There’s no doubt that growing your business is an uphill battle.  It’s a challenging economy and the rules have changed for marketing and sales.  Gone are the days when you could just run an ad somewhere and expect your phone to ring. 

Effective marketing (and sales) today is a much different game than it was even 5 to 10 years ago.  Interruption tactics (like cold calling, direct mail or blasting advertisements) can still work but they are less effective every day.  Instead you have to find ways to attract your prospective clients – get them to hold up their hand and show they are interested in learning more.  Bottom line?  You have to think through your marketing and approach it strategically if you want to generate leads.  There’s no room for mistakes if you want successful marketing.

That said – here are 5 things that small business owners are doing to sabotage their marketing success in today’s environment.  Do any of these apply to you?

5 Marketing Killers

Not following up or following through

This one is a cardinal sin and it’s so stupid…but you see it happen over and over again.  A potential client expresses interest or a need in your products or services…and they don’t get any follow up or response.  It may not be a guaranteed sale, but interest is interest!

Personal example:  I recently needed to hire a caterer for an event.  A friend of mine recommended a local caterer and introduced her to me.  I expressed interest in learning more and received a quick (but friendly) response a few days later suggesting a call for more details. 

I gave her several times I was available for a call.  I received no response. 

A week later, I tried one more time to engage (running out of time for my event) and the only response I got was a phone call on a Saturday several days later during a soccer game.  Not being able to hear while at the game, I recommended a call on the following Monday…and received no response after that! 

Obviously I went with another provider – maybe my business didn’t matter, but Kansas City can seem like a small town and this particular caterer now has a bad reputation for professionalism with me (and others who I might talk to).  If you’re too busy to follow up, then you need to rework your business approach and try something different.

Recommendation – Are you following up (in a timely manner) on all of your potential leads and introductions?  If not – make that your top priority.  Not only are you potentially missing out on business, but you’re burning a referral source as well.

No consistency on marketing activities

Arguably the most important thing you can do for your marketing is to be consistent.  A great marketing message will fail if it’s not in front of people in a consistent way.  An excellent marketing tactic that’s not executed consistently is a waste of time.

How many business owners do you know who have a blog or a newsletter but rarely if ever actually update it or send it out?  Life and your business is crazy with lots of ups and downs, but if you don’t figure out how to consistently apply your marketing, you will never get out of that roller coaster world.

Recommendation – Identify at least a few tactics that you can reasonably achieve and make a black and white commitment to do those activities every week or every month.  Build on that once you’ve got the basics down.

Marketing to Everyone!

“So who do you work best with?”  If your answer is some variation on anyone who breathes, then you have already failed at your marketing and your wasting a lot of time and money.  By marketing to everyone…you are marketing to no one!

We are all getting inundated with literally thousands of marketing messages every single day.  A generic message that could apply to anyone is never going to break through that noise…and is never going to be heard.

Recommendation – Who are your BEST clients?  Carve out a subset of them and get really specific about who they are and what they’re looking for?  Try crafting a message just for that niche and see if you don’t get a much better response.

Not using Content /Educational approach for your marketing

Buyers are looking for solutions to their problems and most of the time they have several choices when it comes to providers.  Who are they more likely to choose – Company A who clearly understands the problem and provides lots of educational materials and helpful ideas or Company B who only has feature descriptions on how cool they are?  Who would you buy from?

Content and educational marketing makes you relevant to the large majority of potential clients who aren’t ready to buy yet.  If you can educate, inform and maybe even entertain someone who isn’t ready to buy yet, you stay in the running and likely top of mind for when they are ready to buy.

Recommendation – Start thinking like a consultant.  What’s the last thing you did to help educate your target market?  What could you create that would add value and establish you as an expert?

Not being found online

Quick – do a Google search on your company’s name.  Is your website on the first page of results?  If not…or if you don’t show up at all, then you don’t have any marketing.  The vast majority of buyers use online search as a key step in their decision process.  If they see your company in an advertisement but can’t easily find you online then you don’t exist and you wasted that ad!

Also do a search on the problem you solve. Does your company come up on the first page in that case? It’s more likely people are searching on problems or outcomes (keywords) than for your business name.  This is a bit harder to solve, but carries a lot more weight.

Recommendation – Quick fix…make sure you and your business have a presence on LinkedIn and Facebook – both are good sources for Google.  Longer term fix – leverage content and education based marketing (blog or articles, whitepapers other content) to address your keywords and the problems your prospects are searching for.

