5 Marketing Tips For Small Business Owners - Marketing 101(Year 2021)

What are the five key things that you need to understand to have effective marketing to grow your company?

If you're going to be successful in either starting a business or growing a business getting past that ceiling you must understand the proper significance of marketing. Too many people treat marketing as an afterthought rather than a priority. So, to make sure that doesn't happen to you we're going to put number one like this;

Marketing Is Critical

Now we're not just want to stop there, because you probably already know that marketing is critical. But what you don't know is where marketing falls into the grand scheme of things amidst every other thing that you've got to do in a business. So, if you're running an effective business, it's not just about advertising you've got finances. Right? Your Accounts Payable, your accounts receivable, maybe you got certain people that are customers and they owe you money. Maybe you got people that are already paying you, current clientele, and guess what maybe you got people that you need to pay. Other vendors, people that are helping you run your website, maybe a web designer, maybe a web hosting company. If you got brick and mortar, you're paying for rent costs, maybe you're paying for product expenses for your materials, all sorts of things. And we haven't even talked about if you're managing staff, hiring, people managing people. 

We haven't talked about operations management, making sure that things get out on time. Making sure that things are done right the first time, there are all of these different components to run a business. So, amidst all of that, this grand world of business that few people know about and understand where does marketing falls in the equation. Well, I would say, if you are just starting or growing a business to the next level, your marketing should be your second most important task, really next to producing something. Okay? I'm going to say that again; if you're not spending at least 60 percent of your time marketing your business as you are first getting started or trying to grow it to another point, then on some level your business as a whole is failing. Because it's not enough that you should have a product or service, you've got to get that product or service out in front of the world. And it's not enough that you should get it out to just any person. You got to get it out to the right person and that's the reason why marketing is so effective. 

Marketing is critical to growing your business. You could have a product or service right now that's better than half the products that are on the market today. But nobody's going to stop buying from them if they don't know who you are. If you have not established trust, if you've not established credibility, if other people aren't talking about it, these are all critical components that go into your business success. So, without wearing out this point you've got to understand that marketing is critical

Study Human Behaviour

If you want to be successful in marketing your company you've got to understand human behavior. You got to focus on studying human behaviour. What do I mean when I say you got to “start studying human behavior”? Here's what happens in most businesses. People start up a company, it's based upon their ideology and their own envision and they want to bring it out to the world. And when they bring this vision out to the world what happens is, they never take the time to see or find out, do other people want, what I'm offering to them. Alright? To some extent, it's good when you have that entrepreneurial spirit, you're a visionary you've got creativity you've got ideas, you've got focus. But the only way that your business is going to stay alive is, if other people actually want, what it is that you're offering. So, without spending so much time in your mind, you need to start studying the behavior of the people that you want to be your customers. What do they actually buy? Why do they buy those things? Would they be interested in what you have to offer? 

Study Human Behaviour - Photo by Pixabay

Marketing is not just I have a product, I'm telling you to go buy it, and then that's as far as it goes. Real marketing is a real deep psychological study into the needs of your customers that you want to offer something to because you want to do everything that you can, to make the right people make purchasing decisions. I'm going to give you a prime example of this; let's say that there's a product that you really want. 

Let’s pretend that it’s just that something that you want, and it's put on a website that's very hard for you to access. Whenever you try to go to the website, you got to go to like 50 different pages before you could even find the product you want. When you try to order the product, it's like there's nothing on the page but the image. You try to buy it and it takes you to ten other pages before it goes to checkout complete. It’s like you have to jump through all of these hoops to be able to get what it is that you want. And that's a prime example of how you could have the right product that a person could want, but you could be delivering it to someone in the wrong way. And there's no greater example of someone understanding this or a company understanding this, than in Amazon’s one-click purchase. 

So, when you look at Amazon that's run by Jeff Bezos the largest e-commerce site in the world what do they do that's different from a lot of other people. Well, they've taken the time to actually study human behavior. So, they don't just come up with all these products to put on their website and then just deliver it how they want to deliver it they take some time to understand the human brain. They understand that mentally, people really value comfort. They value convenience, they value speed especially in this technological world so knowing that people want to get things quick and fast. 

What they did was they invested in making sure that you could go from looking at something on a page to having it ordered and delivered to your home all within one click of a button. That may now seem self-evident because they've already done it, but they had to actually go through the studies of taking the time to find out, how their sales would have improved if they had that one-click feature.

I don’t want you to think that Amazon just did that by coincidence. They literally perform studies to understand how their business was losing money over time because they had too many different pages and barriers for people to go through before a purchase was made. So, the only way you can come to similar conclusions about what's holding back your business is if you study the human behavior of the customers that you're marketing after. It's not just about having one click. It's not just one thing. 

How do your customers like to be contacted? What's the language that they use? Where do they go to make purchases and why do they buy the things that they buy? Right? Even when it comes to the delivery of those things. Are your customers buying things on Facebook? Are they buying things on Twitter? are they buying things you know based upon maybe a reward? Based on the ideal in their brain you know maybe when they buy this thing, they think it's going to come with so many rewards? Are they buying it based on fear? What is the human behavior that drives their buying experience because, if you don't understand that, and you don't build marketing around that, you’re going to get beat in a business up against a person that does? That’s plain and simple.

Going Deep

You need to focus on is going deep and let me explain what I mean by “going Deep” in marketing. So, when marketing, so many people especially online, it's like they want to be everywhere. For them to have a good marketing presence they feel like they got to be on every platform. So, you talk to people that starting up a business and they're like yes; I want to be on Facebook, I want to be on Twitter, I want to be on Snapchat, I want to be on periscope, I want to be on YouTube, I want to have an email list, I want to have all of these different things, Instagram, all these different accounts. 

