I was having a conversation recently with a colleague of mine that went something like this: “Wendy, I wish I had the budget to hire your company, so I could market my business. I know if we spent money on marketing, we could grow.” My response: “Scott, everything you do is marketing. The product you provide your customers is marketing. The way your staff treats your customers is marketing. The environment your customers walk into every day is marketing. The way you answer the phone is marketing.” He was taken aback for a moment while this processed and said, “Wow. You are right. I think of marketing as spending money finding new customers. There is a lot of marketing I can do with what I have. That’s exciting.”
I have this conversation often with business owners. Marketing gets defined as activities that cost money. The result of this misconception is businesses take themselves out of the marketing game because they think they can’t afford it.
This is one of the biggest misconceptions plaguing small businesses today. Marketing is something everyone in your company is doing 24/7/365. Just as you cannot NOT communicate, you cannot NOT market.
Wake up! This is good news for you. Use this information to grow your business.
Here are three important steps you can take right now. And they are FREE.
1) Work on making your product or service remarkable. Make sure you deliver on your promise every time. Be vigilant about this. Act like your life depended on it.
2) Focus on the experience you deliver your customers. From the way someone is greeted when they walk into your establishment and an e-mail you write to the magazines in your waiting room and the copy on your Web site. Pay attention to it all. I walked into a new dentist office recently and there were signs all over the office that said “NO CHANGE PROVIDED” and “WE DO NOT PROVIDE CHANGE!” My whole experience of the office was negative. They had an environment that was not customer oriented, and it came through in everything they did. The signs were just a symptom. I changed dentists as fast as I could. They were marketing – just not the right message.
3) Make sure every employee realizes they are marketing for the company. A family was driving and saw a pizza delivery car next to them. The driver was smoking. The young girl in the back seat said, “Daddy, I never want to order from that pizza place again because it will have smoke in it.” That driver didn’t think of himself as a marketer. Clearly he was.
There are so many things you can do to thrill your customers, so they are addicted to your business offering. Stop complaining that you don’t have money for marketing and focus on the marketing you are doing today. And remember, marketing is something everyone in your company is doing 24/7/365. You cannot NOT market.
E-mail me at wendy@athena-marketing.com, and I will send you a one-page planning tool to make it easy for you to get in the marketing game. If you have any questions or comments, e-mail me or comment on my blog http://wendylieber.wordpress.com/.
