10 Best Tips to Fuel Your Marketing

Business management guru Peter Drucker once said, “Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation.”

Still, most business owners don’t have big budgets for marketing. In fact, most have little to no budget. But the right marketing can propel your organization to the top of your industry. The wrong marketing (yes, having no marketing is wrong) will leave you scrambling for revenue each month, losing market share, and constantly shrinking your profit margins just to keep the doors open.

To do it right, the successful owners I interviewed for The Success Code spent a great deal of time up front – determining the strength of their target markets and re-evaluating their value propositions, making their dollars stretch by using strategic alliances and other relationships in the community, and testing and measuring every strategy for return on investment.

Here are 10 things you must do to build the right foundation and advance your marketing:

1. Accept that you need to invest in marketing to see a return. If it seems like you can’t afford marketing, the reality is you can’t afford to skip marketing. See #4 for budgeting specifics.
2. Know your target market. Clearly define who they are, what they want, and why they’ll buy. ‘Men and women ages 16-75’ is not a clearly-defined target market! You can’t be everything to everybody – and you shouldn’t be.
3. Define your unique selling proposition. What makes your business different from anything else out there? If you can’t clearly differentiate from your competitors, take a step back and find a way to do so before spending a dime on marketing.
4. Create a budget and a plan. The SBA recommends spending 7% to 8% of your gross revenue for marketing and advertising if you’re doing less than $5 million a year in sales and your net profit margin, after all expenses, is between 10% and 12%. Once you have decided on a budget, you need to carefully plan how it will be spent.
5. Outsource as needed. Be honest with yourself about your knowledge and skills and decide if your time is best spent on marketing or other activities. Most owners need to outsource at least some marketing tasks.
6. Do your research. Before making any decisions, make sure you’ve done enough research to be informed. Research even when you’ve outsourced to be sure you can adequately approve designs and strategies.
7. Sweat the small stuff. Marketing is about the whole picture and if one detail is off, it could cost you a customer. Everything from your clothes to your logo has an impact – make sure it’s all in line with your brand.
8. Be cautiously optimistic. When utilizing a new marketing tool or strategy, make sure you’re not wasting time or money on something that doesn’t work for your business model or target market. Test the waters before jumping in!
9. Measure and tweak. You won’t know if you’re getting a return on investment if you don’t measure marketing efforts. Metrics may include online or in-store purchases, website visits, or inquiries for more information. If something isn’t working, tweak it or try a different strategy.
10. Stay top-of-mind. Running one campaign isn’t enough – you have to remind people you’re out there. This is true for new and existing customers. Get out in the community, interact on social media, build personal relationships – whatever aligns with your target market.

Bottom Line

The right marketing will help grow your business. You need to articulate your unique selling proposition in an engaging way to motivate a prospect to take a specific, measurable action. To get it right, use these 10 tips to build a solid foundation on which you can advance your marketing.