But then, when you look at the accounts, it's like it's so sporadic they’re not going here or there in any account. Better for your business to be on one platform, where your market could be found and you're effective on that one platform than be on a billion other different platforms and you're not really making noise at all; you're not moving the needle. This is about going deep. 

Now for a customer or a future consumer to actually buy from you again, what are some of the prerequisites that have to be established? Well, first there's got to be a certain level of trust. There's got to be a certain level of credibility. And what about social bias, how many other people may be recommending your business to them. And so, if you have a marketing strategy that's not very deep where you have a consistent type of marketing effort to put it in front of those people, how are they ever going to get to a place of trusting you? You could have all the billions and trillions of accounts but what will it matter if you're not actually persuading people to buy from you on any one of those accounts. Better for you to have one account and go all the way in, and be a noted brand in that category than to be on a trillion different platforms and you're just a run-of-the-mill type of person. 

This is one of the things that people get caught up in because there are so many different options vying for our attention. And because people don't understand the nature of how critical marketing is. Because they're not studying human behavior to know enough how to effectively reach the people to the point of purchase. They never get to a point where they become effective on anyone's platform because in their mind is just about making a lot of noise rather than connecting. 

It's not just about making noise you don't want to be like a Chiwawa in a business. When you look at a real dog, that's actually capable of biting the hell out of you they don't always have to bark about it a lot. 

So, I'm trying to rewire your perspective on marketing in that, you don't always have to be in front of everybody's face on every single platform but on the platform that you are on, you make your presence felt. 

Continuously Being Consistent

A lot of these things are all foundational principles that you need to have. Well, as your business grows from year to year, look at your marketing plan and actually ask yourself how many of these you are fulfilling step by step from day today. If there are certain gaps and where your business is going, I guarantee you it's probably around one of these five. You're either discrediting the importance of marketing you're not doing enough research into your customer base and you haven't gone deep on any one platform and guess what you’re not being consistent. 

So always be consistent, you need to start thinking about this. Do I really love what I'm doing in my business? Do I like it? Am I just doing something just because somebody else said so? Because, if I'm doing something just because somebody else said so, how am I going to put out consistent marking communications? How am I going to be a consistent marketer, if I don't even enjoy what I'm talking about? And so, one of the things that I always think about especially when it comes to this category is, am I running off of a business model that's based upon one of my genuine interests that I could talk to people about even if I wasn't making money? So, when it comes to what I do, in terms of being your success consultant a lot of times I would help my friends become successful all for free. a lot of times I would speak to people at my church and just help people left and right just, for fun randomly just kind of off the cuff and as I started to see that more and more people were interested at a larger scale, I had to start investing more time with this because I started to run out of my discretionary time. 

Photo by pixabay

So, the whole point is, you can only be consistent at something that you value and care about. Get care into your business model. Get care into your idea and then just vocalize that regularly. Now any real businessperson would tell you they're all top corporations all successful businesses everybody that’s wanting to compete, they're marketing themselves daily. Their business is being marketed daily you know a lot of times if you cut on the television. And let's say that you're watching TV for a few hours straight. Chances are you're going to see multiple commercials from the same company. You're not just going to turn on the TV and be watching it for hours, and it's just one McDonald's commercial, you're going to see many McDonald commercials. You're not going to just cut on the TV and see one Volkswagen commercial, you’re going to see multiple Volkswagen commercials. Now, why is that? Is it because maybe one person got off the TV, another person got on the TV during in-between time? Well, maybe, but more importantly, they understand, that to be effective in marketing, you can't just put out a message one time and expect everyone to get the gist. You've got to consistently put out the same message or a variation of that same theme behind the message, multiple times for it to start latching on to people.  so, one of the things that are important in this one about being consistent, it's not just about the volume of content that you put out it's about having a fundamental understanding, that most consumers don't really catch on to advertisements until they’re looking at it on average anywhere between five to seven different times. 

It's very rare and kind of Hollywood, that a person would look at your one commercial, your one video your one billboard, one time in life and just say wow this is just so incredible, I've got to stop what I'm doing right now, I’ve got to pull out my wallet with all this money that I've been busting my butt to get, and I've got to pay this person for how great of a product this is in the universe, that’s a fairy tale. 

You got some people that will do that some the time but you can't build a business off of that pipe dream. If you want to build a business something that's going to actually put food on your table you must understand this fundamental marketing law. You’ve got to be consistent especially in a world where there's more noise more than ever. You got people that's got all types of videos running YouTube Ads, Facebook ads and TV commercials and billboards, all these different campaigns. So, what's going to help your voice not get drowned out by theirs is to stay consistent. Stay consistent to the best of your ability. So, if that means that you may need to have someone help you put out regular communications well, that's what you need to do. Because, if you get drowned down and nobody knows that you exist you could have the greatest product in the world but nobody will buy. 

Pick A Lane And Dominate

Focus on picking a lane where you can dominate and you want to stick to it. Pick a lane within a business pick a niche where you stand the chance of dominating at it and you want to stick with it from day to day.  Most people get into a crowded marketplace, they do what everybody else is doing and then they wonder why they don’t get results. So, even when you look at what I'm doing with my business you don't see me just coming on the scene and being like “hey yes, I’m just that business guy, I'm just that business person. There's a lot of different business channels. You've got a lot of different business teachers and so that's the reason why I would tie it on my YouTube channel Blackman's career. It’s a specific lane that I'm offering. So, this is the number one home for where black men will come to learn how to be able to build businesses in ways that are specific to their personal needs.

Pick a lane and dominate - photo by Pixabay