Marketing…. A Key Lever In Monetization

What does effective marketing do?  It helps you put your concept, product, service, or offering in front of your ideal or target audience.  If it is great marketing, they will be compelled to engage with you and listen to what you have to say.

So, you should Always Be Marketing if you want to monetize more effectively.

Sounds obvious, doesn’t it?

“ALWAYS BE CLOSING”

This is a little variation of the sales adage “Always Be Closing,” but selling and marketing are a little different. It’s amazing how many business owners refuse to do any type of consistent marketing or advertising! They mistakenly believe that they should only market when they need a quick influx of cash. And they often believe that they can only market when the economy is good or they are flush in cash.  Think about it: in tough times, what do businesses often cut first?   Yes, marketing and advertising gets slashed, when, in fact, that is the last thing that should be stopped. Henry Ford once said, “A man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops a clock to save time.”   Whether the business is new, struggling, or just in plain need of customers we often hear, “We do not have money for marketing.”  Even though the “open it and they will come” strategy worked in Field of Dreams, when it comes to building a business, that kind of approach rarely, if ever, works.

There is no doubt you must have a consistent and targeted marketing strategy if you want your business to be profitable and lasting. You see a small little ad in the local newspaper or community publication once or twice a year can hardly be considered marketing consistently. Yet many businesses will do just that, believing that they are properly “marketing” their business. But, even if you spend more than that on advertising, marketing extends beyond the occasional sales ad and into your everyday business interactions.

Something to Think About

Here’s something to think about: If we were to meet you at a business event, how would you introduce yourself?  What would you say about your business?

If you’re like most business owners who hire us, you would probably tell us what you sell or simply say that you are in a certain industry, right? Isn’t that what most people say when asked this question?  Well, it’s true that you do sell something and operate within some industry. However, your answer to that question should quickly educate any potential customer and lead to questions that will help you to learn more about them.  For example, if someone were to ask us what we do, we would say, “We teach companies how to grow their business 15% – 75% in six months through sound education-based marketing and sales strategies.”

If an “education-based marketing” approach is not part of your typical response, then you’re most likely part of the group of businesses who are not maximizing their profit potential and may in fact be having serious profit problems.

Quite frankly, many business owners are confused about what business they are in, and they make it sound more complicated than it actually has to be. So let’s break down your responsibilities as a business owner. The most important activities in your business should be as easy as 1-2-3:

It’s easy as 1, 2, 3

1. Understanding your clients’ wants, needs and desires and then providing the education-based information they will benefit from.
2. Creating compelling marketing for you, your concepts, products, services, and/or ideas.
3. Selling and then delivering the promised result(s).

If the doors of your business are open, you should be focusing on these three activities every day!

We are not here to beat you up over what you’re not doing, or over what you don’t know about marketing. We are here to show you a system that works—today! After working for years with business clients, we have come to realize that most business owners do not know what works and truly are not to blame for their inability to put together effective marketing campaigns.

Food for thought

Think about this: Did you receive an instruction manual about how to get customers when you first started your business? Was there a course offered in grade school, in high school, in your college major, or at a trade or professional school designed to teach entrepreneurs how to attract qualified customers to their business? Heck, no!

Plus, what’s more, most of the books on marketing talk about how to build a compelling brand –the old method, which worked when you could create a TV ad to monopolize the 4–7 stations in your media market, but THIS is no longer a effective or cost-efficient model.

When you first opened your doors, you probably just went out there with a spirit of bravado and told everyone what you were doing. Then, with great expectation, you sat back and waited for customers to come rolling into your business with cash or credit card in hand. After all, your idea was a sure thing, right?

When things start slow

Back in the day, So when things were a little slow to start, you probably turned to industry publications, magazines, and newsletters, which focus solely on products and customer service as the solution to your problems. Now days, we have google, apps, software and more to TELL US EXACTLY what our customers like and don’t! Easy right??

Then,, you looked around at what the competition was doing and you probably began to think that if you offered your product or service at a lower price, customers would flock to your business instead of your competition. But what really happened?

