Why is my marketing not working for me?

There is nothing more frustrating that doing some marketing and finding it doesn’t work for your business – especially if you’ve spent money on it. Not only is it annoying, but it’s also demoralising and pretty soon when you’ve exhausted all the ideas you had for marketing your business, I can completely understand why you’d think that marketing was a huge pain.

But why isn’t your marketing working for you? Let’s look at some common reasons and see if we can put them right.

REASON NUMBER 1: TARGETING THE WRONG PEOPLE

The easiest way to find customers for your business is to go where they go. The most common reason why your marketing isn’t working is that you don’t know enough about where your customers go. Let me explain. If you were targeting mothers for instance, common places you might find mothers include doctor’s surgeries, mother and toddler groups, post offices, schools, nurseries etc. If you were targeting HR Managers, you might go to CIPD meetings, read Personnel Today, go to HR conferences etc.

Sounds easy doesn’t it. But, I meet far too many businesses who tell me that anyone is their customer or are appealing to the end user rather than the person who buys their services (i.e. the employee rather than the HR manager who will pay for what they’re selling).

Solution: Go back to basics. Really define who your customer is. Think about what motivates them and what frustrates them. Then think about where they might go to buy what you’re offering and make sure you’re in these places when they’re looking.

REASON NUMBER 2: NOT EVERYTHING YOU DO WILL GET YOU CUSTOMERS
Whenever you do any marketing, there are three objectives: a) Get awareness of your business b) Build your reputation and c) Get customers. Agree? Problem is that many of the marketing ideas you’re doing already are probably better at getting awareness of your business or building your reputation. PR for instance is great for awareness as is advertising; networking is great for awareness; doing a talk is good for building your reputation; sending out leaflets is good for awareness and so on.

You can get business from these methods, but it an extra step – capturing contact details!! If you do some PR, you’ve no idea who has found your press release really interesting but didn’t get around to calling you, let alone who might have looked at it. Therefore, you need to build some mechanism in each of your marketing methods to get contact details of people who are interested.

So in a press release, you might offer a free sample or a free newsletter; in a talk you might offer a free summary of your presentation and so on. If people give you their contact details, they’re telling you they’re interested – then all you need to do is follow-up.

Solution: Without contact details your marketing ideas will do little more than build your reputation and the awareness of your business. In each marketing activity you do, find some way of capturing those contact details.

REASON NUMBER 3: NOT DOING MARKETING

Ah – caught you! I know it’s hard. I know you have 1001 other things you want to do. But, the simple fact remains that most small business owners who say they aren’t getting as much business as they would like are not doing any marketing. They may dabble in it, but they probably aren’t doing it consistently.

You see if you really want your marketing to work for you, you should be trying 5 (yes 5) marketing ideas at once and putting a system in place to capture contact details so that you can follow up with people.

If you really don’t have time, find a marketing person to do some marketing for you (you can always contact us you know) which frees you up to do the things you like doing.
Solution: Do marketing (or if you really don’t like it, find someone to do it for you).

9 times out of 10, the three reasons I’ve outlined above are the main reasons why marketing doesn’t work for small business owners. Think about the solutions I’ve mentioned and try putting them in place for your business. Good luck.

Exceptional Thinking provides marketing help and advice for start-ups and small businesses. For more tips and ideas, go to www.exceptionalthinking.co.uk and sign up for the free newsletter.

Don't let 'being too busy' put you off...

Just recently several small business owners have said to us that they've been reluctant to do some marketing for fear that they'll be 'too busy' and they won't be able to cope with the workload. This is a common misconception about marketing, so I thought I'd clear it up:

Firstly, if you start doing marketing today, it will probably take at least three months to actually see the results. And that's if you work really hard at it! New business won't come all at once; it's more likely it will gradually build up over time and you'll be able to cope with it.

I always say to business owners who tell me that they're worried about being 'too busy' - let's get you there first and then we'll worry about that. If you end up being too busy, you can choose to stop marketing, be more selective about who you take on as a customer or take on some additional help - being 'too busy' can always be dealt with.

Don't fear being 'too busy' - you can always deal with this. And remember it's always better than being 'too quiet'!

For more advice and help on managing your time in your small business, check out our new e-book "Managing your Time" at http://www.exceptionalthinking.co.uk/Survive-Course.php

Do you need a website?

A question I've been asked a lot recently is when you're running your own business, do you need a website? Mmm, interesting one this because I think the answer to this question is not always. If you think about it, there are quite a few industries out there that don't have websites and get away with it - builders, plumbers etc. My builder doesn't even have an email address (he says computers aren't for him) and yet it's never affected his business.

But, the interesting thing about websites is that there is a perception at the moment from the general public that if you don't have a website you're not a 'real' business. So, bearing this in mind, it seems that it is good to have at least a web presence out there.