It’s Not Rocket Surgery!

None of the above ideas are rocket surgery…or even brain science!    However most small business owners are failing at least one of the above five ideas and many are missing on 2 or more of them.

How about you?  Are you onboard and in good shape with all 5 of the ideas above?  Anything else I’m missing that’s a critical marketing step?  I’d love to hear your thoughts – leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

Shawn Kinkade   Kansas City Business Coach

Photo by Alex E. Proimos

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You’re going to have to learn how to market your products and services effectively.  I’m differentiating marketing from sales as the activities and efforts that draw interested, qualified buyers to ask about your product or service.  Without marketing…the process of getting people to come to you, you have a major uphill battle when it comes to growing your business with strictly outbound sales efforts.

You also have to figure out how to systematize and automate all the major components of your business.  Ultimately it needs to run like a machine…you build the framework and all the components, set up the systems that other people can run (or are automated) and it continues to generate money (and grow) even without your daily input!  It’s the only way to scale your business.

One step in this direction is the combination of these two things – Marketing Automation…building a marketing machine…a system and automation that will help your marketing run (mostly) on it’s own.

Let me give you an example – at Aspire we’ve just started experimenting with some Marketing Automation and although there’s still a long way to go, it’s off to a good start..

Goal for Aspire’s Marketing Automation

Over time we’ve found that the most effective marketing approach for the Business Advisory services we offer is educating business owners with ideas on how they can grow their business.  In order for this educational approach to be effective, it has to be relevant to the right target audience, it has to be shared gradually over time and it ties into additional educational opportunities (i.e. workshops or other events).   So the goal for Marketing Automation for Aspire is to build automated tools that will help facilitate that educational process.

Obviously this blog is a great starting point, but business owners generally don’t have time to dig through a blog to find what they really need.  The answer?  Targeted, high value information and ideas that can be delivered to interested business owners on their terms…I’m generally not available late at night…and there are only so many hours in the day, so it has to be information that’s packaged on a convenient schedule for the entrepreneur.

How does it work?

That’s where the Marketing Automation step comes in – check out out the Sign Up form at the right side of the blog (and also on the main part of the website) for a free e-Book on ‘Leading Your Business To Success’.  This is a great set of information that will benefit any business owner who’s trying to grow their business, with a lot of practical tips and ideas and now that’s we’ve done the hard work of pulling the information together, we can get it to interested business owners in a totally automated fashion.

Some of those business owners will get a lot out of the information and that’s all they want or need – great!  We’re glad to have helped out.  Others will also get a lot out of the information but they’d like help on additional ideas or other issues – that’s great too!  We’d love to meet with them and see if there’s a fit to really help them accelerate what they’re doing.

In addition to the primary set of information – we’ve also created a series of simple Tips to help business owners build Focus, Clarity and Momentum.  Same idea from a marketing automation perspective, but may appeal more to those who are looking for some quick hits rather than big ideas.

In both cases, we are delivering valuable information over time in a way that’s convenient to the reader.  Also we are building up a list of people who have given us permission to talk to them about how to grow their business.  Adding value, starting a conversation and staying top of mind for when it makes sense to take action.  That’s what marketing automation is all about.

Are you automating any of your marketing approach?  What are you using and how are you doing it?  I’d love to hear your thoughts – please share them in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

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I bet you’re really good at what you do.  You add a lot of value to the right kind of customers…probably way more value than you charge for (if you’re like most business owners I know).  You know your industry, your product and service inside and out.  In fact you could go into painful detail on how the work gets done…which actually might be part of the problem!

Which would you rather hear – a litany of facts and figures, features and benefits…or an engaging story that illustrates a problem, an approach and a solution (a happy ending!)?  It sounds like a pretty obvious choice, but look around at how most businesses present themselves from a marketing perspective.  The ones who don’t know any better talk way too much about themselves and about all the cool features they offer.  The smarter ones focus on benefits and outcomes, but even that can be pretty dry and unremarkable over time.

Maybe it’s time to think about telling some stories about your clients.

I had a great chance to hear my friend John Stevenson from Client Kudos talk this afternoon about the power of stories in business – which is what he does for his clients.  Story telling is an art and a science…and it just may be the missing component from your marketing mix.

Why Stories?

Interesting – Stories (done right) are always going to be more interesting than just facts and figures.  Sure you may need those details to help close a sale…you don’t want to leave them out, but in terms of painting the picture of why someone needs your product or service, a story is going to be way more compelling.

