Help! My Marketing’s not working!

Here’s something to think about if your marketing’s not really working.

There are kinda two bits to marketing. I’m just going to call them Part 1 and Part 2. In the Healthy Income Program we call them Raising Agent and COFFEE. Marketing professionals might call them Strategy and Tactics. You can call them whatever you like. It really doesn’t matter, you just need to remember that there are TWO  bits and you need to do them both!

Part 1

First of all you absolutely need to have:

1. A FABULOUS product which is….
2. usefully DIFFERENT to whatever else is on offer and is….
3. designed for a SPECIFIC  (very niche) customer group

Ok, so you’ve probably heard this before and kinda know you need to have these three things. But it’s worth checking that you really do have them because lots of small businesses don’t.

Why’s that?

Well you might have started a business because you are good at something (making cakes, candles, clothes, hairdressing….) and next thing you know everyone is doing it! If you’re a cakey you can happily blame shows like The Great British Bake off/ Great Australian Bake off/Cake Boss for your current predicament!

It’s really, really irritating I know. But you HAVE to work out a way of being a bit different. And I’m pretty sure that if you go to the trouble of looking for a DIFFERENCE you’ll be able to find it.

The GOOD thing is that once you have got your difference and sorted your Part 1, customers will buy your stuff. Truly! They just need to  know about it.

And how will they get to know about it?

That’s Part 2!

Part 2

Part 1’s the hard bit. Now you’ve just got to work out HOW to let your customers know you exist!

There are tons of ways you can do this. Some will work well, some less so. Some will bomb. That’s OK! When you know what works you do more of it and when you know what doesn’t work you just stop doing it. Really, it’s that easy. The only hard thing is making yourself actually do it!

So what are the kind of things you can do? Well this is the stuff you read about all the time. You know; advertising, Facebook, networking groups, cold calling, mail drops, free samples, events, blogging, website, alliances with local businesses etc etc.

If you put your mind to it I’m sure you will be able to think of lots of stuff you can do (and if you need some help this is a good exercise to do).

The big thing though is this. If you haven’t done Part 1, Part 2 WON’T WORK. At least not very well. You might get a few sales but crikey it will feel like walking through mud.

Of course some of the Part 2 stuff takes time to work and you need to keep plodding on with it while you see if it does. But you can do a few Part 2’s simultaneously and if you’ve got Part 1 right I promise you WILL find some Part 2’s that work fabulously!

Comments

comments