Lack of effective marketing typically is one of the root causes of startups and small businesses not reaching their potential.
Many startups and small businesses I’ve worked with start with the “if you build it, they will come” mentality. There has probably never been a moment in history where this assumption is less accurate.
We live in a world where your potential customers are bombarded with marketing, ads, and new products, online and offline, sometimes on a second-to-second basis. The influx of images, videos, slogans, and clever wording amount to sensory overload for most everyone in the connected world.
How important is effective marketing in the sensory overload world in which we live? It’s make or break. It’s live or die for your startup or small business.
What is effective marketing? Very simply, it’s marketing that gets your message across to you current and prospective customers in such a way that when they decide to make a purchase in your product or service category, they make that purchase from your company. You and your product and service offerings are top-of-mind at that critical moment when your customer is ready to buy. While there are many aspects of marketing effectively, that’s it in a nutshell.
So, the next obvious question is: how is effective marketing accomplished?
Let’s consider one extreme of the spectrum, which is extremely large companies with extremely large marketing budgets, for example, Coke, Pepsi, IBM, Ford, etc. How do those large companies market effectively? They spend a fortune on making sure their message and brand are in front of you as often as possible, and preferably in the appropriate context where you may be about to make a buying decision for the product or service they offer. How many Domino’s Pizza delivery ads have you seen when you’re sitting there feeling kind of hungry watching TV in the evening? They invest tons of money into trying to keep their product, their message and their slogan in your mind, all the time, especially when you’re “hungry” for their product or service.
No small company has the marketing budget or the staff to take this big company approach to staying top-of-mind.
What does effective marketing look like in the startup and small company scenario, then?
First, effective marketing for startups and small companies must be extremely targeted. You must know who your customer is in as much detail as possible. You also must know their habits, including where they are likely to consume media that may allow you to reach them with your message. As a small business, you typically don’t have the luxury of broadcasting your message to “everyone” and hoping that it reaches those to whom your products and services are relevant. For example, if you own a local bike shop, you’re not well advised to spend your entire ad budget on just one single ad on national broadcast television. Rather, you’d be wise to spend that money on a series of targeted ads in local publications and other media, online and offline, that are most likely to be consumed by the demographic that makes purchases in a bike store such as yours. Also, don’t forget social media marketing as a very effective way to cost-effectively target many markets for many product and service categories.
Next, you’re typically well-advised to look at your marketing budget as a long-term investment. You will likely be able to come up with some marketing that does deliver short-term results, but much of what you’re doing in effective marketing, is laying the foundation for future sales. There’s an adage in advertising that people don’t even “see” your message until they’ve been exposed to it at least nine times. You’ll hear other numbers, too, like seven times, but in reality, given the over-saturated sensory overload media environment in which we live today, whatever the correct number is, it’s likely to continue to rise. The key point is that you cannot spend a few dollars on an ad, then be disappointed and pull the plug because it doesn’t lead to immediate sales. Clearly, to market effectively, you’ll want to track the results, as best as you possibly can, for all your online and offline marketing and advertising, but you must give it a chance to work before pulling the plug on it.
Next, find a hook, a way for your marketing and ads to stand out from those of the masses. I’m not saying you need to have a Gecko in your ads, but you have to admit, it’s been highly successful for Geico. They are, of course, throwing huge money into their Gecko ads that almost everyone with a TV sees at least daily, so it is a different world than the marketing budget reality of small businesses, but you get the idea. You need to have something(s) in your marketing and ad campaigns, something consistent, that will allow your target market to recognize your company and offering and file it away in their overloaded brains, for future use when they need to make a purchase in your space. It does not need to be an animated character, of course, but it needs to be something that will stick in their minds.
Finally for now, in order to market effectively as a startup or small business, you need to have a marketing budget and a marketing plan. Effective marketing typically does not emanate from a haphazard approach of throwing a few dollars towards ads whenever the money is available. Rather, your approach to marketing must be deliberate, with marketing dollars allocated to campaigns, the effectiveness of which will depend on how well-targeted they are and how much they’re informed by data rather than conjecture.
Image by Nel Botha from Pixabay