Initially, you may have seen a rush of customers after you ran the promotion offering the product at a low price, but did that rush of customers continue? Did most of them return after the sale was over? No.

Then, as time went on, you probably began doing less and less advertising because you weren’t seeing great results from your advertising dollars. Deep down inside, you may have had the gnawing feeling that you should be doing some sort of marketing and advertising, but you didn’t have a clue what to do. Then, since you spent your available money, you were up the creek without a paddle.

You may have even bought into the false belief that you were just a simple small business owner, selling a gadget or providing a service, but not a marketer.

This terrible mistake in thinking has been made across the country by entrepreneurs who fail to realize that they have to become marketers.

See, if you want to be a successful and profitable business owner, then your primary job every single day is attracting more customers to your business. That’s it!

What’s the only way you will make money?

Why? Because the only way you make money is if there is an exchange of money for the value that you will be delivering.  You need people to come to your business willing, ready, and able to pay you money in exchange for what you offer.

Other day-to-activities that do not bring in revenue can easily become the focus of a misguided small business owner.

SOME EXAMPLES

For example:

• You don’t get paid when you counsel employees.
• You don’t get paid when you do payroll.
• You don’t get paid when you answer questions about when the next delivery truck will arrive.
• You sure as heck don’t get paid when you sit around all day hoping and praying that someone is going to walk into your business or pick up a phone and call you!

How DO you get paid???

You only get paid if a transaction occurs, if you deliver value in exchange for money.  Because of this, your number one job each and every day should be to implement your strategy and make sure the tactics that you implement are driving more paying customers through the business’ proverbial doors. And once they come in the first time, you must make sure that you have an effective plan in place to capture their information and sell to them again and again. Then because of the outstanding job you and/or your team did, you become honored with their referrals. The only way to do this is to become a marketing and advertising zealot.

When you begin to embrace the role of marketer in your business, it will become very easy to see if you are using the right tactics to attract customers. And, more importantly, this focus and attention will allow you to easily navigate any economic conditions that may arise. This is the edge that you want and need as a business owner. We know some business owners who had NEVER advertised their business. It was as if they rely solely on luck to keep their books balanced. However, when things got tough, they were forced to adjust quickly or they went belly-up.

Why is marketing is so crucial?

Marketing is so crucial to your business that if you want to be making money every day, you should have different campaigns in play at all times.

Now, the questions you may be asking at this point are,

“Isn’t that excessive?

Won’t that just overload my customers?

Will I be seen as tacky?”

And the answer to each of those questions is exactly the same, “Not if your marketing is good.”

So, if my marketing is good….Then what?

If your marketing is good, then your customers will never feel like they are being “sold.” With the right kind of marketing strategies, prospects and customers won’t get tired of seeing your ads because you are bringing them compelling information that impacts their lives and gives them value.

Are you avoiding marketing and advertising because you believe that it is too expensive? Even now you may instantly associate the word “advertising” with those multi-million dollar Super Bowl spots and think that only the “Big Boys” of business can truly play in the marketing sandbox.

Well, here’s the great news for today’s entrepreneur — that is no longer the case!  In our “information overload” society with over 400 channels on some cable or satellite systems and all of the new media strategies, it is much easier for smaller companies to get themselves noticed.  In fact, you can not only get noticed, you can move someone to take action through compelling, targeted advertising.

Today there are at least one hundred or more ways to advertise your business on a shoe-string budget, many of which didn’t exist 10 years ago. And you will be amazed that most of them cost less than what you spend on lunch for the week. Actually, many of them are free.

Did you just say FREE??

Yes, I said F-R-E-E. You can afford that, right?

But you MUST view yourself as the marketer of your business–not just the owner of a business–in order to succeed in the new economy. Heck, to succeed in any economy.

Ready to learn more?

You can excel and be a very successful marketer if you thoughtfully implement the strategies outlined in all of the upcoming blog posts…Stay Tuned!!

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