3 Steps To Become A Lean, Mean Marketing Machine

​[2.5 Minute Read]

Seriously, if you’re opening the doors to your business and hoping people walk through without having put any marketing tactics into motion, your days may likely be numbered. We meet a number of business owners that have essentially given up on marketing because nothing seems to work, or it’s just too much effort. We’ll let you in on a little secret, there is no “easy button” for marketing, it takes time and effort and if you want people to know about your product or service, it’s essential that your marketing is continually pumping out your message.
 
It's not surprising that most small business owners wear quite a few hats so we wanted to give you three steps to help you achieve your business goals via marketing.
 
Step 1: Get Focused
Choose the two to three ways you can most effectively and efficiently communicate with your target customer. The old adage of doing a couple things really well versus quite a few things really poorly works here. While we’re fans of developing a diversified marketing portfolio, it all depends on your bandwidth so even if it’s two things that you can implement, that’s a great start. The key is to have thoroughly analyzed where your target customers (associated with the specific business goal you want to achieve) are congregating so you can infiltrate their busy lifestyle. Maybe it’s their social media feeds in the evening hours or could it be sponsoring a meet up or a popular gathering spot? Whatever it ends up being, be sure it’s crafted in a way so it hits home with them and really resonates with the wish list they have circulating in their head to help make their lives happier and a little easier.
 
Step 2: Schedule Your Marketing
Next, you’ll want to figure out when you can realistically find time to devote to executing your marketing program. It might be the first 30-minutes of your work day or maybe it’s a particular day where two hours of focused marketing implementation can take place each week. The bottom line is that you need to find time during your busy schedule and then schedule it. That means actually blocking out the time and dedicating those prized marketing minutes to getting a lot done, which may mean putting your phone in airplane mode. Make it a priority and treat that time block as if it were a game-changing business meeting that can’t be interrupted or re-scheduled.
 
Step 3: Track It!
If you’re not tracking your marketing, how will you know if your time, money and resources are being spent in the most efficient way? Whether it’s reviewing your google analytics on a regular basis, asking your customers about what brought them in and methodically tallying their responses or simply running a Square report on zip codes, it’s crucial that you have a system for determining if your marketing is working. For example, if your customer mentions having seen you on social media, pry just a little bit more and ask if it was the cool drone video and if they answer yes, then you know it was the Instagram ad you’re running…the key is to have very specific ways to measure your marketing you work so hard to broadcast to your current and potential customers.

Bottom Line
If you're serious, we mean absolutely serious about making your marketing program work for your business so you increase sales and web/foot traffic then we recommend you working through our "Prepare for 2018" workshop in our DIY library."