SME Marketing – Where to Start with Marketing for a Small Business

SME Marketing – as a small business where do you start with marketing to help you bring in a consistent flow of leads and customers?

Most small businesses were started by a practitioner, you are really good at what you do, but don’t always have all the relevant skills or the time to run and market your business. As the business grows the first things that are outsourced quickly tend to be bookkeeping, finance, and human resources – often due to the legal requirements to get it right. Marketing and sales, however, is one of the last to be outsourced and is often done by the business owner themselves – is that you?

Getting and keeping customers is the lifeblood of any business, but it’s hard to know what the best ways to market your business are with often limited budgets. How do you grow your database, increase awareness, generate more leads, drive more customers to you? For many businesses it can take them down the rabbit holes of ideas because let’s face it, there are a million ways (well, maybe not quite a million)…

SME Marketing Rabbit holes:

• Website
• SEO
• Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, blah, blah, blah
• Print Advertising
• Radio
• Digital Marketing
• Direct Mail
• Email
• Video
• Blogging
• Social Media Advertising
• TV
• Networking
• Landing page
• Drip campaign
• Exhibitions

Etc, Etc, Etc.

Crazy?

Slightly!

No wonder you are confused, overwhelmed and frustrated.

As a business owner, how on earth are you supposed to know how to market your business, to generate a steady stream of leads that you can close into clients and customers?

Is it time you stop wasting your time and money going down rabbit holes and finally get your marketing to bring you all the leads you want?

But there’s a problem:

1. Effective SME marketing is now more complex than ever;
2. Effective marketing requires specialist knowledge and understanding (that most business owners don’t have because they’re practitioners of their craft, not marketers);
3. Effective marketing requires a high proficiency of execution to work well;
4. Effective marketing is harder to achieve than ever before;

And even when you do achieve some success, momentum stalls and the marketing soon stops because you, the business owner is now too busy servicing the work to keep the marketing going.

So ‘famine-to-feast’ becomes the norm; the best case scenario.

And in all cases, that’s because there’s NO SYSTEM, no framework, precious few re-usable marketing ‘assets’, and an activity plan that is, at best, ad hoc.

As a small business you need a marketing and sales system working in your business that predictably and consistently brings in the right flow of new customers every week, like clockwork. When you have this, then owning a business is phenomenal.

But when you don’t have that, then owning a business is unpredictable, unreliable, and incredibly stressful.

Cracking the rhythmic acquisition of customers changes everything

All businesses need to have in place their Foundation Blocks of Marketing – because without having these in place, there’s no point even thinking about starting an exciting marketing campaign.

We have eleven foundation blocks we work through with our clients, just some of the things included are:

• Marketing Asset Review
• Google My Business
• Customer Reviews
• Price Reviews
• Remarketing
• Your follow up process

Once these are all in place and working, then you can start developing your exciting marketing campaigns. At this stage, the first thing you need to do is to really understand your customer, and create an utterly compelling, differentiating message. This will make it easier for you to target your ideal customer, have a strong brand message and positioning, and have created your category of one. Why is this important? Because you can spend a huge amount of money attracting customers to your business but if you are shouting the wrong message to the wrong people then it’s wasted.

Now that you understand who your ideal customer is and what your marketing message is, then, and only then can you start to drive the traffic and bring in leads – no longer getting lost in the rabbit warren by going down all of those holes! Because now, you will have an understanding of which marketing pillars will be right for your business – because you understand your customer. And this needs to be done systematically.

Many small businesses then miss out the most important thing – measure and track. You see, if you don’t know the score, then you can’t tell the winners from the losers. So tracking of every lead, conversion rate, cost per lead and sale, is key to knowing what’s working and what isn’t. From there you know where to put less or more effort for more cost-effective marketing. And this needs to be done EVERY day, as part of your daily routine.

I work with my clients to implement an SME Marketing and Sales System in their business that fixes the marketing confusion. For good. It puts you in control. It makes the rhythmic acquisition of customers a reality. For you.

For more information on this system, I have a brochure you can access here (and you don’t even have to give me your email address!).

If you’d just like a chat to see if I can help you with your marketing then click here

For a chat about your marketing – Call Me

No obligation, no cost, just a conversation about how you can make your marketing more effective