Ask The Hard Questions, Discover The Real Problem With Your Marketing

“I spend about $200 a week on Facebook advertising,” my new client admits sheepishly. And how much business do you think she’s ever gotten from it?

None.

This is often the case for many small businesses who know they need to market their business, but have no clear vision on how to do so effectivity and within budget.

The end result is typically lukewarm, at best. It’s not long before you realize that your marketing isn’t working, your budget is shrinking, and you’re mad about it.

Don’t pass blame.

You’re frustrated. And it would be easy to blame the social networks for trading organic reach for ad dollars, but that wouldn’t be entirely fair. Nor is blaming search engines for getting your address wrong when you haven’t updated your local business listings.

And it’s hard to fault an editor for not running your recent news release, when all they got was just another impersonal pitch.

As the old saying goes, “when you point your finger at someone, three more are pointing back at you.” And that’s where you’ll find the real problem with your marketing strategy.

Ask the hard questions.

Only when you get real with yourself can you create a genuine marketing experience that works for you and your audience. And to do that, you have to ask some tough questions.

1.  What’s your value proposition? Many businesses are unclear about the value that they offer the marketplace so their messaging is reduced to a summary of products or services. When this message hits the market, there’s no impact.

Understanding what you do best, the pain points you help your audience resolve, and then communicating the outcomes they can expect is essential to the success of any marketing campaign.

2. Who’s your audience? This step is totally skipped over because it’s hard to figure out. Many small businesses take the easy way out and guess. Or worse, they just throw up their hands and consider “everybody” as their target.

I can assure you that your audience is not everybody. It’s very specific “somebodies” and you have to figure out who they are.

Identify who you had in mind when you created your product or service and build out that buyer persona, which is just a model of who you’re trying to serve.

Spend some time developing your persona’s character, including what he or she is thinking, saying, and feeling.

3. Do you have a marketing plan? Just like business plans, marketing plans have gotten a bad rap. We tend to see them as 50-page wardens that chain us to our desks for weeks crunching numbers and making charts.

While I’ve seen my fair share of those, I’ve also seen simple plans like the one we create for our clients here at Crayons & Marketers.  We manage to stick your goals, a SWOT analysis, value prop, core strategies, budget, and a diagram of “Stanley”, our persona guy, in just a few pages. Simple and it gets the job done.

But even if you just take a sheet of paper from your legal pad and write down what you plan to do that month, you’ve got something to build on. Keep track of your results and use them to jot down ideas for next month, and so on.

Someone really smart once said, “if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”

Seek clarity, gain perspective. 

To sum it up, understanding your value moves you away from being an order taker ­ – highly transactional – to being an invaluable source of good information and solid solutions long term.

So be clear about what your business stands for and how you help. Then share that message on the channels where your audience is looking for solutions.

But you can only do that when you answer the hard questions first.

 

Be on the look out for our next blog post!  We’ll take on three more hard questions and let you cheat … we’ll give you the answers!