It is important to determine which business you will devote the most time, money and effort running. If you feel both are primary businesses, you may want to hire a business coach and think this through before you become totally overwhelmed. People have run two separate businesses, but it may not be the right thing for you.

• Can the second business operate effectively with less attention?

  Some Internet-based businesses can operated pretty much unattended once they are established. If you have a business at this stage, then feel free to start another, more demanding business. If the second business requires a lot of attention to make it successful, then you might want to reconsider starting a second at this time.

• Are you equally as passionate about both businesses?

  Multiple streams of income is a good thing, but if you are really passionate about one of the businesses, then why aren’t you putting all of your effort into that business and ensure that it is a winner?

Focus on Your Core Competency

When you focus your business, you maximize customer value because you clearly address a critical need. You build your reputation and become known for a particular product or service. Expansion is fine as long as you offer something complementary to your current products or services. If you find it difficult to discover the thread that ties all the pieces together, then you probably have moved too far from the core of your business. If you stray too far from your core, you run the risk of diluting the brand you have worked so hard to establish.

• The company skips research and instead relies on the ‘gut feel’ of key individuals, or
• The company decides to study a problem to death and is afraid to make a decision until every last unknown has been explored.

Each of these paths is fraught with peril. The first may lead to wild swings in direction unfounded by fact while the second leads to “paralysis by analysis”. This article provides some practical information about market research to help you avoid going down either of these two paths.

Definition

Market research is defined as the collection and analysis of information about a company’s customers, competitors, or markets for purposes of business decision making. Information may come from primary sources (the buyers themselves) or from secondary sources (already published and publicly available data).

This definition has two main components:

• There are many sources from which you can gather information. It is important that in doing research you rely on several sources so as to not adopt hidden biases that may come from any one source.
• You need to deal with information, not data. In order to become actionable, the data that is collected must be interpreted to reveal its real value.

Primary and Secondary Sources

Often times the very best source of market research data comes from the people you know – in particular those that already buy from you. There is a wealth of information you can gleam from people you already have a business relationship with – provided you collect it religiously. Every company needs to have a customer database where you gather demographic information. (Note that the database may be as simple as an Excel spreadsheet or as complex as a full-blown sales force automation system.)

What should you collect?

To start, business-to-business companies want to collect information about their customers’ vertical industry, size, revenue and location. Depending on their particular product or service, business-to-consumer companies may want to capture customer information such as ZIP code, occupation, and gender. Beyond this basic information you want to collect information about how the customer found you and why they purchased from you. How do you know why they buy? Ask them!

Ultimately your goal is to be able to ask – and answer – questions such as: “Why are high tech companies in Maine buying my product?”, or “How do teachers in Holden find out about my business, and why do they buy.”

You cannot ask only your customers however, as this never helps you understand the world that didn’t (yet) buy from you. Understanding their wants and needs is harder, but can be done in a wide variety of ways.

• Read third party reports in journals or from analysts who cover your industry
• Talk to you people that you do business with to get their view of the customer needs
• Create a survey you can send out to interested parties. There are lots of good on-line tools you can use to quickly and easily create a survey. I’ve used Zipsurvey, SurveyMonkey and Zoomerang in the past and found all of them affordable and easy to use. Your on-line newsletter is a great way to distribute this.

Lastly you can look at general demographic information from organizations such as Hoovers), InfoUSA, or the US Census bureau, available through sites like www.mass.gov/mgis or www.freedemographics.com. These tools can help provide ‘big picture’ information about markets, allowing you to understand at a high level the size of your prospective market.

Not Just Data, Information

For any of this ‘stuff’ you have collected, it only becomes meaningful when you filter it with your own set of experiences. Let me provide two examples to illustrate this point:

On a recent project, I was in a discussion with an industry analyst. In it he touted the traction a particular company was getting in selling their solution to mid-size customers. When pushed on who specifically was buying, it turns out his data source was the CEO of the company in question.  

On a separate project, we did some data mining and noticed that we had large number of mid-sized banks as customers. Digging deeper into the data showed us that there was a common buying criteria for all of these companies.

In both of these cases the data only became valuable after it was further analyzed and processed. Admittedly this is sometimes the hardest part and where the ‘art’ of market research comes in. The best tool to use during this process is an inquiring mind that constantly tries to find what might be behind the raw data that you’re seeing.

First Steps

For many people, the first step in market research is to understand its elements and most companies can benefit most from getting their customer database in shape to help revel the hidden information about the people they already know.

The phrase “As a business owner, you must spend time working on your business as well as in your business” is a statement that has much wisdom. Working on your business usually refers to spending time marketing your business to ensure that you constantly have your name in front of your prospects.

