How are you faring with your marketing efforts?
Are you achieving the results you want, retaining your key customers, attracting your preferred customers, increasing sales?
If you have been tracking your marketing results you would be able to answer these and other questions easily.
If you haven’t been tracking the results, then as we head into the second half of the year, it is a good time to actually have a marketing check up. The reason for this is so you can get rid of what is not working and concentrate your time and money on what is getting results for your business.
Ideally you would have set marketing objectives at the start of the year as it makes measuring what you achieved easier. It also takes the guesswork out of the equation. If you haven’t set any objectives, you still can conduct a simple marketing check up by looking at these areas and answering these questions:
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Tagged as:
Customers,
Marketing,
Marketing Objectives,
Marketing Tactics,
small business
Are you trying to juggle too many marketing activities at the one time and getting nowhere.
You may have noticed that people who seem to achieve great results and are successful are often very organised.
They know what they want to achieve, how they are going to achieve their goals and then follow a path. They do not jump down side paths in case it is more interesting and they are focused in their approach which gives them time to ensure their marketing activities are completed on time.
I was reminded of this when reading The Marketing Mix blog post by Deidre Rienzo who is following a plan which includes a calendar with daily and weekly checklists.
Another blog post by Shirley George Frazier from Solo Business Marketing shared information on her daily schedule which helps keep projects progressing each day.
A third post is by Skip Reardon on Small Business CEO about the importance of tracking how you spend your time.
All of us have different ways of working that suit our personalities and habits. One way of achieving more in less time is what I call – Work in Progress.
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Tagged as:
Marketing,
marketing activities,
marketing goals,
marketing results,
marketing tasks,
small business
The simple reason is because Time is Money.
Every hour, especially if you are a service based business that you spend on implementing marketing tactics for your small business is actually costing you time that otherwise may have been spent on generating income.
For most small business at one time or another we actually do need to turn to the no or low cost marketing, especially in the early days. It is important however that we look at where we are spending time and could there be a better alternative, such as outsourcing or in fact not doing that marketing activity.
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Tagged as:
bootstrap marketing,
Marketing,
marketing activity,
Marketing Tactics,
marketing tools,
small business marketing
Well at least this is what happened when I saw the latest Yellow Pages television commercial.
I could not find a copy of the commercial to show you, however to paint a picture for you, there are a number of business owners writing on a wall the results they achieved with listing in the Yellow Pages.
One woman says the world “Gamble” in the context that she took a gamble listing her business. This meant to me that she was willing to risk her money without having an idea whether this would work or not.
Of course the commercial features that the gamble paid off and the business got the desired results. But for some reason whenever I see the commercial I associate it with BIG RISK and none of the benefits it is trying to communicate for the brand.
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Tagged as:
Communication,
Customers,
Marketing,
marketing message,
potential customers
How are you faring with your marketing efforts?
