When you stop and think, it really is a lot easier to make marginal and profitable improvements to the products/processes/promotion tools we have than it is to “push the envelope” and dive into something completely new.

Seth continues to remind the rest of us marketing bloggers that we’re just living in his world His blog is and seems to have always been the finest on the web.

When putting together a marketing plan, many small businesses look at their budgets and try to think of where they can advertise to boost sales.

Instead of taking that approach, here’s a different angle… Look at your marketing plan and look at your budget and try to think of all the ways you can improve sales WITHOUT advertising.

It’s true that there exists no better and more efficient way to put your business’ name in front of a lot of eyeballs. But at the same time, it produces low ROI in comparison with other types of marketing like public speaking, networking, PR or even direct mail for example. And it’s usually terribly wasteful.

Consider this: in your local community newspaper, your ad can probably be seen by 10-20,000 people every week. But how many of those 20,000 are really ideal customers for you? It likely isn’t 20,000. For example, if your product or service is geared more towards women than men, you can already cut that 20,000 in half. Geared towards women with young children at home? Take another significant cut. Odds are that when you really narrow it down, you’ve only got a couple thousand people left out of the 20,000 you’re paying for.

And, taken on it’s own, independent of a bigger strategy, most small business owners can count the number of times that the local newspaper made their phone ring on one hand.

Advertising on it’s own can’t be a marketing plan for small businesses. Instead of going to advertising first, do it last… For a small business, advertising works best as the icing on top of working strategy, filling in the gaps and finding the people that your other initiatives just can’t get to.

So as you enter the new quarter and think about your marketing, think about how you can reverse the model and do it differently this time.

I’ve been telling this story for years and I’m sure that just about everyone who’s ever worked with me for any length of time has heard it. Early in my career I worked as a designer and production manager for a network security firm and I was always eager to impress our VP of Marketing with my boundless creativity. So I’d come into meetings prepared to present my very best.

But I very rarely made it onto the white board. Instead, my very best concepts usually got the following response:

“That’s a great idea… For a different company.”

I came to dread those eight words and I heard them often. But that experience taught me a very valuable lesson which I have carried with me for years… We are all capable of having great ideas — MANY great ideas. But you can’t implement them all. And most of your ideas, even some of your favorites — once taken into the context of your business — probably shouldn’t even make it onto the white board.

Effective marketing, and effective overall business management requires a degree of moderation. You’re always going to have more opportunities, more ideas and more creative insights than you will have the time, money and personnel with which to implement them. So don’t be afraid to kill the ones that don’t fit straight off, no matter how creative or innovative they are.

A lot of times it seems that we as small business owners look at our marketing to-do list from a tactical rather than strategic perspective. It’s a common pitfall that a lot of us fall into where we get so focused on getting things done that we forget why we’re doing them and what we expected to get out of them in the first place.

There’s no doubt that being tactical is easier; it’s certainly less work for us as business owners and we are likely to get things crossed off our list quicker than we would if we meticulously planned and strategized around everything we do… But we’re also more likely to come out the other end of that project with a “band-aid” type of solution that is not likely to get us the results we wanted long term… And soon we’ll end up with another item on that growing to do list: “re-do web site.”

It also goes without saying that most of us aren’t marketing, branding or web geniuses and can’t sit down and come up with a brilliant winning strategy in an afternoon. That’s why — and especially if anything I’ve written here scares you — the best recommendation I can make to someone who needs to start a new branding, web or marketing project (but doesn’t know where to start) is to contact an expert and ask for help.

Getting good help may cost you cash out of pocket in the short term, but it is certainly more efficient in both time and money than your eventual alternative of “redo web site” or logo or brochure… And that’s before we factor in the additional business that we won and opportunities we generated by doing the right thing up front.

And who wants “just” a web site anyway?

“If you build it, they will come” is NOT an online marketing strategy, much as a “Grand Opening” sign does not assure you of a packed house in your first weekend if you were to open a store or restaurant instead of a web site.

