5 Ways to Get Unstuck in Your Marketing - Part 1

As a small business owner, it's highly likely that you're wearing many hats, and one of those hats happens to be Chief Marketing Officer. And I can tell you that I've met more than one entrepreneur who felt that was the hat that just doesn't quite fit.

Most of our small business activities involve right-brained thinking. We run numbers, we analyze, we crunch data, and we do all the "stuff" that we do as the technicians of our business.

And then along comes this marketing thing... Now we're forced into a left-brained activity. We need to be creative. We need to think outside the box. We need to step outside of our comfort zones, shift gears, and look at our business from the customer's point of view.

For many small businesses, I see one of two things happen:

** The entrepreneur feels uneasy with the whole task of marketing. It's so much easier to keep focusing on the tasks we're familiar with, to stay inside our box, to keep doing what we're doing. So marketing is never made a priority. It gets pushed to the bottom of the to-do list. And chances are, it just never gets done.

** The entrepreneur knows that marketing is crucial to business survival. He frets and worries over each and every marketing activity. He wants every single nook and cranny to be 110% perfect. His marketing activities become arduous tasks that are over-analyzed to the point that they are never completed.

Both of these scenarios are disastrous to small business. Fortunately, no matter which scenario you fit into, there are 5 extremely easy ways to get yourself out of it. Let's take a look at the first 3:

1. Begin with the end in mind.
Stephen Covey discusses this concept in The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, and it works for highly successful marketing, too. I see many entrepreneurs stumble at the beginning stages of campaign development, so they never move on to the really important part of the marketing piece.

If you're stuck on the creative - what colors should we use, what graphic fits best, what should the headline say - move beyond that point and start mapping out the final stage - what do we want the customer to do as a result of this marketing piece?

Do we want her to call our 800 number? Do we want her to request a free report at our website? Do we want her to come to the store and purchase our new purple widget at 50% off? Once you have the end result clearly mapped out, you'll either find that the creative components fall right into place, or you'll find that it is now extremely easy to outsource the creation of the creative since you can provide clear and concise directions.

2. Copy what others have done.
Now first I have to give you a huge warning: be extremely careful with this concept! It's a documented fact that many (I can probably say "most") entrepreneurs do not test and measure their marketing activities, so just because a campaign is out there does not mean that it is working. Let me share a quick, funny story with you:

A few years ago when I was taking on a new client, he showed me a campaign he had been running, and he was hoping I'd be able to continue it. Initially, I was extremely disappointed in my "marketing instinct" since, after looking at it for only a few seconds, I would have sworn the campaign would not be very effective.

I was beginning to question whether I clearly understood this client's target market, and I thought that maybe I wasn't the best person to take on the job. So I asked the client if I could see the numbers from the campaign since I'd like to analyze how much new business it was bringing in. His response was, "Oh, I don't think it actually brings in any new business, but it gets our name out there." And he had been running the ineffective campaign for years!

So the point is, be careful with what you copy! Use your gut instinct and your knowledge of your own customers to analyze what will work for you. Look at campaigns outside of your industry and adapt them to fit your own business. (This is also a great way to break out of the me too! marketing mold.) Then track and measure every campaign and if you identify one that isn't working, quit running it!

3. Repeat what's worked in the past.
Many entrepreneurs gets hung up on the idea that marketing is supposed to be creative and new and trendy, so they're hesitant to ever run the same marketing campaign twice. I say, "Run it until it stops working!"

Not every customer is going to respond to your ad the very first time she sees it. If it's a good campaign with a great offer, you're actually doing a service to your clients and prospects by reminding them about it. And since one of the goals of marketing is to attract new clients, it's a great idea to re-run effective campaigns so you'll be able to reach a continual stream of new prospects.

The key here is to only re-run your effective campaigns, which means you must track and measure each and every single marketing activity. This doesn't have to be as scary as it sounds. I recommend "dumbing down" your tracking system so you're guaranteed to use it.

With several of my retail clients, I set up a simple three-ring binder with lined pages. Every ad we run and every coupon we create gets taped to its own page in the binder along with a notation of how much the ad cost. Once a week, each coupon that came into the store gets tallied up and written down in the binder on the corresponding page.

At the end of the campaign, we total the coupons, multiply the number of coupons by the lifetime value of a client, divide that number by our general conversion rate (not every one who brings in a coupon will remain a full-fledged customer) and compare that number to the cost of the ad.

Part of making this system work is knowing the lifetime value of your customers and knowing your general conversion rate. These numbers are critical for any small business owner! I'd like to suggest that you spend an hour or so getting familiar with these numbers so you can start using them in all of your marketing and management activities.