5 Ways to Avoid Small Business Marketing Complacency...

by Charlie Cook
©2007 In Mind Communications, LLC, all rights reserved.

Standing still is falling behind. I hope that 2006 was your best year ever and that your marketing brought in new business every week. If so, reward yourself and your employees for your successes, but don’t let success make you complacent about your small business marketing plans and strategies.

To take your business to the next level in 2007, shift your focus to what isn’t working with your marketing.

In the December issue of Fast Company, Charles Fishman describes James Wiseman’s experience as a newly hired section manager at a Toyota plant in the U.S.

For the first couple of weeks, Wiseman joined the weekly plant meetings and shared the successes of his team, maybe even bragging a little. Instead of congratulations, his comments were met with an awkward silence. Finally, the plant manager took Wiseman aside. “We all know you are a good manager, otherwise we wouldn’t have hired you. But please talk to us about your problems so we can all work on them together.”

Toyota isn’t satisfied with maintaining the status quo. Whether it’s the quality of their products or the number of sales, it’s company policy to look for ways to improve.

Make continual business marketing improvement your company policy. You’ll find ways strategies, tactics and detail plans to better your marketing results, in 'The Insider Secrets to Highly Effective Marketing'. It’s written for people like you who want to improve on last year’s performance.

Use this link to see your sales soar in 2007 >>

Want to See Your Company’s Profits Grow Every Year?

If you want to improve on last year’s results you’ll need to improve on last year’s marketing strategies and techniques. To do this you need to identify what is and isn’t working with your small busines marketing and what to change.

The key is to constantly experiment to discover how to improve on your existing performance. Each month, test a new idea against your existing strategy to continually identify better solutions.

How to Avoid the Trap of Marketing Complacency With Your Business

1. Turn Marketing Problems into Opportunities
Most people’s marketing is far from perfect, yet they use the same tired old strategies and ideas over and over.. Break out of this stagnant cycle. Identify the imperfections in your marketing; there are your areas of opportunity.

2. Reward the Identification of Problems
Praise employees who point out the problems in your marketing. Each problem you or they identify represents an opportunity to improve your lead generation and sales.

3. Seek Solutions
Don’t try to reinvent the wheel on your own. Ask for help from the people you work with. If they don’t have the answer, seek out an expert.

4. Improve Your Performance
Based on the number of leads or sales you generated last quarter or last year, set higher, specific goals for this year. You could start with the response rate to your ads or the conversion rates of your web pages or your closing rates.

5. Make Small Fixes Every Week
There is no magic pill for success. Companies like Toyota didn’t become world leaders overnight. It took years of continual improvement. Improve your marketing each month by making small changes. Overtime the small improvements will result in large increases in sales.

I wrote The Insider Secrets to Highly Effective Marketing to show you exactly how to generate more leads, convert more leads to sales and grow your business.  In late 2006, I updated it with 5 bonus sections to give you even more ideas you can use to continually improve your marketing strategies and your profits.

Use this link to claim your copy of Highly Effective Marketing >>

Not Sure What To Fix?

Ready to ditch marketing complacency and embrace small business marketing perfection, but not sure where to start? Here are the most common areas of opportunity.

• Understand what your prospects want
When was the last time you did a survey or asked your prospects why they buy your products or services?

• Lead generation
How many did you generate last month? Do you know what’s limiting the response to your marketing?

• Is your copy working?
• Is your layout effective?
• Do the images support the message?
• How could you double your response rate?

• Conversion rates
What percentage of your prospects become paying clients? What’s getting in the way of converting twice as many?

• Is your offer working?
• Is your follow-up system working?
• Why aren’t more people buying?

If you’ve started off 2007 marketing the same way you did in 2006, you’ll generate the same results at best.

Are you satisfied with this? Or are  you one of those people who is always looking for a better way; a better way to help your clients and customers; a better way to make more money?