Connect Your Marketing To Your Business Goals And Model
Marketing is the most frequent answer I receive when I ask business owners to describe their biggest challenge. That and marketing your business online. It seems to be a perplexing area of business and one that feels almost like magic. I get feedback that it is hard to track, difficult to structure, feels random, it is expensive, it is hard to calculate a return for, etc. Everybody seems to know that its necessary, far fewer seem confident in doing it.
As I’ve mentioned before, many small business owners are gifted in a few areas and that has enabled them to begin and sustain their business. But to grow and sometimes to remain in business, you need to pick up a few business skills along the way. The typical small business owner can quickly get overwhelmed trying to learn all aspects of business ownership and leadership if they try to do it on their own.
It helps to have a system in place that is designed for small businesses and lets you quickly flow from goals through actions and measure progress along the way.
I recommend taking a step back from considering marketing issues and ensure that your business is organized such that the messages flow to the appropriate customers and that you’re prepared for the increase in business. Its also important to define how you’re going to measure your progress so that you understand which marketing efforts pay off.
To begin with, ensure that you have a clear definition of your business and its purpose including specific goals for the business as well as for you as the owner. Be honest and clear at this stage or everything that follows will be more of a challenge to accomplish.
Next get a clear picture of where you are today, financially and operationally. This baseline will enable you to quickly identify challenges you may be able to address immediately and also sets the stage to compare results to in the future.
The next step is important regardless of how mature your business is. Create a clearly defined and customer validated business model. Your model will describe how you deliver value to your customers and all of the key components of your business that are required to support the delivery of that value. It will also help you articulate clearly who your customers are.
Test this model by surveys, customer interaction, market research, etc. so that your business isn’t based upon a hypothesis, but on reliable assumptions that are researched.
Once you have your “house in order” you can turn to marketing. Don’t market blindly or on hunches. Use the “marketing mix” of product, price, promotion, and place along with competitors, channels, and customers to craft your efforts.
Make sure that your marketing efforts are aligned with your business model and goals and track the expenses and results carefully. Record your campaigns and results and learn from them in order to improve each time you launch a campaign.
While marketing is often described as the leading challenge in business, the issue and problem runs deeper and can only be solved by ensuring that you have done the steps mentioned here. If you don’t take the time to analyze and structure, your efforts will continue to produce random results.
To learn more, click here!
Marketing is the most frequent answer I receive when I ask business owners to describe their biggest challenge. That and marketing your business online. It seems to be a perplexing area of business and one that feels almost like magic. I get feedback that it is hard to track, difficult to structure, feels random, it is expensive, it is hard to calculate a return for, etc. Everybody seems to know that its necessary, far fewer seem confident in doing it.
As I’ve mentioned before, many small business owners are gifted in a few areas and that has enabled them to begin and sustain their business. But to grow and sometimes to remain in business, you need to pick up a few business skills along the way. The typical small business owner can quickly get overwhelmed trying to learn all aspects of business ownership and leadership if they try to do it on their own.
It helps to have a system in place that is designed for small businesses and lets you quickly flow from goals through actions and measure progress along the way.
I recommend taking a step back from considering marketing issues and ensure that your business is organized such that the messages flow to the appropriate customers and that you’re prepared for the increase in business. Its also important to define how you’re going to measure your progress so that you understand which marketing efforts pay off.
To begin with, ensure that you have a clear definition of your business and its purpose including specific goals for the business as well as for you as the owner. Be honest and clear at this stage or everything that follows will be more of a challenge to accomplish.
Next get a clear picture of where you are today, financially and operationally. This baseline will enable you to quickly identify challenges you may be able to address immediately and also sets the stage to compare results to in the future.
The next step is important regardless of how mature your business is. Create a clearly defined and customer validated business model. Your model will describe how you deliver value to your customers and all of the key components of your business that are required to support the delivery of that value. It will also help you articulate clearly who your customers are.
Test this model by surveys, customer interaction, market research, etc. so that your business isn’t based upon a hypothesis, but on reliable assumptions that are researched.
Once you have your “house in order” you can turn to marketing. Don’t market blindly or on hunches. Use the “marketing mix” of product, price, promotion, and place along with competitors, channels, and customers to craft your efforts.
Make sure that your marketing efforts are aligned with your business model and goals and track the expenses and results carefully. Record your campaigns and results and learn from them in order to improve each time you launch a campaign.
While marketing is often described as the leading challenge in business, the issue and problem runs deeper and can only be solved by ensuring that you have done the steps mentioned here. If you don’t take the time to analyze and structure, your efforts will continue to produce random results.
To learn more, click here!
