SmashingRed™ Web & Marketing

Some of you may already know this but just to reiterate: you are a marketer. And, to make it even more powerful, your competition are marketers. And, to really bring it home, some of your competition are better at it than you.
Small business owners all to often think that they offer a product or service to the world but the fact of the matter is their success or failure can almost certainly be attributed to the ways in which your company, your brand , and your people and your customers and prospective customers interact.

Here are some quick ways that you can take hold of your marketing and make things happen:

1. Make a plan based on your actual goals for the business.
2. Target the right people. For that matter target someone. Don’t try to market the same way to all people.
3. Schedule your marketing activities. Mark out what activities need to be done when in order to remove the haphazardness and stress of what to do next.
4. Plan the whole cycle! If you are going to be doing a huge campaign to have people call in, you had better make sure that the people who answer your calls know what to do or you could wind up wasting money.
5. Do somthing. Now! Just becuase you haven’t the perfect plan doesn’t mean you should wait for it to arrive. That costs money.
6. Good marketing costs nothing. That means that if your marketing efforts are working they generate revenue and are an investment. Just becuase some marketing is expensible at tax time doesn’t mean is should be treated as such in the day-to-day.
7. Be consistent. Market regularly. The biggest and best way to grow your business is to never stop marketing and to be doing the same things until those things stop working.
8. You are not the customer. Just because you have read the same boring sales letter for the last 5 years doesn’t mean you should change. If it still brings in money, keep on sending it out. When it stops, then you can change it.
9. Your front line employees are marketers too. The lasting impression about the type of service or response from on of your employees is more powerful than most other marketing.

There are hundreds of other ways to take hold of your marketing. Tell me what yours are.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 28th, 2006 at 11:07 am and is filed under Marketing Tips, Miscellanea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.