1 Key Strategy I Teach My Clients To Overcome The Common Marketing Mistakes Businesses Tend To Make

1 Key Strategy I Teach My Clients To Overcome The Common Marketing Mistakes Businesses Tend To Make

The 3 common problems in business…

When I wrote my book ‘I Just Want It To Work, A Guide To Understanding Digital Marketing And Social Media For Frustrated Business Owners, Managers and Marketers’, I researched over 40 businesses ranging from around the $600,000 in revenue mark up to just over $600 million in revenue. And what I found so interesting was that regardless of the size of those businesses, whether they’re at the smaller end of the spectrum or at the larger end of the spectrum, they had three problems in common.

  1. MONEY
  2. RESOURCES
  3. UNCERTAINTY

Through this research what I learnt is it doesn’t actually matter where you sit on that spectrum, the problems when it comes specifically to marketing, digital and social media tend to be the same. Money of course is relevant depending on the size of the business, and it comes down to the size of the marketing budget a business is given.

What I found was the reason money was an issue for most of those businesses was because they were uncertain on how to invest it. It was a chicken or egg scenario. They wanted to know where they should be putting money, where to drive the best returns, how they should drive the best returns and what where the best methods or best strategies they needed to employ.

This of course led to uncertainty. “Should I be on social media?”, “should I be creating content?”, “should our business be partaking in various marketing strategies?”, “should we be advertising on digital and social channels?”, “Should I be Google marketing and should I be using Google search?”, “should I be focusing on SEO?”, were the questions I was asked. And questions I still get asked by people today. There was so much uncertainty and overwhelm around the decisions that businesses needed to make in regard to marketing, digital or social media.

Resources. The decision businesses often face is whether to try and do marketing, digital and social themselves, or whether they feel it is best to look at employing someone or an agency to do it for them. This is something I delve into in depth in my book, where I highlight the pros and cons of each option. Regardless of whether a business is at a point where they are boot strapping everything and doing it themselves, whether they employ someone to take care of marketing as they grow, or whether they have a full marketing team, at each stage, businesses believe they still have a resources issue.

Perhaps this was because the person employed to take care of marketing specialised in sales, or maybe they were really great at graphic design and content design, but they don’t have a great overall wealth of knowledge in the marketing sphere. And as a result, the business does not have resources at a level that is required to support the business holistically.

So, the reason I am writing this blog is to highlight these common problems, and for those reading to know that you’re not alone and that businesses of all sizes face those same three problems at varying degrees depending on their size.

What I recommend to my clients, or anyone who believes they have the above problems…

So, when a client comes to me for advice I set up a strategy session where I can go into their business for a whole day and uncover the different aspects of the business. As part of this session we do a SWOT analysis of the overall business. This is where you look at a business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. By conducting a SWOT, our goal is to identify and double down on the strengths and focus on what the business is really good at. We then Identify the weaknesses in order to recognise the ways in which these can be addressed. At this point we can identify whether it is necessary to employ or outsource someone to work on these areas.

Now we focus on the external elements of the business, opportunities and threats. We work out ways in which a business can capitalise on external opportunities, and how to turn threats into opportunities.

Regardless the size of a business, a SWOT analysis is always something I recommend doing as it allows businesses to identify the ‘problems’ they may be having which is the best way for a business to begin addressing this. This may mean a business needs to employ more skilled marketing staff, or perhaps employing a marketing agency such as Menace Group to take care of all marketing, digital and social.

So, if you’re interested in learning more and you feel that you need a simplified guide to business marketing strategies feel free to grab a copy of my book or reach out to me on Facebook or LinkedIn. I’ll be more than happy to help if you have any questions or uncertainties in regards to your business or marketing strategy.

 

 

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