Small Business Marketing Question
“My marketing question is about my target market. I am re-structuring my business. I monogram (embroider) on items. I could market to anyone and everyone needing promotional wear but should I or would it be better to narrow down my target. At the same time I don’t want to miss an opportunity.

Your advice would me most appreciated.”
Cynthia

Answer
Pick a niche or a couple of niches and you can focus your marketing, charge more and make more.

– Charlie
Small Business Marketing Ideas That Make Sense and Make Money

Want Success With Your Small Business Marketing? Find out which things make the difference

Last week we got the big one.

We got our first big winter storm and up north in Vermont where I ski, the mountain received over 48 lovely inches of fresh snow, enough to even convince my wife to leave a day early for the holiday weekend. Here on the coast in Connecticut where I live the same storm produced 2 measly inches of rock hard frozen crud.

What was the difference? Just a couple of degrees.

Your business is the same. Small shifts in how your small business marketing can make a big difference in your results and your profitability. With the right marketing strategy you can get an abundance of business or with a slightly different approach hardly any business at all. Here are four little changes which can yield big results for your business.

1. What You Do With Your Goals
Everyone has goals for themselves and their business. Some keep them in mind and only a few commit them to paper. A small difference but it turns out the people who regularly identify and put their goals on paper end up making over ten times as much.

What are your small business marketing goals for this year? Do they include discovering how to attract more clients?

2. Where You Focus Your Marketing
If you’re like most people your small business marketing touts your good name and your products, it’s focused on you. Typically this approach yields only minimal results and limited sales.

Your prospects’ biggest concern is their own needs and wants. Change a few words in how you talk about yourself and your products and services. You’ll find that instead of just getting a luke warm response you’ll be generating a ton of hot leads with your marketing.

This simple shift from a focus on you to a focus on your prospects could help you attract as many clients in one month as you did in the last six as it did for Denise Annunciata of Leaplaw or help you get your next $200,000 sale as it did for Bill Orser of SafePlay.

3. What You Do With Leads
Last week I got a call from John, a builder in Oregon who after ten years was still struggling with his marketing. I asked John how many names he had in his prospect list. He said he had a dozen or so.

Over ten years anyone in business will have helped, talked to and met 1,500 people or more unless they live in an isolated village in Alaska. Imagine instead of just giving someone your business card you asked them for theirs. Then take the next step and ask them to tell you either what they want and need relative to your services or for the name of one person they know who could use your services.

Do this small task and you’ll have more leads than you ever imagined.

Over ten years, using this easy marketing technique you could have built a database of thousands of people to contact with information about your services.

With the help of any contact management system or database program it’s easy to build your business network. It may seem like a small thing to do each week to take 2-5 minutes to add in the names of prospects but without this simple action, ten years down the road you could still be struggling like John.

4. How Often You Contact Your Prospect List
80% of sales are lost due to lack of follow-up. Personally this drives me crazy when I hear a client tell me about their low lead to buyer conversion rate. More than 9 out of 10 times the problem is they don’t have the simple follow-up systems in place.

Think about it. You’ve done all the hard work to identify a qualified prospect. You know they want what you sell – yet all too many don’t buy. Don’t be satisfied with this!

I asked one client why they didn’t follow up inquiries by interested prospects with a series of helpful emails to engage their interest, help build credibility and create a sense of urgency. Their response was they didn’t want to pester the prospect and they already had a once a month follow system of contacts in place.

When someone contacts you they’re indicating an interest and what they want is to get all the information they need to get know you and trust you and buy from you. Wait a month and the prospect will have completely forgotten why they contacted you in the first place. It’s during the first week that they want to hear from you, again and again.

It may seem like a small difference, waiting to make contact over and over or doing it the first week, but it is often the difference between losing a prospect or adding a new client.

Can you see that if you made these four changes you’d be more successful? Now imagine if you made a few more.

There are hundreds of little ways you can change your small business marketing that will make a big difference in your profits including ad copy, pricing strategies, product bundling, use of ezines, etc,. Each one could help you make 10-20% more this year.

Put a few of them together and you could easily see your income double from $750,000 to $1,500,000 in less than a year.

Small differences in temperature can result in over 36 inches of new snow versus 1 or 2 inches of frozen crud or 36 new clients versus 1 or 2 duds. While I can’t control the weather and have to take what mother-nature dishes out, you can control what you do with your small business marketing and how successful you are, it just takes making a few changes.
– Charlie Cook