small business marketing Archives

Marketing is branding

One of the reasons I fell in love with the subject of marketing was that when I did my MBA I quickly realised that marketing is the very heart of every business. Without marketing there can be no business. Non-marketing people often hate it when us marketing nerds harp on about how “business = marketing”. The thing is though, it’s true.

I cannot stress this enough, so I figured it would be good to enlist the help of two of my favourite business gurus in management and marketing in the last century: Peter Drucker and Al Ries, to drive home the message of just how important marketing is.

Peter Drucker says “A company’s primary responsibility is to serve its customers, to provide the goods or services, which the company exists to produce. Profit is not the primary goal but rather an essential condition for the company’s continued existence. Other responsibilities, e.g., to employees and society exists to support the company’s continued ability to carry out its primary purpose.”

This is at the core of marketing. Serving your customer. Because it always has to be all about the customer. You have to see things from their point of view. You have to realize what they need and what they want and that’s what you need to be giving to them. So, that’s the primary responsibility. Try to flog junk they don’t want or need and you won’t get anywhere.

Peter Drucker also says: [Read more…]

Owning or Renting Your Marketing

Those that have been following me for a while might accuse me of being anti-advertising. So I want to address that today.

I am not against advertising, per se. However, I want to make sure that businesses are always using the marketing activities most suited to themselves, their market and their brand, and activities that give them the best return on investment (hmmmm very much a business phrase! :) – and activities that can be measured to show that they are really delivering results and that all important ROI.

Unfortunately, many of us just throw adverts out there and don’t think enough about what we want them to do, or make sure that they are doing what we want them to do. The fact is that people need to see you (your business, product, service) quite a lot of times before they are ready to buy, and for most small businesses, getting that exposure entirely through advertising is simply too expensive. I have spoken extensively about how often people need to see you in videos. If you plan to drive your marketing mainly through advertising, you have to advertise a lot and that can get very expensive.

Another thing that non-specialists in marketing have a tendency to do with their advertising is to try to say a million things at once. The fact is that it is hard enough to get people to take note of one message in your advert and as soon as you try to get more across everything becomes muddled and the ad loses its effectiveness.

Advertising can however be a great marketing tool if used correctly. What do you need to do for that? Here are five things you need to remember when you use advertising in your marketing: [Read more…]

Don’t Be Boring!

One of the things I keep telling people, that need to market their product or services, is to be different, be special, be interesting, be something that matters to people. I think one should always aim for making a certain group of people love your business, product or service. Some think I am crazy ;)

But you know, I am not. Mom always said to me, “if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well”. Your business, product or service is not a small part of your life that you can just plod along with. If you have your own business, don’t you want to do the best you possibly can with it? Get as much as you can out of it? And don’t you want to have fun doing it? The fun comes with doing things well, aiming higher, creating something exciting, unusual, something interesting. Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaase don’t be boring! [Read more…]