A lot of clients will look unhappily at their web stats and say, “What’s wrong? We’ve got a great site and a great product, we’ve done the Search Engine Optimization… Where did we mess up?”

Great site + great product or service + SEO do make a great foundation for success on the web, but it isn’t all you need. A client of ours contacted us last week with questions about their SEO and why it wasn’t working like it should. We looked at their analytics and found that nearly 75% of their site traffic was from search engines…

The first question that popped into my head wasn’t “Why is our SEO not drawing enough visitors?” but “Why are WE not drawing enough visitors?” There are four ways that someone can access your web site:

1. Directly typing your URL
2. Clicking a link to your web site from someone else’s web site
3. Finding you on a Search Engine
4. Paid advertising

In the case of my client, they only had three potential traffic sources as they do not advertise and one of those traffic sources was doing three times as much work as the other two combined. Just think, if this company could just draw enough direct and referral traffic to match what they were getting from search engines, their overall site traffic would increase by 50%! And while retention programs aimed at current customers will help give the direct traffic numbers a boost, the biggest opportunity for success by far exists in building referral traffic from other sites.

Why? Because Google is a lot like high school… Popularity counts and the more people talk about you the more important you become and the higher you will get ranked. So an increase in solid referral traffic may actually have a much greater impact over time as the search engines compensate your increased popularity and perceived relevance in the marketplace with better rankings.

And don’t forget… If one of your competitors is consistently ranked highly by Google and the other search engines, it likely isn’t by accident. It’s because they worked hard over time on not only their SEO, but also their overall reputation and presence in the online marketplace. You can’t expect to beat them overnight. But do the right things with your web site and you’ll get there as well. It won’t be easy but it WILL be worthwhile.

Here’s the bottom line: the folks that sell you your ads will never admit this, but the truth is that any kind of mass media advertising isn’t designed to “work” the way a small business owner wants it to. Those are awareness-building tools and not the kinds of initiatives that, on their own, are likely to bring you the kind of ROI you’re looking for… Namely phone calls, foot traffic, etc.

I recommend that small business owners invest their time and marketing budget into efforts that are likely to reach fewer people, but more likely to net actual customers. These would include networking, referral marketing, retention programs, email marketing, etc. And build an audience that you can reach over and over again.

I wrote about this in November and again in December but considering the topic, it’s work saying again. Marketing is a science of reach times frequency. Reach is sexier because we all like to think that because we’re in a magazine that’s read by 200,000 that we’re going to drum up a lot of interest. But frequency is actually more important. You’ll win a lot more business by reaching 50 people 10 times each than you will reaching 500 people once.

Another thing that works is incentives… Incentivize new customers, incentivize current customers to refer friends and family, incentivize partners, local business owners and others who can send you new business. When you network and meet people that have the potential to send you a lot of business, bring them in and offer them a free or discounted service so they can see how great it is. And make sure that when you do win new business that you have a retention process in place to keep those customers and stay in front of them.

The business that I mentioned that sparked this post was actually a massage business. Here’s what I suggested to the owner as examples of high-ROI but low-cost marketing efforts that would likely make more sense for him than traditional advertising:

• Create a referral program
• Create a retention program
• Solicit businesses to allow you to use their offices/retail locations for advertising; if you offer a discount it could be considered an employee benefit
• Also solicit business owners to buy your service in the form of gift cards for employee bonuses or x-mas gifts
• Office massage days are a great idea too as is offering massage in a company’s trade-show booth. These types of services have a great value to the business you market them to and gives you the opportunity to be paid to market yourself to a large group of individuals that could ultimately become your customers as well.

Traditional advertising is a great tool… just not for what most small businesses use it for. I usually tell small business owners to invest in developing low-reach/high-frequency/high-ROI initiatives BEFORE spending on advertising. Mass media is usually the thing I recommend that businesses do last after they have developed all of these other engines to acquire and retain customers. That ensures that we have the right processes in place to keep any customers that DO come into the system through traditional advertising.

Have questions about developing an effective small business marketing plan? Shoot me an email, I’m happy to help.