Marketing is not something you can turn on and off. Marketing is 24×7 and should be an integral part of your business culture. Excuses like “I’m too busy right now” or “I don’t have the budget or staff” is a recipe for disaster. What happens when your pipeline empties? How will you get your business rolling again?

Like any task that must be performed every day, you need to figure out a way to make it a habit. We must learn to schedule time to develop your marketing campaigns. If you never put marketing high enough on your list of important tasks, you will never find the time. This article covers ideas that can help you make time for marketing.

Make Marketing a Part of your Daily Routine

Marketing is more of a mindset than the ability to devote time to particular tasks. If you consider marketing an integrated part of your normal business day, you won’t consider it an extra activity and time becomes less of an issue. You begin to realize that you have opportunities to market yourself in almost every context in which you interact with people. That doesn’t mean to “sell” your business every time you meet someone. What it does mean is to always project the image you want to project so that prospects and referral sources will want to find out more.

You must commit to making time for marketing. Whether to attend networking events, develop a seminar series, seek out speaking opportunities, or write a proposal, you must schedule the time and treat it like any other appointment. Without a commitment to your business that marketing is essential, you’ll find yourself consistently putting off your marketing efforts, which could haunt you a month or two from now.

Develop a Marketing Plan that Helps You Focus

Without a plan, most businesses spend time, money and effort on activities that don’t benefit the business. Trying to navigate your way through the web of marketing possibilities is time-consuming and most likely not your core competency. By developing your own, individual marketing plan enables you to make optimal use of the time you have and to avoid tasks that don’t align with your priorities and basically waste time.

A marketing plan guides you though the maze and breaks the effort down into manageable pieces that are more easily accomplished. Marketing is not a monolithic entity that is undertaken as one major project. It is a series of small, integrated activities that help you educate your target audience about how you can help them and continues to build visibility and awareness over a period of time.

Outsource Marketing to Buy Back Time

Have you determined your marketing goals? If you have, align your marketing activities that help you work towards your goals first. If a task does not help you achieve them, determine whether you are better off outsourcing them. Does it make sense to try to design your own brand identity, business cards, or Web site? Or should you take advantage of external skills for those tasks while you prepare for a seminar, speaking opportunity or event? Which tasks are most crucial to you achieving your marketing goals? Create time for marketing by determining where you can effectively delegate and where you need to take control.

Opportunity costs are a topic of every economics class. So why are we so hesitant to spend money to off-load our time so we can take advantage of every opportunity that arises? How much is your time worth? As a small business owner, I know how hard it is to spend money on something I know I can do. But even as a marketing consultant, there are times I will outsource the project to a capable person because I need to use my time with my customers, executing a marketing program that guides me towards my desired objective or building my business. The choice is yours.

Transform Marketing into a Way of Life

In order to market yourself 24×7, consider marketing as a way of thinking, acting and getting the word out about you and your business. Redefine marketing as projecting who you are, your strengths, and how you can help others solve a problem. For many services businesses, this is exactly what their marketing should communicate.

When you meet someone at a networking event, don’t introduce yourself as “I do marketing”, “I sell insurance” or “I am a designer”. Instead, introduce yourself in a more interesting way. For example:

• A marketing consultant is someone who “helps businesses get new clients”.
• An interior designer is someone who “transforms houses into dreams”.
• Insurance salesperson is someone who “helps you sleep at night”.

By introducing yourself by the benefit you bring to your clients, you have a better chance of getting the attention of the person you are speaking with long enough for them to remember you. As a business owner, you are marketing your business continuously. Take advantage of every opportunity to be visible and be noticed.

Develop Marketing Communications that Work

Depending on your business, there are many avenues to take to get the word out about who you are and what you do. Your prospective clients must be aware of you and perceive you to have the expertise they need before they will even entertain hiring you. To become more visible and credible to your target audience, write articles for publications read by your market, present at their trade association meetings, send newsletters to targeted companies, and host seminars for industry leaders. Each of these activities will increase your visibility, make personal contacts, and help you become the expert in your field. Be sure you follow up with those who show interest by scheduling some time to talk.

Be Persistent and Patient

Marketing is a process that never ends and it takes time for marketing activities to bear fruit. Don’t expect instant results from your marketing activities or you’ll get discouraged and give up too quickly. Every activity plants a seed. Every activity reinforces the previous one. Persistence and patience are the keys to successful marketing. If you spend time each week marketing your business, you will find your pipeline is always full.

