Are You Happy With Your Marketing Efforts?

If you’re like the vast majority of small business owners, you just said “No”. It’s not your fault – it’s not anybody’s fault – it’s just the way it is. People seldom go into business to become marketers. They intend to manufacture fasteners, build houses, or take away the pain of a toothache. No, few go into business to do marketing. Once in business, however, growth does depend upon it.

Where is marketing on your Priority List?

It’s not that we don’t want to “do marketing”. It’s not that business owners don’t realize it has to be done. Quite to the contrary, we give it a very high priority. We start doing marketing a certain way because we see everyone else doing it, then it becomes a ritual. For example, once a year, – generally just days before deadline – the ad rep for your local Yellow Pages stops by. Most of us never are all that happy with the performance of those expensive ads, and fully intend, year by year, to change them. The minutes of the days tick by as we get closer to that ad deadline, and most of them are spent dealing with other things that required our attention. Finally, at the last minute, painfully aware that the clock has run down, we cave – “Just do the same as last year.” Fixing that ad was on the top of our priority list every single one of those days – we just didn’t actually make it a priority. We allowed all of the other things to come first. Oh, and the best part is that every other ad we place we word, or make look, just like that ad that isn’t getting us a level of results that makes us happy, right?

Besides, is that ad really getting you business? How much business did it generate for you last year? is it the medium itself, or the content? What about “Best Service Around”? Does anybody ever say they give poor service? Around what? If you read an ad that said “Best Service Around” would it be enough to sway you? Try this experiment. Find a page in the phone book, or in a trade publication, containing ads from you and several of your competitors. Cover up all the names, addresses, phone numbers and logo. Copy it and give the copies to key employees. How many were able to correctly identify your ad? What tipped them off? Were you happy with the results? if not, we have some work to do.

What if I told you that in a few short weeks, you could have a marketing plan in place that would continue working every day of your life, even when you can’t work on marketing?

Oh, wait a minute! Remember if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. I’m not saying that you will “never” again have to work on marketing, but I am saying that once your system is in place, it will cease to be a struggle, and you’ll never again waste money on ads that don’t work.

Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase “Get with the program.” This is the marketing program you really can get with and stay with.