3 Reasons Business Owners Avoid Marketing - Part 1 of a 3 Part Series

by Scott on March 09, 2007

Whether it’s marketing departments at Fortune 500 companies or a small business marketing team, I’ve observed the split between those that produce the product and those that try to attract customers to it. In these companies its not the job of the producer of the product to market it. As a small business owner, you do not have that split though.

So, here are a few thoughts on why small business marketing is important and why small business owners may not think of themselves as the marketing department. In my next articles I’ll share seven tips on how to practice small business marketing without becoming a salesperson.

3 Reasons New Business Owners Don’t Put Too Much Planning into Marketing

Bob Walsh reminded his readers of an excellent, relevant video of a Seth Goodin presentation to Google called All Marketers are Liars. Godin’s right – marketers are liars (it’s called puffery). And who wants to be a “liar”? Not me. Not you.

Yet the truth is that competency at a task does not correlate to how well the resulting products are received or celebrated. This is a hard thing for microISVs and most small businesses owners to hear. Here are three reasons why people put too little thought into their small business marketing plans.

1. They’ve been told they’re the best programmer (or lawn care guy, accountant, painter, etc) that people have ever worked with. What more could people want?
   Yet company owners are only paid if they get “hired”. Being great at building the product or service the company offers does not make one great at getting “hired” in the first place.
   
   
2. They Have Such Personal Excitement About Their Product That They Don’t See How Anyone Could Not Immediately Just Want It?
   Again, people could only want it if they hear about it. The marketing efforts we will talk about in the next article are all about helping people hear about a product, try products, and talk with others about their experiences.
   
   
3. They Don’t Want To Be One of Those Slimy Greedy Salespeople.
   They’re not alone in this aversion to sales. Katherine B. Hartman, a marketing professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington says that in an analysis of movies and TV shows from 1903 to 2005 “the salesperson character personifies some of society’s most despised characteristics-greed, deception, distrust, and selfishness.”

So I’m not proposing all small business owners become salespeople. I’m recommending that new companies should plan from the beginning for the marketability of their products, services, and business and have a small business marketing plan. In fact, make it part of deciding what product or services to offer.

Part two of this series is here.

Posted in Small Business Marketing, Referral Marketing | 1 trackback

[0] comments

New Feature: Measure Marketing Results

by Scott on March 09, 2007

LeadsOnRails.com now has a reports to help users measure marketing results. Details here. Next up: we are tying these effectiveness reports directly to lead capture web forms to help users develop effective web campaigns.

Posted in Productivity | no trackbacks

[0] comments

Blogging and White Papers Are Not Free

by Scott on March 09, 2007

Authoring white-papers, newsletters, and blog entries can certainly be effective marketing tools. To know just how effective you need to measure costs and resulting leads. But too often business owners forget to account for their own time.

White Papers, E-Mail, and Webinars

This month’s (March 2007) issue of Inc. magazine has an article called “Wooing Customers One White Paper at a Time” (the subject of the article has invested over $2 million in white papers over the years). Dan Dershem of LeanLogistics is featured and shares his marketing budget. Here are some key points:

Marketing budget as percent of revenue: 2006: 7% 2007: 4.6%

Lead Acquisition: e-newsletter budget up by 130%. webinar budget down by 55%.

This is one company focussing on e-newsletters because they’ve found them inexpensive and effective. Dersham reports that e-mail campaigns resulted in double the number of leads at one-sixth the cost of producing a Webinar.

Many small business owners write their own e-mail campaigns which keeps cost down. Yet, if you author your own company’s emails, whitepapers, and blog entries, then you might be underestimating the cost of those marketing efforts.

If you run a report like this (ignore the numbers, they are fake and not the point of this article):

make sure that you are including your time in the estimate of lead acquisition and marketing cost. (Click here to see the system that created this report).

Whether it be maintaining a blog or writing emails, you need to assign yourself an effective hourly rate and estimate much time you spend on those activities. Armed with this info you can then get a true picture of the marketing effectiveness of those activities.

Alternative Authors?

Why is this important? Why measure something if you are not going to change it? That’s a good question. So the second part of this article is a call to business owners to measure alternatives as well. What if you had others in the company or professional copy writers author your emails? What if you bought industry newsletters? What if you paid a blogger?

It might be worthwhile to try a professionally written campaign and then measure results. Just be sure to include the cost of your time in the self-authored campaigns.

no trackbacks

[0] comments