If you are a small business owner, one of the key issues you consider is balancing your time. The problem, of course, is that you have too much to do and never enough time to get it all done. Being human, we emphasize what we do best, spending most of our time doing the things we like. But being business people, we know we need to balance our preferred activities with those “got-to-do” activities.
Regarding marketing, some people like it and some do not. Whether you like marketing is not the issue. You need marketing to achieve balance in your business. Good marketing can generate activities that help you pursue the most profitable, highest volume sales possible, in the context of your resources. As Tom Bonoma of Harvard Business School defined it—“Marketing is the function through which the firm encourages exchanges of goods for money that are profitable to it and satisfying to its customers”.
Plan Your Attack
You can’t avoid marketing. Any contact with customers is marketing. The issue is one of marketing quality. What drives quality is planning and follow-through. You need a marketing plan.
Planning impacts success. Consider a study done by a major computer industry franchisor who wanted to find out what factors contributed to a franchisees success or failure. Their analysis showed a single key element that separated the winners from the losers. That element was planning. The successful franchises had a plan. The failed franchises did not plan. It was the existence of a plan and the business owner’s commitment to execute that plan that foretold success.
In a small business environment, marketing planning can be simplified down to four key steps – selecting target markets, analyzing target markets, rating target markets, developing sales plans. Notice a theme here? Target marketing is essential. Begin with the understanding that you cannot be all things to all people, and not everyone is a customer.
Four Steps
Step one, selecting target markets, is a screening process. A profitable business focuses its resources and efforts on customers it has a good chance of getting. This means customers who value what you are offering, and are willing to exchange money for your goods and services. Start your segmentation with your existing customers, and expand the effort from there. Weed out unattractive segments and select potential target markets.
Analyzing target markets is the second step. You’ve identified your best customers. Now you need to understand them—the who, what, when, where, why and how that underlies their buying decisions.
Once you understand each target market, take the third step and rate them and prioritize them. Rate them based on the strength of your appeal to the customers in the market. Rate them based on the overall size of the market. Rate the growth potential of the market. Your evaluation process should produce a ranking that is a road map of where you will focus your limited resources, and your even more limited time.
Finally, develop a sales plan. The sales plan is the blueprint of actions and tactics you will use to get orders and reorders. View various sales tactics such as advertising, sales promotions, direct marketing and direct selling. Consider the cost and return on each tactic in the context of the research you painstakingly have done already. The goal with the sales plan is growing revenues with a strong return on the needed investment to get those revenue dollars.
Small businesses that want to grow in a profitable and sustainable manner need to plan their marketing before selling. Marketing is distinct from selling. Without the marketing effort, selling becomes a one-off activity with little predictable success.n
Ken Cook is managing director of Peer to Peer Advisors, an organization that facilitates business leaders helping each other. You can reach him at kcook@peertopeeradvisors.com.