Relatable – Stories let people relate.  By telling a story about your best clients, you will inherently attract other potential clients who are like your best clients.  I’m much more likely to pay attention to a story about someone like me then just a random person who I don’t have anything in common with.

Engaging – People get into stories, the format ties directly into how people communicate – check out this great article from Psychology Today on the Power of Storytelling. 

“Stories are how we are wired. Stories take place in the imagination. To the human brain, imagined experiences are processed the same as real experiences. Stories create genuine emotions, presence (the sense of being somewhere), and behavioral responses.”

The real power of stories, especially for business, is the ability to create genuine emotions…people buy on emotions…and if you’re not stirring up some kind of response you’re going to have a tough sale!

Memorable – Finally stories are memorable.  Because they stir up emotions, because they’re packaged in a logical orderly way, people will remember your stories.  And because they remember, your chances of being top of mind when they’re ready to buy goes up immensely!

Are you telling stories in your business?  The odds are good that even if you are, you could stand to tell a few more.  You could go out and interview your best customers to get a moving story, but there’s clearly a benefit to having a 3rd party have those conversations for you (clients are more likely to open up to someone else) and to have a trained writer and designer to pull together a compelling final product.  It’s a difficult thing to do well, but a well crafted success story is really effective and can be used in lots of different ways.

If you’re looking to add some punch to your marketing – I strongly recommend meeting John so you can hear his story (I’m happy to introduce you or can reach him via his website).

What stories could your clients tell?  Share your thoughts in the comments below – I’d love to hear them.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

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Does your marketing suck?  Wouldn’t you like to strap on your mind control helmet and make your target market sit up and listen to all the great things you could do for them?

There are times when marketing feels like black magic…or maybe rocket science, but the reality is there are proven and well understood principles of marketing that, if followed, will get the right people raising their hands and asking to learn more about your product or service.

It’s not a silver bullet – these principles are fairly easy to understand, but they can be difficult to actually put into practice.  The good news is that you don’t have to be perfect off the bat – most of your competitors aren’t very good at marketing either (just look around at a lot of the marketing targeting you these days).  With a little bit of knowledge and effort, you’ve got a great opportunity to stand out and take control of your marketplace!

What are these tried and true principles?  Let’s take a look:

1. Have several marketing strategies active at all times

2. Focus your marketing message very tightly

3. Have a consistent message across all mediums

4. Have a very clear next step

You might have a great product and a really enticing marketing campaign, but if you don’t clearly lay out what you want your target audience to do, nothing will happen.  Do you want them to call you?  Go to your website?  Send you an email?  Visit your location?  Whatever it is, make it easy and make it very, very clear (painfully clear).  Are you frustrated that you’re not getting calls?  Maybe it’s because you don’t have a clear call to action!

5. Track where your opportunities are coming from

Marketing can be frustrating and expensive…especially when you don’t know what’s working and what’s not working.  If you have an advertisement that’s not driving any sales, you need to stop spending money on it – which you can only do if you know it’s not driving any sales!  Conversely, if you found a winner, it might make sense to double down and invest more.  There are lots of ways to track things, especially with technology options, but you have to make it a priority and plan it out ahead of time.

6. Make sure your message is Dramatically Different from your competitors

The path of least resistance when it comes to advertising is to look around and copy what seems to be effective from your competitors.  Unfortunately that just means you look like everyone else and there’s no reason to pay attention to your message!  If possible, develop a Dramatic Difference when it comes to what you offer.  If you can’t reach a dramatic difference, then do whatever you can to stand out.

7. Focus on your existing customers first

That doesn’t mean not marketing to prospective customers, but you should have a weighted mix of activities that include upselling and cross selling to your existing customers..

8. Stay in touch with past, current and potential customers

You must have a list of all your past and current customers and you should have a database of all your prospective customers who are in your pipeline.  And with those lists, you need to actively stay in touch with them on a regular basis.  That could be a newsletter, maybe a card in the mail or a regular ‘special’ offer you make…anything that keeps you top of mind when they’re ready to buy. 

9. Give your buyers a Real Reason to Believe in you

The world is way too noisy these days and your prospective customers aren’t going to believe big claims of how you can help them…unless you give them some proof.  You could start with Social Proof – testimonials from your raving fans will get people to believe.  You could also offer a meaningful guarantee that shows the confidence you have in your product or service – make it a no risk or at least low risk proposition and they’re likely to believe it’s real and give you a shot to help them.

