2 Questions to Ask Before You Do ANY Marketing
You have an exciting new offer, product, or service to announce in your business and want to start putting out the word in ALL the places! Or you need to generate some more revenue this quarter and are deciding to invest in some marketing to do so. Either way, you need to figure out what steps you will take to market. A lot of us at this point may decide to do something random and new because it’s the latest trend, perhaps we turn to an old faithful method like updating our radio ad or newspaper ad. Or maybe we’re thinking about hiring a contractor or marketing agency to do some marketing work for us. No matter what has brought this new opportunity for marketing into your business, there are 2 questions you should ask before deciding anything.
What is the goal?
The most common first answer to this question is going to be: The goal is more sales! And while that is probably the ultimate goal, it’s not a good goal to guide our marketing strategy. So my follow-up question to this answer is:
How do you currently get sales?
If you answer with “I don’t know,” or “We don’t have any sales yet,” this is the point where we need to pause and take a deeper look. If you don’t know how you are getting sales currently or you have never made a sale before, then you have a business opportunity, not a marketing opportunity. Until we can establish some basis here, we don’t want to go out spending a lot of marketing money on a lot of different strategies. That would be like pouring gasoline on a fire. It makes a big fire, but does it get you anywhere? No - it burns for the sake of burning. Now you do have to get those first sales from somewhere and marketing can be part of that, but it should not be the ONLY part.
We need to break this big lofty goal of getting more sales down into some more manageable steps. If your sales are coming from foot traffic into your store, then our real goal to get more sales is to get more people to come into your store. If your sales are coming from new people discovering your products online, then we need to focus on providing them with new ways to discover you. And if your sales are coming from people hearing about you through word of mouth, then our goal is to give people a reason to talk about you more. It’s cause and effect. The effect will add up to being more sales, but our goal is to generate the cause through our marketing.
Be Specific - “More” Doesn’t Guide Us to Success
The second part of setting our marketing goal is to get specific and set some actual numbers. It can feel a little challenging to throw a number out without feeling like you’re pulling it out of a hat, or to feel a little anxiety about the pressure of meeting a hard number. But what this gives us is a baseline to work towards and a clear way to communicate about if the goal was actually met or not. A good way to determine a good number for your goal is to look at what you have seen in the past if you have that to go off of. If in the past you have seen 10-15 customers in the door in the past and you would like to increase traffic, a good goal might be to increase that by an incremental amount such as 15 or 20%.
The reason we do this is because “more” doesn’t really tell us all what the goal is. More could mean a lot of different things to different people. More could be 3 or 300. Being specific
What is my timeline?
Deciding what the timeline for your goals is will allow you to choose strategies that make sense. Your timeline and goals together will also guide your budget. In general, a smaller budget generally means a longer timeline is required to meet the same goal. Understanding how these interact with each other allows you to make informed decisions about your strategies and choose realistic goals to work towards.
Something else to remember about budgets is that all marketing has a cost of some kind. Even if you are not paying for advertising, design, or printing, you are still paying with your effort and your time, or your employee’s effort and time. Even if no money changes hands, there is still an opportunity cost and a cost of time invested. It’s important to remember this when you look at your marketing strategies. Organic or cost-free marketing methods can be amazing, but depending on your timeline and your goal, may not be the most cost effective option.
Tips for Marketing Strategies Based On Your Goals and Timeline
If you have a big goal and a short timeframe: Join someone else’s party. What I mean by this is you don’t have time to focus on building your marketing infrastructure and complicated campaigns here. The best opportunities for you are going to be to partner with someone who has already put in this work. This could be an organization that promotes your products or services, an influencer who introduces your business to their network, or getting press in publications that have a high impact in your area or audience.
If you have a big goal and a long timeframe: Lay a strong foundation. If you have some time to work towards your big goals, start by setting up a good foundation for your marketing and building it piece by piece. This will allow you to gain the maximum amount of return for your effort over time. This might include laying a consistent framework for how often you show up on social media, setting a manageable amount to invest in advertising each month, and really focusing on identifying a marketing message that works for you and can be used as you grow.
If you have a small goal and a short timeframe: Focus on fun! Small goals and small timeframes are perfect for events, sales, or pop up shops. If you are a digital business, this could be a 5 day challenge in an online group or a 3 day BOGO sale- anything that gives people a new reason to enter your circle quickly. Generally you want to focus on providing them more value in a shorter amount of time than they would normally get here. Events such as tradeshows or conferences can be a really good way to engage a whole new circle of people in a short time as well.
If you have a small goal and a long timeframe: This one usually isn’t the case for most people unless they have been in business for a long time. But if this is you, to build on a small goal over a long timeframe, focus on identifying a new area you can devote to in your marketing consistently. Maybe if you are currently only updating your website or sending emails to your customers sporadically, commit to providing updates on a regular schedule. These smaller tweaks add up over time to make subtle shifts in your business.
The Overall Goal of Marketing is to Multiply
While it can be challenging to recognize how small efforts add up over time to create sales, remember that everything you are doing to market your business is adding up in your favor. Attributing sales to specific marketing events can be difficult and time-consuming to track. This is why we often measure marketing campaigns with “impressions.” Each time someone sees your marketing is called an impression. As they receive more and more impressions from your marketing over time, those add up to cement your business in their brain. This allows for two things to happen:
Your business is top of mind.
Your business is omnipresent.
When your business is top of mind, your customer will think of you first when they are ready to buy. Even though they have never taken action on your marketing before, they have an awareness of your business that sticks with them, so when they are ready to purchase, they know exactly where to go.
Omnipresence simply means that your business’ marketing is everywhere. So all those impressions that your potential customers are seeing is adding up. They see you on a Facebook ad, they hear you on the radio, they see you in a news story, they meet you at a networking event - you’re everywhere! The more they see you in a variety of places, the more likely it is that they will take note of your business and start to wonder what all the hype is about.
So remember, even when the results of your marketing aren’t immediately apparent, everything is adding up over time to slowly convert those harder-to-reach customers.
After you’ve decided on your goals and timeline, you can logically identify strategies that will work for you. Then it’s time to start measuring your results! Check out this post on how to start measuring your marketing stats to help you grow.
More Content for You:
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This Common Marketing Mistake is Sabotaging Your Efforts
Is Your Small Business Using Social Media Effectively?
5 Things Your Customers Need to Hear from You
Easiest Way to Increase Your Sales for Small and Growing Businesses
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