Marketing help and access to experts for less than $100 a month. Too Expensive? Really!!
In order for a business to succeed you have to spend money on it. For some businesses that may be tools, and supplies, for others that may be ongoing education and membership fees. At some point in time all businesses need to pay an expert like an attorney.
One expert that many small businesses like a mom and pop shop or a single service provider neglect to pay is a marketing expert. Often they think putting an ad in the local throw away or newspaper is marketing. This is a piece of it, but only a small piece. Additionally, they do this without a system in place to track the ROI (return on investment) of the campaign or a way of capturing contact information form the leads they do get so they can build a relationship with them and sell to them again. This is just the tip of the iceberg, there is so much more to marketing than just a one-time campaign, such as branding, knowing your ideal customer…. and the list goes on.
Many small business owners like those mentioned in this article try to do it all themselves, thinking they are saving money. The problem with this is they are really costing themselves money and they don’t realize. For one they are doing things they don’t really understand and so it’s taking them time, finding usually free resources all over the internet, learn it, then do it. While they may eventually get it done the time they spent doing it could have been spent on getting more customers or doing what they are good at for their business and making more money.
I understand that depending on your stage in business hiring some of theses experts can be costly. Good marketing experts can cost form hundreds to thousands a month. I recently shared a marketing solution with a service provider, who is at the beginning stage, that is an in between solution. On the one hand it is a DIY (do-it-yourself) solution, but it is a hand-held, step-by-step, easy to consume and implement solution. It is membership site put together and supported by marketing experts, gives access to a private group of marketing experts where questions can be asked and new information is added on a regular basis which is vital in the ever changing world of social media. All this for less than one hundred dollars a month. Sadly the provider thought it was too expensive. With that kind of mindset it is likely this person’s business won’t be very successful and they will always be scrambling to try and make it work.
This article “The Importance of Marketing for the Success of a Business” explains more on the importance of marketing.
One definition of marketing I found started like this. “The total of activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer seller to the consumer or buyer, including……” What things would you include as marketing?
