Small Budget Marketing Tactics The Laser Approach
So you own your own business! Congratulations! You went into this adventure feeling pretty comfortable about your skill set and capabilities. But like most of us you quickly realized you are smoking competent in three or four areas and not so solid in about 18 others! Some you didn’t even think about till taking the plunge. There’s no clear path! That’s how I felt as I worked my way through the first year of owning a small business.
Let’s use marketing as an example. In most companies you have a support staff and years of company history, budgets and data points to use as a context to propel you forward towards your marketing goals. Thing are clear. In your small business you are starting from scratch and most of the time your “team” is looking back at you in the mirror. And that mirror is not so clear.
My story begins with a $500 a month budget that grew to $5,000 a month then $10,000 a month literally putting flyers on car window shields in the rain, in the dark with my pregnant wife! But we established a budget, we established a target market, we followed through and we measured our results. Coca-Cola spends billions a year on advertising and they do the same thing. Delta, UPS and Google do the same thing. They’ve followed the same clear path consistently since they were scratching for survival like you are right now! Consistently marketing is the magic sauce to success.
The hardest part is to wake yourself up and take action. Don’t let yourself get paralyzed by having a small budget! I was many times. It is not a smooth path. So how to shake yourself up?
Action recipe… one part fear and two parts joy!
- Message yourself! Set a daily reminder on your phone or even a post it note that says “Everyday not marketing is a day closer to going out of business!”
- Establish a digital cookie jar and set aside as your budget a dollar amount per day to spend and see how much you actually have in 30 days!
- Celebrate increasing the value of your bank account! Few companies that market strategically and consistently fail.
How to keep your momentum going? Check out Small Budget Marketing… the Taser Approach. It’s part of the The Sales and Marketing Academy. This program will at first, force you to define many aspects of yourself and your company’s image, budget and message. Thereby generating a clear path to succeed in marketing. It’s like adding an entire enterprise level marketing team to your company!
Tell me what you think! I too am working at getting better every day and appreciate your time and thoughts.
1 Comment
You can’t be good at everything and a business will require a lot of different things you will not be good at or hate doing. And most people are not very good at marketing their own business. Does that mean they shouldn’t do it? No. Because then they would go out of business quickly. This is a skill they need to learn and quickly. Especially small businesses which don’t have a budget for marketing so they can hire someone to take care of things.