Reality: Marketing is about educating your target market about your products and services and why they should buy from you. Marketing is everything you do to reach this target audience, whether it is advertising, direct marketing, Internet Marketing, events, public relations, strategic partnerships or networking. Take advantage of all the options available to your business that make sense in terms of applicability and budget to your business and you will see an increase in awareness of your products and services.

Myth 2: Lower prices encourage more people to buy

Reality: If that were true (and in some cases it may be), no one would buy a BMW verses a Ford. Differentiators are what the prospect perceives is valuable to them. The reason for so many options among types of products is that people have different views of what is valuable to them. That is why it is so important to target your product or service correctly so that you can provide the maximum value at the right price, not an artificially discounted price because you are trying to reach the wrong audience.

Myth 3: Offering a broad range of products and services ensures more sales

Reality: Too many options confuse your buyer. Making your prospect make too many decisions will kill the sale. By offering a convenient package at a perceived valuable price, you will sell more product and service than you would by trying to sell lots of giblets. Take a look at today’s computers. They are not longer kits that you assemble yourself. The manufacturers offer a line of products in small, medium and large – price points that please most consumers. In fact, the lower priced models are probably not the most valuable and when you actually go to buy, you end up buying the higher priced version because it offers more for the money.

Myth 4: Email marketing is no longer effective due to SPAM

Reality: Email marketing is still effectively if done properly. People always want information and providing it through an opt-in marketing program is a way to reach people you normally would not reach. However, buying a list from a less than reputable broker and sending out lots of email to people who are not interested in what you have to offer is SPAM and should not be done. But building your own in-house email list by encouraging visitors to your web site to sign up for your newsletter or other type of correspondence should be done and is ok. Just because some people abuse a very good medium to reach people with your message does not mean you should abandon it all together.

Myth 5: Great marketing works instantly

Reality: Although marketing can shorten the sales cycle, and some tactics can produce instant results, marketing is about sustained contact with your target audience to ensure they know who you are when they are about to buy. Marketing is an investment and like all good investments, they take time to achieve the greatest gains.

Myth 6: Successful marketing campaigns win awards

Reality: If your ad agency or web design agency is more interested in winning an award than helping your business thrive, then run as fast and far as you can and find an agency who is concerned with results for YOU, not for them. Yes, we all like customer success stories and awards for our work if it is available to us, but that is secondary. You are paying them for their services, not to do something that will get them recognition. Keep in mind that advertising and web design that is artistically wonderful could send the wrong message, not deliver the message clearly to your prospect, or mislead your prospect if the visual is contradictory to your brand.

Myth 7: Internet Marketing is all you need for marketing programs

Reality: Internet marketing is a wonderful tool for all businesses today. Its ability to reach your prospects when they are most ready to buy is a cost-effective means of getting your message out. But Internet marketing is not the only game in town. We often refer to “integrated marketing” plans because it is the integration of many different types of marketing activities that drive visitors to your web site, to call you or to buy. Don’t overlook the value of direct marketing, advertising, public relations, events, partnerships and networking to round out your marketing plan.

Myth 8: Messages need to be changed often, otherwise your marketing gets old

Reality: Consistency and repetition is marketing’s best friend. Just when you are bored to tears with your marketing message or marketing campaign is just about the time your messages may resonate with your target audience. Changing your messages, brand, or marketing campaign for the sake of change is a waste. Be sure you plan a strategy that has options. For example, if you are doing advertising, you can start a theme and change the image throughout the campaign, sending the same message to you clients. This eliminates potential boredom and increases interest.

Myth 9: Advertising sells product

Reality: Advertising builds awareness and generates leads. If you try to sell within your ad copy, you run the risk of turning off prospects that are currently information gathering. You need to attract prospects first and educate them on your products and services. The education process would include regular contact with them about your business, services, products and special offers you may have. This develops a trust relationship with your prospect will make it easier for them to eventually buy from you. An add that sells skips the building trust stage which becomes an obstacle to a prospect responding to your ad for information.

Myth 10: Partnerships and Alliances are for big companies

Reality: Partnerships and alliances are extremely important for all companies. We can’t do it all and having partners you trust there when you need them, to offer a service or product you can’t, helps your customer get what they need from you. Just because you are in the same business does not necessarily mean you are competition. Join forces to increase your resources, find areas they are stronger than you and utilize that aspect of their business, or package some services together to offer your clients more value for their money. Yes, these activities are part of marketing and can help you get more visibility, more clients, and more revenue.

Summary

Marketing is about educating your prospects and customers about you, your products and services, and how you can help them solve a problem. Marketing should educate, inform, announce, enlighten and influence human behavior. All the ways you can think of to accomplish this for your company is a marketing activity. Marketing is truly an investment in time, creativity, resources, and energy. The more you can invest the greater business success you will have.

