How can your company explosively grow when your business sucks at marketing?
Referrals and word of mouth are great, but they can only go so far—and they’re usually slow coming if we’re being honest.
Sooner or later you know you’ll need to go on the offensive to market and advertise your brand instead of waiting and praying.
If you don’t, good luck winning market share, opening a new location, or building a bigger team. Your business growth simply taps out without marketing—it has no other choice.
Compare that to the business that has the advantage of turning on their marketing like a faucet where they can always get more customers anytime they want.
The ability to bring in new customers seemingly at will is not only a perk in itself, it also allows the business flexibility to raise prices, try different promotions, and get customer feedback to improve.
What’s the company I just described understand while the other one is going to struggle? It’s simple, one is not making the two mistakes that will kill your marketing and the other is.
Two Marketing Killers
It’s not that you’re just going to be average if you make the two marketing mistakes below.
Your company is going to fail from a marketing perspective and suffer the consequences down the road—one of them possibly being bankruptcy.
1) No money investment
First and foremost, your business has to put your money where your mouth is and pay to market or advertise your services. It costs money to get in front of new faces, but chalk that up as the cost of being in business.
Your business should be spending:
-
- At the very least 3% of your company’s annual revenue on marketing
-
- 7% to 10% of your company’s annual revenue on marketing
- Ideally more than 10% to grow at a faster rate
Of course the final totals will be different for every industry—a software company should spend more of their annual budget on advertising than a restaurant should—but these are solid general guidelines.
What should you spend money on to bring in more customers? Work with a website design company for one. Then Google pay-per-click ads or Facebook ads are the best bet for almost every business. Depending on the industry it may also make sense to invest in video projects, television ads, or radio ads.
And this doesn’t mean there aren’t free ways to build an audience.
Optimizing your website for keywords and SEO and adding email capture forms to your website can both return thousands of dollars of profits in a short time (among other free marketing ideas).
Once you commit to financially investing in your marketing and advertising, you’re not done yet.
2) No time investment
Not investing any strategic time into your marketing is the second killer mistake.
Because your business can toss as much money at a problem as you like. But if these funds are not strategically allocated in the right direction, then it will not deliver on expectations.
Your team or you may walk away at the end of the campaign and think, “Aha! I knew marketing and advertising doesn’t work!”, when really you didn’t execute to get the best ROI.
These are a few examples of what it means for a business owner to invest time into your company’s marketing:
-
- Schedule a weekly meeting solely devoted to marketing
-
- Delegate an individual or team to fix your current marketing weaknesses
-
- Ask for a monthly report listing every marketing channel, dollars allocated to it, and the individual platform’s performance
-
- Scope out your competition to “steal” their good ideas
- Research successful advertising campaigns by innovative companies in other fields
What does no money and no time get you? No results, no business growth, and maybe you’re forced to close down shop if an Amazon-type company comes after you.
I want you to win, and win in style. The way you’re going to do that is by spending the money and time it takes to find marketing channels that produce real business results.
You can totally do this!