Zero-G Creative was featured in this month’s Around Town Small Business Journal, a business magazine serving the north Atlanta area. The subject of the article was building lasting business partnerships, a topic that is very important to us here at Zero-G.

Click here to download the article as a PDF.

This is actually a common mistake, and something that I talk to our clients a lot about. The problem starts with the gap between the seller and purchaser of any given product. As the people selling or marketing an item, we know it inside and out. We understand what it does and the things that make it unique and incredible. We innately know why everyone should want one. The customer though is a stranger. They know little or nothing and often need to rely on us to help them make good purchase decisions. We, on the sales and marketing side are obsessed with features. They are often our differentiators and the things that we get excited about.

When I ran marketing communications for a global baby toy manufacturer, our company revolved around features. If we came up with a baby seat that played seven soothing songs while our competitor’s product played only four, that was a good day in the office. After all, we were fighting a war for shelf space against larger, more mature companies like Fisher-Price; anything that could give us extra ammunition when we went into battle was important. And seven songs is definitely more — and better — than four.

But what’s in it for the end customer? Do they care how many songs it plays? Our customers, regardless of the industry, are obsessed with benefits. They want to know how their lives or businesses will improve by making this purchase. To the business owner, the benefit seems obvious because their extensive knowledge on the subject prevents them from being objective.

There’s no doubt that features are important… But they usually aren’t meaningful unless connected with a benefit for your customers which you can easily express in both conversation and collateral. Before you do anything else, make sure you tell your customers what’s in it for them. It may be the most productive change you ever make to your sales and amrketing approach.

As a consultant and the owner of a design firm, I have these kinds of conversations with business owners all the time. They paid money to someone who disappeared. They waited months to hear from the designer that suddenly lost interest in their project after a long string of unreturned emails and phone messages. They didn’t realize until after it was too late that their designer didn’t have the expertise to properly and professionally execute the project at hand.

When I started my design firm, Zero-G Creative, I was determined to break these stereotypes and show business owners that they can get quality design, good advice and outstanding customer service without paying agency fees. We’ve offered transparent pricing, a solid design methodology and a satisfaction guarantee that protects businesses from being charged for additional revisions when they are unhappy with their designs.

But now we’ve taken our commitment one step further… Zero-G Creative has been accredited by the Better Business Bureau. It’s just another way for us to prove to our clients that we’re willing to go the extra mile to earn their trust and that we are confident enough in our track record that we’d be happy to have the Better Business Bureau publish it on their web site.

Trust is the foundation of any good business relationship and we believe in serving our clients in the manner they deserve. While we can’t make up for any bad experiences people may have had in the past, we can certainly give them a better design alternative now.

Personally though, I think one of the most frequently overlooked places to find valuable connections and partnerships is with your competition. I know this may sound like heresy to many out there, but in my experience it’s true… Your competitors can actually HELP you grow your business.

My company specializes in graphic design, web design and marketing for small to medium-sized businesses. There are hundreds of qualified firms and individuals competing with us just here in Atlanta and, I would guess, tens of thousands nationwide if not more. But at the end of the day, no two design firms are exactly alike. Some firms are big and some are small. Some do a little bit of everything, but some firms specialize in a specific media like print, magazines or web. Some firms work exclusively on specific types of clients, like technology firms or consumer products companies.

Many times, we’ll get referrals from other firms for projects that aren’t right… Projects that are too small for our agency contacts and projects that are too big for freelancers we know. Sometimes other designers will even start projects for us to finish. Why not? Building a good relationship with people within your own industry is a great way to earn a top-notch reputation. And this strategy isn’t limited to design and marketing… I have seen people in a variety of industries work effectively with competitive firms or individuals. Business consultants do this all the time as do lawyers, accountants and IT firms.

Certainly you need to be careful about how you work in relationships like this… You obviously don’t want to expose too much of your organization or give someone information that they could easily exploit to your disadvantage. But at the same time, you have a lot to gain by developing close relationship with other professionals in your industry — even if their services overlap with yours.