10. Make sure you can be found online

These days, if I can’t easily find you online, then you may as well not exist.  Even if your business isn’t going to sell anything online, you need to be found online for the sake of credibility.  To most people you don’t have a real business if they can’t find you on Google.  A professional, clean website is the starting point, but you should also have some presence on Social Media and you should understand how local search works (i.e. Google Places, Yahoo local, etc.).

Are you controlling your marketing?  Score yourself on how many of these 10 that you’re doing well with.  If you’re not doing well with at least 5 of these, it’s likely your marketing sucks!  Now what would you like to do about it?  If you’d like a 3rd party perspective on how to get better from a trusted, licensed professional business coach – contact me for a free consultation.

Did I miss anything?  What marketing principles are you struggling with?  I’d love to hear your thoughts, share them in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

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Sometimes it can really help to look at things upside down…or backwards if you want to find some answers!  The change in perspective generates a lot of ideas and be a valuable tool.

I’m talking about Reverse Brainstorming – a simple and powerful way to spark ideas that might get overlooked if you were coming up with a list of things you could do. 

The process is simple – isolate a problem that you’d like to solve…in the article above they used the example of ‘How can we improve patient satisfaction’.  Then you simply reverse the idea and brainstorm possible answers on ‘How can we make patient satisfaction worse?.

The reversal opens up all sorts of possibilities and often puts you closer to the situation.  Let’s try a different example hits most small business owners:  “How do I get more effective marketing”?

We’ll start by reversing the idea:

“How can I make my marketing less effective?”

Here are just a few ideas…unfortunately most of these are things I’ve seen with actual businesses – I imagine you could come up with a lot more!

• Be difficult to find online.
• Run marketing activities on a really inconsistent schedule…do it steadily for a few weeks and then stop for a month or two.
• Make sure your marketing talks all about how great you are…
• Don’t give the potential client any reason to follow up.
• Make it a challenging puzzle for the prospective client to figure out what the product or service is and who you are.

This is obviously an incomplete list – there are a lot of ways to be less effective when it comes to marketing, but it’s a pretty good starting point.

The next step is to look at the ideas that resonate, even a little and reverse them back into potential solutions.  This works especially well if you have a couple of people to bounce ideas with.

Example 1 – Be difficult to find online

Be difficult to find online is an easy reversal into ‘make it easy to be found online’.  Studies have shown that 98% of buyers go online to search for solutions for problems – if you can’t be found on those searches…then you don’t exist…and you’re not going to land any new clients! 

That doesn’t mean you need to build a $20,000 website and go all in for expensive Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing, but you do need to understand who might be looking for you and what it would take to at least be a consideration when they’re searching.  Look into things like local search (here’s another good guide to local search) and the important basics of Search Engine Optimization.  There are a lot of effective things you can do that don’t cost that much money but can generate a great return.

Example 2 – Don’t give the potential client any reason to follow up

Sadly the examples of marketing materials out there that don’t give potential clients any reason to follow up are everywhere.  Open up a local paper or a magazine and I can guarantee you’ll find a ‘So What’ ad in the first couple that you look at. 

A lot of business owners are sold on the idea of ‘Getting their name out there’ as being useful in some way – but the reality is that unless you’ve got the advertising budget of Pepsi…or Budweiser…name recognition isn’t worth much and certainly doesn’t drive sales.

Let’s reverse it – “Give the potential client a clear reason to follow up”.  If you’re spending money on advertising, what outcome do you want?  Obviously you want more customers, but realistically, what’s the next step that you want that potential client to take?  Maybe you want them to give you a call.  Maybe you want them to go onto your website and download a report (giving you their email address and approval to market to them further).  Maybe you want them to try out a discounted or sample size of your product.

What ever the case is, once you’ve got a clear idea of what you want them to do as a result of the ad – then construct the message around convincing them to do that very thing.  Give them a strong call to action:  “Tired of feeling overwhelmed with your business and not making the kind of money you know you can make?  Contact Shawn today for a free consultation!” 

Not only do you need to be clear on what you want them to do, give them a reason to do it and make it exceedingly easy for them to follow through!

What could you turn upside down in your business?

Reverse Brainstorming works best with a small group, but you could do it on your own as well.  What issue that you’re facing would work really well with this process?  Share your thoughts below – I’d love to hear them.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

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