In order for your small business brand to strike gold with customers (both current and potential), it is crucial that your marketing messages are on target.
That said, can you confidently say each time a marketing pitch representing your brand goes out it will hit the spot? Even more important, have you been sending out too many marketing pitches as of late that are not on target?
For the small business owner and/or the marketer representing them, having a winning message is as important as ever, especially given the myriad of choices today’s consumers have.
So, is your marketing message ready to do its job?
See What Works and What Needs Attention
To give your marketing pitches, and your small business for that matter, the best opportunities to succeed keep the following factors in mind:
- Know your audience – For starters, what audience exactly are you going after with your marketing efforts? If you don’t know the answer to this question, take a step backwards and do some more homework. If you just blindly throw some marketing pitches out there, can you really expect to come away with a high success rate? Smaller businesses usually know their markets a little bit better than the bigger brands, so use that to your advantage. When you have less consumers with which to pull from, your message is all the more important;
- Test it out – Do you regularly test your marketing pitches and related efforts out before they hit the print or air for public consumption? Unlike the bigger brands out there, smaller companies oftentimes have less of a hit-or-miss window to work with, meaning that they have to hit the nail on the head sooner rather than later. Larger companies typically have more resources with which to work with, not to mention typically better-known brands. If one or even a few marketing messages do not quite hit their intended targets, there is wiggle room to recover. Meantime, the small business owner oftentimes knows he or she gets one crack at winning a consumer over. Using A/B testing with email marketing is a great way to test marketing pitches to see if they are ready for a broader distribution. Test, review, and even alter to some degree your marketing messages (email, social, mobile etc.) so you can improve the odds of landing that new customer the first time around;
- Don’t be dug in – How many times have you seen the business owner who is unwilling to change? He or she thinks their marketing messages are on target, but consumers are saying otherwise. Determined to stick it out, the business owner only relents to changing things up when the revenue starts to take a serious nosedive. Avoid getting to that point in the first place by analyzing and even tweaking your marketing pitches as necessary, allowing them to stand out. The same holds true for your website. Some small business owners do not invest the time, effort, and even funds necessary to have a first-rate site in place. As a result, consumers come and go on the sites, oftentimes not in a big hurry to return. As a small business owner, you (or someone on your team or an outside pro) need to regularly test your website for issues such as view-ability, broken links, and the ability to easily find company information (contact details etc.);
- Accept feedback – Lastly, accepting constructive criticism over your marketing messages is healthy and should never be avoided. Just as social media is a good avenue for you and your brand to get consumer feedback, answer questions, even deal with concerns over your company, so too is letting consumers address you on your website and in person too if possible. Always keep in mind that you can learn a ton of information from consumers, so never tune them out.
Put Together That Winning Formula
The life expectancy of a small business is oftentimes less than five years, something you do not want to be a part of.
Part of having a winning small business formula is making sure your brand’s marketing message is tried, true, and tested.
So that you and your small business can stay in the game for many years to come, sit back and review just how informative and useful your marketing pitches truly are to consumers.
When you do that, you stand to oftentimes land more business than you could ever imagine.
About the Author: Dave Thomas covers small business and marketing topics on the web.