How do you create a website though and where do you find a good designer? Well my advice on this one is that you shouldn't spend a lot of money on your first website. Why? I guarantee you that a few months after it's gone live you'll hate it. Lots of reasons for this - in a few months you'll find out what you really sell and you'll want to change it; you won't like the text; you'll have criticisms from friends and family and so on.

So, get your first website done as cheaply and as easily as you can. See if you can barter with a contact of yours or whether your mate can do it for you. Don't worry about getting it perfect - just get something up on the internet. Then, when you decide a few months down the line that you'd like to sort it out, now is the time to spend money on it.

In terms of choosing a website designer, I would go out and talk to no less than three. Pick the one that you feel comfortable with and understands your needs. They might not be the cheapest, but liking them is more important when you've already decided to spend the money. The other thing that I think it's well worth investing in is the services of a copywriter. A copywriter is someone who writes the words of websites, brochures, adverts etc and will bring your customers needs to the forefront - don't forget we tend to spend money on the design of the website and forget about what other people will read. Check out Google to find a copywriter near you.

The ups and downs of running a business

When I first started my business, I had a mentor who used to say to me "show me an entrepreneur and I'll show you a manic-depressant" because sometimes you're on top of the world and other times you're on rock bottom. And how quickly this switch can happen - one minute you're bouncing along full of the joys of spring and the next you come crashing back to earth with something as simple as a phone call. Can you resonate with this?

I was just reminded of this today after having a great day with lots of things going right and then arrived back to the office to a letter informing me that we hadn't won a major contract.

So, how do you cope with the ups and downs? My favorite way is to exercise - this always makes me feel happier. What about you? Let me know your top tips to getting yourself back up when everything feels like its going wrong?

What is a SME?

The more I run my business, the more I get irritated with the term SME (Small to Medium Sized Enterprises). Why? Well, a SME can be any business between no staff members right up to 249 members of staff. There's a world of difference between the two. Someone with no members of staff (the vast majority of SMEs) will have completely different issues and concerns that someone with 1 member of staff, let alone 249.

I was with a group the other day that was being led by a guy who clearly did not understand small businesses. The only problem is, the group he was addressing were all small business owners. He thought that the sole problem the business owners faced was dealing with members of staff and forgot about all the other areas of running a business - i.e. marketing, time management, strategy, finance and actually running the business.

And that's the problem when I hear small business owners say that their customers are SMEs too - who do they really mean? Usually when I dig down, they're trying to attract medium sized companies and certainly not one man bands.

So, my challenge for this week is, if you've been using the term SME, try to really narrow down who you're talking about. Do you mean one-man bands or a business that is much larger than that? What issues, motivations and frustrations might the company you're trying to target have? And if you really mean SMALL businesses, make an effort to get to know about them...they do not have the same issues as medium sized companies and the way they think is completly different too.

I'm very happy to help people get to know about small business owners - just contact me and ask!

Work / Life Balance

Happy New Year to everyone!

I'm sure like me, you've been setting your New Year's Resolutions over the last week and a bit and (hopefully) trying to stick with them.

Quite a lot of my resolutions this year are about me - what I want to do personally and have very little to do with the business. It got me thinking - can you truely run a business successfully and have a life?

Over Christmas, I read Gordon Ramsay's New Book "Playing with Fire" which was a good read and highly recommended. But, it's clear from the book that he throws everything he has into his work and lives the personal life to Tara (his wife). He asks a question later on in the book about whether or not you want to really be rich and successful and implies that if you do, you will need to make some sacrifices.

My take on this is that yes, I want the business to be successful and want to make money, but I'm not sure I'm prepared to do that at the expense of other things - because at the end of the day I want to have something more to talk about than the business on my death bed!

But, I'm also aware that the more you focus on other things aside from the business, the more difficult it is to thoroughly devote yourself.

So, I ask the question again - is it possible to truely run a successful business and have a life? I'd certainly be intersted in your thoughts!

Helen

Taking advantage of opportunities

I went to speak to a group of relatively new business owners yesterday, who were lovely by the way and made me feel very welcome. We were talking about building your reputation in your field and they asked me what I'd done to do this. While I was talking to them, I realised that what I'd done was to take advantage of opportunities.

I said to them that we start each day with a blank page and it's up to us how we fill it. I could choose to sit working at my desk each day or I could choose, as I did to go out there, volunteer for things, get involved, build my contacts and take advantage of all the opportunities that are out there.

Let me give you an example - one of my contacts runs start-ups courses for women in schools, which is a relatively new scheme that she has successfully got of the ground. This morning on BBC breakfast news, they were saying that they were looking for schools who were doing something unique and unusual - I would be seizing this opportunity by the throat and contacting BBC telling them about what I was doing.

Another example, a couple of months ago, Steve Wright on BBC Radio 2 (seems to be a bit of a pattern here doesn't there) mentioned his 'business idea of the day' - I don't think he intended to carry this on, but I emailed him loads of business ideas of the day that he could use. Ok, nothing came of it, but you never know...

So, my challenge to you is to take advantage of the opportunities that come your way and go and see what happens. You never know what might come up.