It goes without saying that if you want to grow your business and have it succeed, you have to take marketing your business seriously. This goes beyond building a strong marketing team or having the best project managers. If your marketing efforts aren’t producing, then your business will fail.
It is never too late to start the process. We are all at different stages of the business owner’s journey. It doesn’t matter if you just discovered your passion and considering launching a business next month, or if you have been an established business owner for ten years, you need the foundation of a solid marketing plan or your efforts will fail. Our Marketing Plan development program has a total of nine stages to develop for the plan to complete, all of which are equally important. You can’t neglect one stage or another. Many business owners have done a great job on a handful of the stages, however, they still lack the results they desire because they failed to fulfill the other parts.
Let’s take a lot at some other reasons that small businesses fail at achieving a strong marketing presence.
You don’t have marketing software in place or it is outdated.
One key tool each small business owner should invest in is a good project management system. There are several options out there, many with a free version for businesses with smaller teams and few projects.
If you are fortunate to have a system in place already, are you evaluating it frequently to ensure that the process you have is still relevant? Replacing your marketing project management software with one that helps your manage your projects more effectively and manage your team member will enable you to crush deadlines, work out budgets, and manage large complex marketing projects.
You don’t have a marketing plan at all.
This doesn’t mean that you have done no marketing at all. But It does mean that your marketing is probably a hot mess, and your marketing team has no idea whether they’re coming or going. You are spitting out marketing tactics and strategies based on what you see someone else doing and hoping for the best. You need a solid marketing plan that is shared with your team and addresses all aspects of your marketing efforts. Once your marketing plan is established, you should be able to look at each piece of content your business puts out and determine how it aligns and fits into your overall strategy. If you can’t see how something supports your marketing plan, then it shouldn’t be shared.
Sit down and talk to your marketing consultant and your marketing team members to come up with a marketing plan that works for you and your business.
You’ve failed to execute your marketing plan.
If you’ve set a marketing plan into place and have the right software to keep it organized, and your marketing is still failing to bring in the customers you want, then you might be failing to execute the plan you have in place.
You may be one of those very few business owners that got the right advice at the right time and have a marketing plan in place. However, it may have been over five years ago and you haven’t really looked at it since then.
For example, in your plan, you may have indicated that your blog needs to put out fresh content every week in order to keep up with the trends of your industry. However, if you only put up content once a month, that’s not executing your marketing plan. Instead, you need to either re-evaluate your marketing plan or see if staffing adjustments are needed to have the personnel in order to keep up with your plan.
You’ve failed at your social media duties.
Many small business owners feel that social media is a waste of time when it comes to marketing, but in reality, it’s one of the best ways to bring customers to your business. Take the time to learn social media posting, and make sure your marketing team knows it as well. One of the biggest complaints about this is time. It takes time away from your daily responsibilities to think of content to share and get it posted. The most effective way to solve this is to develop a content planning schedule. This has numerous benefits including saving time, producing better quality content, and providing consistent and relevant content to your followers. At Channer Consulting we also offer a Content Planning Session to help teach you the steps to creating a content planner and keeping it active so you never have to struggle at the last minute to come up with content to share
These are just a few of the reasons that your marketing plan might not be working for you. These things are easy to fix with the right software, the right team, and a little determination.
If you are in that bucket of small businesses that do not have a marketing plan in place. Or you have one but have not updated it in over 3 years, let’s set up a time to chat so we can help get your plans up to date and get your marketing efforts back on track.
