It’s no wonder small businesses are perplexed when it comes to marketing. Every week, business owners are bombarded by hundreds of supposed marketing solutions.
I’m a copywriter and a marketer and I’ve been studying and applying the strategies of marketing for over 24 years. I have a team of 5 highly trained professionals, who help deliver my clients outcomes.
Yet with all the skills and resources I’ve acquired, I’m constantly being solicited with latest wham-bam-thank you-mam marketing solutions. Now don’t get me wrong some of these are probably offering great service.
But it’s too much and it must be confusing for businesses owners, to know what to do. Just to give you an idea, how much marketing stuff I see, let’s look at the people who approached me last week to sell me the ultimate silver bullet for my so called marketing issues.
Still Relying on Yellow Page for Your Marketing
I had the sales rep from Yellow Pages trying to get me to purchase advertising for their directory as well as online. I told that I didn’t even have a copy of the yellow pages and I couldn’t even remember when was the last time I’ve seen one, except for my brother who uses to prop up his computer monitor with it (not exactly the best target market).
His reply was, yes that may be true, but old people still use the Yellow Pages. There could be an element of truth to this though they aren’t exactly my target audience. So I thought I would check with my father. So I asked, “Dad, when did you last use the yellow pages?” His answer clarified my original thinking. “I could not..remember..”
As a business, I have not advertised in the Yellow pages for more than 20 years. You might ask why? The Yellow pages automatically suggest a ring and 3 quotes, so why would people look at all my competitors, and hope I win the lotto by them magically picking my ads. This is lazy marketing.
I had a proposal from a Call Centre in India who wants to solve my health issues by getting one of their local representatives in Melbourne to fly up and make a demonstration. They want to show the dangers lurking in my office carpets and how they could provide a preventative plan for my staff so they are safe from the dangers of dirty carpets. I liked their concept and their approach, but the trouble is my office does not have any carpets, apart from the fact that I have many clients in this field and like to give my business to people I work with.
So far, I have 4 emails this week offering to provide me with cheap SEO services. For those who don’t know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. They have a team of crack SEO guns, that what the ad said. The only trouble is most of these so-called experts pushing so-called SEO tactics, do it in such a manner which comes out more likely to see your website be punished by Google.
If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, do a search on Google about the Panda & Penguin updates, thousands of websites have disappeared from the search listing because they tried to “game” the system. Now they’re paying the price, as their sites no longer show up in the search.
If that ‘s not enough I have been offered articles written for as little as a dollar, it’s sure to be compelling. The idea being this articles will help drive traffic to your website. How well do you think someone can write about your business, or know it for a “one dollar article,” it’s not what I want associated with my business.
This is only the tip of the iceberg – day in, day out they have been pushing the latest marketing tactic, which promises to make you rich and solve all marketing problems.
They’re telling me I need a new website, I have to fix my Google Adwords, I should join their networking club and even gets new signs to drive more customers to my business.
If you’re a business owner you’re being swamped daily with all these offered “amazing” marketing solutions. You know you need to do something, but it leaves you clueless which approach to try that will work for your own. Everybody seems to be peddling marketing relief.
In most cases, these are only band-aid solutions because they don’t solve the real problem. The only way for these solutions to be effective is by incorporating these such that they need to be part of an overall strategy.
Sure you can start anytime, just pick one, and it may even work. Or you could waste a lot of time and money trying to get a result.
Business should not be based on a lucky dip, or of picking the right marketing promotion system, to get more sales.
In over 25 years of marketing to small business, I learned that it does not matter which marketing solutions you use if you don’t send out the right message to the right people. So I set up Getting More Customers to help business navigate the perilous confusion of marketing your business.