There are many, many ways you can attract new customers to your business with marketing. The list is deep and wide, so I’ll summarize with this: if you see/interact with something that makes you want to buy something, that’s marketing.
- Yep, that includes seeing bottles of coke on your favorite sitcom.
- Yep, that includes the display ads you ignore-but-notice while doing your daily sudok on your phone.
- Yep, that includes the featured snippets that answer the questions you ask Alexa or Google.
- Yep, that includes the guy at the mall handing you shampoo samples.
Small business owners have a unique challenge in this regard. There are a plethora of marketing strategies and tactics you could implement to attract new customers and retain current ones. But how many should you choose? Which ones?
Here’s the #MarketingTipMonday: pick a handful of marketing activities and do those few things really well.
Because:
- It is better to put full effort into a few things, than half effort into many. You know this to be true in other parts of your business, and it applies to marketing too.
- Many marketing efforts take time to produce results. If you jump from strategy to strategy, you’ll miss the exponential growth that comes over time.
- There are always new ice-bucket challenges or hash browns. Committing to a few strategies will keep you from being distracted by what’s noisy. When you only have limited time to commit to marketing, tried-and-true beats shiny-and-new every time.
I don’t want to be prescriptive. The exact number of marketing activities that makes sense for you business and which will be most successful depend on several factors (how much resource you can commit to marketing, what tactics you already have in place and how successful those are, what type of business you are, your audience preferences, what your competitors are doing, etc.).
Now that you’ve narrowed down the marketing efforts you’re going to perform for your small business, don’t forget to monitor them. You’ll want to review KPIs on your marketing activities at least quarterly. Your annual marketing planning is the perfect opportunity to decide if you want to keep, adjust, or drop any efforts. An annual review gives time for the effort to gain some traction.
Need expert advice to choose which marketing strategies you should prioritize or measure the effectiveness of the efforts you already have in place? Bright Oath Marketing is here to help small business owners make smart marketing decisions.