How to Do Small Business Marketing on Any Budget
Posted by: Cheryl Clausen in coaching, tags: increase sales, sales, sales coach, small business marketingMany small service business owners miss the mark when it comes to marketing themselves. The only reason to market your service business is to produce leads. Once you have leads you have an opportunity to move them through your sales funnel and earn a customer.
Until or unless your marketing produces leads you’re just throwing your hard earned dollars away. Unfortunately, ad space sellers have their best interest in mind and they only want to sell ad space. Never ever waste your money on ads that do nothing more than “get your name out there”.
In fact, before you spend one cent on advertising of any kind make sure you have a message that attracts the attention and interest of your ideal clients. There are two free or nearly free ways you can test your message before you spend any real money. First, develop a core marketing message and test it in face-to-face encounters. Second, draft a marketing campaign of at least 3 if not 5 touches with a clear call to respond in each message.
Don’t get scared when I say draft a marketing campaign. Your campaign could be nothing more than a series of three letters that you write and send to no more than 30 people a week. By the time your ideal clients get your last message you’ll know if you have something you can improve on, or if you need to start over.
When it comes to marketing practice my philosophy of “aim small miss small fail forward fast”. Aim small means that you’ll have a small pool of test subjects that you’re focused on connecting with. When you do that it means you can’t miss big you can only miss small. Fail forward fast speaks to the fact that if a marketing communication doesn’t work once it isn’t going to work the next umpteen times, so you have to make improvements until you reveal the message that does work.
You can work on your core marketing message without any financial expenditures. And you could test a small marketing campaign for the cost of postage for three post cards mailed to 30 people for three weeks in a row. That will fit into any small business budge, and what you’ll learn will be priceless.
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December 27th, 2007 at 12:43 am
You’ve made a great point and it’s refreshing to see other people recommending direct response advertising and using direct mail in this way. I love direct mail for this very reason.
It allows you to test your messages with a small group before spending a fortune on something that may or may not work. Very few small businesses use direct mail effectively, but it can be a powerful lead generation strategy.
September 1st, 2009 at 2:25 am
Nice How to Do Small Business Marketing on Any Budget | Increase Sales Coach, very relevant to what I was searching for (insurance for small business).