Marketing is one of the key pillars of designing your perfect business. The greatest businesses on the planet understand this and engage in marketing activities each and every day. However, this is an area where most small to medium businesses get it very very wrong.

Most small businesses participate in “advertising” as opposed to marketing.

What do I mean you may ask? The owner looks at their upcoming workflow or check in with their weekly/monthly sales figures and think “Oh shit we don’t have enough work coming in, we better do some marketing”. So they will quickly put together a flyer, email or social media post – send it out there and hope it brings in some new business. Sometimes it works and a
a lot of the time it doesn’t.

However, fast-growing businesses understand that marketing is an everyday activity that involves strategy, tactics and the mindset of testing and measuring.

Now let me make another quick distinction. Not every marketing piece has to have a direct offer, discount or special deal. Marketing is about engaging in a dialogue with your potential client/customers and fostering a relationship with them.
Marketing’s primary job is to clearly articulate that you have a solution to a specific problem. It should talk to one person, with one problem and encourage them to enquire about how you can solve this problem with your product or service.

Marketing’s secondary job is to get a prospect to know, like and trust you and your brand enough that they will enquire or opt-in (take the first step, not the end step). It is not to try and sell to them.

This is the role of your sales process.

Now I am sure you are nodding your head and saying, “that all sounds great, but I don’t have the time or budget to market every day”. As cliché as this will sound I am going to say it anyway – you can’t afford not to market every day.

We have developed a simple yet effective 9 step marketing plan, that when followed makes setting up your marketing simple.

The 3 key pillars of the strategy are:
1. Clarity
2. Context
3. Campaigns

I have broken each of these into 3 key components to make it easy to implement.

Clarity is all about:
1. Getting clear on the specific market you are going to target.
2. Refining your message to that target market; and
3. Getting clarity of the offer to that target market.

Context is all about:
1. Character – helping people to get to know, like and trust you and your brand.
2. Credibility – why should they trust you and your brand

3. Connection – how will you build your tribe

Campaigns is all about
1. Offline – which offline tactics will we implement
2. Online – which online tactics will we implement
3. Social – how we will utilise social media in our marketing efforts.

Now while this may look quite detailed and complex, but it is actually quite simple. It takes a bit of work in the beginning to do the research, analysis, and testing, however, once you have this in place it really requires minimal energy to maintain. Now let me qualify this by saying it is minimal energy to maintain if you commit regular time and focus on this.

It is NOT a SET AND FORGET system!

You have to commit to consistently working the system and make marketing part of your daily activities. Commit to the marketing plan, commit to daily implementation and this commitment will inevitably lead to business growth.