There could be several reasons that this happens. If it is happening to you, make sure you are not committing the following four deadly sins of marketing. These sins certainly won’t commit you to eternal doom, but they could put your business into serious jeopardy.

Do Your Marketing Messages Speak to Your Prospects?

Developing clear, concise messages focused on helping your prospects solve a problem are critical to successful marketing activities. Review your messages and ensure they communicate what you do, for whom you do it, and what benefit they will gain from doing business with you. If your messages are vague, too broad, or inwardly focused, you will lose your prospect quickly.

Messages that do not convey the value and benefit of working with you is a lost opportunity for moving the relationship forward. Don’t lead with your process, the “how you do things”. Instead, focus on the outcome, the “what you get when we’re done”. It is far more interesting to your prospect to talk about themselves, what they need, and what they are looking for. Keep the how you do things for later discussions with the prospect once you’ve convinced them you can help them achieve their goals.

Is Your Business Positioned Properly?

Some businesses end up getting categorized incorrectly mostly by their competition, making it very difficult for them to easily explain what they do to their prospects. Remember that positioning is the way in which you want current and potential customers to think about your business. If your business offers a great service which results in a higher return on investment, make sure you position your business as such and not let the competition position your business as the most expensive.

I have a client whose competition positioned them as the high cost service, when in reality they did provide a better, more reliable service that resulted in their clients achieving a more lucrative and reliable cash flow. After turning their messages around and saying this to their prospects, they were able to negate their competitor’s negative messages about them.

Another prospect I’ve spoken with has been put into a general category that compares them to a florist, when actually they are an event designer. The work they do warrants a higher price structure, but they end up being perceived as a high priced florist. Unfortunately, they lose the prospect before they get a chance to explain what they do and how they can turn your special event into a beautiful production.

Can You Differentiate Your Business Effectively?

What is it you can do that others in your field cannot? Can you articulate your key differentiator that sets you apart from others in the crowded market of like businesses? Differentiation is a way to make you stand out from the crowd. When developing a positioning you need to select the most persuasive, meaningful and unique difference that will allow you to compete for the largest number of potential clients. There are four categories of differentiation that you can consider: price, focus, product/service, or customer service. You certainly can have more than one differentiator in different categories; however, you need to make sure that the one you use is the most compelling benefit for your target audience. The key to successful differentiation is to know your clients really well and pick a blend of differentiation methods that truly sets you apart. And remember, the differentiation is about the client, therefore speak in terms of benefits.

Are Your Marketing Materials Professional?

Great messages, clear positioning and differentiation work wonders for businesses. But put them in a less than professional setting and your prospects will never stay long enough to hear them. Your business’s Web site, brochures, and other sales tools have to contain quality content and look professional to get the prospect’s attention. If your Web site is your main fulfillment piece for your marketing programs, be sure to get someone who can effectively represent your brand identity in the design of your site. If your content is vague, lacking substance, or just not clear, get help from someone who can write effective content. Self printed, black and white business cards send a negative message about the lack of success, not frugality as some people may think. Cutting corners and trying to save money on the basics can hurt your business more than you know.

Your Marketing Penance

For your marketing penance, you need to spend one hour on defining your target market and two hours on developing your messages, positioning and differentiation that speaks to this audience. Once these tasks are completed, to ensure you are absolved from your marketing sins, you must determine the most professional way to project these messages to your prospects. The gates of marketing heaven are not that hard to reach!

But when it comes to marketing, patience is a virtue. If you believe that marketing will deliver high return on investment in a short period of time, you are only fooling yourself and setting your business up for failure. Marketing is about building relationships with prospects to turn them into long term customers. Regardless of the marketing activity you are implementing right now, the rewards may come – but it may take three to 18 months.

Some business owners thing that if someone doesn’t respond to your offer immediately, throw them away. But to cut through the noise, prove that your business is worth using and get the attention of your prospect, you need to touch these prospects several times. It is the rare occurrance that someone receives your first marketing activity and buys immediately. It happens, but it is rare.

Whether you are generating leads from direct marketing, internet marketing, public relations, or referrals, you need to take time to nurture those leads and build a level of trust between you and them. Keep in mind that a new lead may be interested in what you have to offer but may not be ready to buy right now. If you develop the relationship, they will most likely call on you when they need what you have to offer.

Don’t give up on your prospects. In business, everything is timing. When the time is right, those prospects will take your call, ask you for a proposal or initiate a discussion on how you can help them. If you stop marketing to them, they will forget you. Out of sight in the marketing world is truly out-of-mind.