Marketing.
Taking your products or services to the marketplace, finding those interested in purchasing them. This is the basis, for all the sales your business will ever do.
Sounds pretty simple, right?
For some, it is.
For others, they get completely crushed by their competitors who are making it a priority and excelling at it.
The good news is that you can level that playing field by strengthening your marketing plan and the materials that you use to deliver your message while branding your business offerings.
Whether you are talking about your online presence, your physical location signage, printed materials, TV, radio, even your business cards, your marketing message needs to be clear and consistent, always driving toward a desired outcome.
We’ve probably heard, “I paid a fortune to have a website built and it did nothing for us!” a thousand times over the years and it’s one of our favorite marketing failure examples. Our next questions are always, “What did you do to make sure people visited it? How did you promote it? What keywords were you working for search and how were you converting the traffic? How did it fit with the rest of your marketing plan?”
That’s always followed by a blank stare.
That’s a complete marketing failure, making materials with no plan on integrating them with an overall effort, no call to any action by visitors and no opportunity to convert. Often even looking and sounding completely out of step to the rest of the company’s presence, leading to confusion about whether or not that’s even the right site.
If your build didn’t include an idea of how you were going to integrate it into your sales and marketing effort, you stopped at the halfway point. No wonder it isn’t working for you!
The same holds true even for your physical location or storefront. If you don’t have a plan to make customers aware of how great your company and its products/services are, how will they know? Why would they choose you over a competitor? Why should they even be interested?
One of the most difficult tasks most small business owners have is remembering to, or even wanting to, make sure they are selling all the time. If you aren’t putting selling first, it won’t matter how great your company is or the services/products it provides, no one will know about you or be convinced to try you out.
If your whole business plan revolves around word of mouth or people stumbling upon you and you have any competition of any kind, your business won’t be around for long.
That’s where marketing comes in. Bringing your offer to the market, where your clients and customers are. Actively getting your message out into the world to make certain what you have to offer is visible to potential buyers, while giving them a compelling reason to give you a try.
Marketing isn’t a replacement for sales, it’s a delivery method for your message, an extension, a tool that can take many forms from traditional to cutting edge guerilla methods. A print ad, a brochure, a billboard or TV spot…all forms of marketing. Attending trade shows, business fairs and conducting seminars can all be marketing tools as well. Online presences, ad runs, social campaigns, coupons, contests are also all part of the marketing tool bag.
Where to start? What do I say? How do I get the materials?
That’s where we can help. With the ability and experience making and placing these kinds of materials for decades, we can help you craft and fine tune your message then pick the places that your potential customers has the greatest chance of seeing them. Traditional might be right for you, maybe nontraditional, new media might be a better fit. There might even be simple methods that you can incorporate into your existing day to day operations that can pay marketing dividends. Whatever is right for your enterprise, we can help you get your message out there.
Planning and strategy, design and implementation.
Flexible, independent solutions for every budget level.
What doesn’t work is doing nothing.
What’s your marketing plan and how will it bring you success? If you don’t have a solid answer, call us today and power up your business!