Small Business’ marketing vicious cycle

The Sales Gooses video is a brilliant metaphor for the pitfalls that many small business owners fall into especially when it comes to marketing your buisiness. Smallbiz-emarketing strongly believes there is a better way to think about and to do marketing. Read on to see what typically happens in small businesses and how you can save time, money and mental well-being with our marketing services.

Marketing is everyone’s job

All small businesses or start-ups quickly find that marketing is vital to attract potential customers to buy your product and services. However, limited resources often make it very difficult to find the budget for marketing experts.

Understandably, most small businesses decide to make marketing everyone’s job, so your staff do marketing as well as their other roles. This option seems especially sensible in these days of digital marketing where it is suggested that doing digital marketing is quick, easy and cheap.

It usually quickly becomes apparent that your team are struggling to do marketing as well as everyone expects as not enough customers are buying to make the business sustainable. Staff often have the same goals as the owner/manager, which depend on getting more customers: a successful business that offers secure employment, interesting work, satisfied customers, good salaries and progression opportunities.

When all of these appear further and further away than ever, team members start murmuring about needing more help.

Desperate appeals for resources

Everyone understands that money is tight especially when you are just starting out. You and your team also know that more customers would enable the business to get specialist marketing that could lead to more sales. In this truly vicious circle however, not enough sales mean that the business cannot afford the budget for expert marketing.

Left to struggle on with limited success, the team usually turns to the business owner/manager and ask for more resources. Except now, their murmurs have turned to nagging. Nagging soon becomes relentless clamour that can’t be ignored no matter how hard you try. When their clamour is unresolved, staff resort to making direct desperate appeals to the owner/manager. Something has to change; you must do something!

Something is better than nothing?

A caring entrepreneur often starts by providing additional resources to make marketing easier and more effective usually in the form of books, software, training, incentives, etc.

While doing these may satisfy the team, they are only short-term fixes because everyone knows at the back of their mind that better marketing could transform the business into the thriving company where they can fulfil their aspirations.

Sooner or later, the murmurs, nagging, clamour and desperate appeals for expert marketing cycle starts again.

You can hardly blame the team for wanting more help; after all they do not have the background, training and experience that professional marketers have. The team have their areas of expertise, but it is not marketing. Is it fair to expect someone to learn to be a medical practitioner after a few ad hoc training programs, books and Internet resources? Yet, your team are expected to achieve a similar feat – to do an expert marketing job while learning on the hop.

Unless things change, the risk is that your team members will stop enjoying working for your business and instead seek employment elsewhere where they can use their skills, do interesting work that they enjoy, work with happy customers, etc. Having taken the time and effort to assemble the right team around you, the last thing you need is for them to become ex-team members!

Taking responsibility

For many reasons many entrepreneurs make the momentous decision to do the marketing themselves. Understandable reasons for taking this step include, taking the burden off the team, taking responsibility and working within your limited resources.

However, the reality is that do-it-yourself marketing is typically misguided when you have many other vital tasks to do to keep the business afloat.

These are some of the barriers you are likely to experience with DIY marketing:

• Lack of time.
• Producing the kind of content that engages potential customers across the different marketing mediums.
• Lack of knowledge and training.
• Limited budget/resources

As the business’ situation continues with less-than-great-marketing, unsurprisingly, your team’s murmurs, nagging, clamour and desperate appeals for expert marketing start all over again.

Moving forward

www.smallbiz-emarketing.com believes that things can and should be different. Getting expert marketing does not need to break your business, even if you have a limited budget. Take a look at our services page to find out how we can help you and your team save time, money and your mental wellbeing by providing professional digital marketing services that bring your target customers to your business, at affordable rates. We can help you and your team do the things you are good at, the reason you went into business in the first place.

Contact us for your free no obligation digital marketing consultation, and you get the first month’s digital marketing completely free.

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