Marketing Action Club BLOG

Many small business owners and independent professionals face a marketing conundrum. It’s not that you don’t know you need to be marketing. Many just don’t make it a regular and consistent part of running the business.

In order to get regular and consistent marketing results, you need to have regular and consistent effort.

But here is the small business marketing conundrum for many. See if this sounds familiar at all.

When business is good, you really don’t have a lot of time for marketing. You need to service the clients you have and take good care of them.

In other words, you’re busy and don’t feel like you have excess capacity to devote to yet another activity. But, when the business slows down, or maybe crawls to a halt, what do you do?

Well, it’s time to start marketing. You need to bring some new business through the door.

And for many a small business owner, that brings up a couple of problems or challenges.

1. Any marketing activity that you engage in tends to be unplanned and reactive to the current business slow down.
2. You might be feeling cash strapped and don’t have money budgeted to pay for any marketing expenses.

The result is a hodge-podge of unfocused, random marketing activities. It was once described to me as more of a desperate searching than marketing at that point.

In addition to being unplanned, your marketing doesn’t work well because you’re needy. Prospects can sense it when you’re needy for business. And, the harder you try to “get” business, the more you actually push it away.

It’s a real small business marketing conundrum.

In order to get regular and consistent marketing results, you need to have regular and consistent marketing effort.

To break out of this marketing predicament, start by creating a marketing plan. Even a simple marketing plan will outperform the reactive scatter gun approach.

• Clarify your niche
• Articulate your uniqueness
• Create an attention getting message
• Compile success stories and testimonials
• Identify the marketing tools and tactics you can build into how you run your business
• Clarify your goals and intended results for each marketing tactic
• Create action steps to deploy each tactic
• Get out your calendar and schedule key activities

There, that wasn’t so hard now was it? Don’t over-complicate the effort.

Build marketing into your existing processes. Make it part of how you run the business. Don’t wait for business to crawl to a halt before you start thinking about what marketing step you should take.

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