Today, I want to talk about this question: do you make these three mistakes with your small business marketing? There’s obviously more than three mistakes people make, but the following three are the ones I want to focus on today.
The first mistake is not creating a website. This is common these days, with new businesses. I’ve come across them, some of them are now my clients. The first thing you do is you have the business idea, you might register the business with the state and local municipality, and then you go ahead and you create a social media page, something like Facebook.
That becomes your sole focus: increasing your Facebook page, and posting things on Facebook. That is an interesting strategy. It’s certainly a cheap strategy, but in the long run, it could be a costly strategy, which leads me to my next mistake, which is revolving your marketing around social media exclusively.
The fact is that most people, when they’re looking for a product, service, or something, they don’t necessarily go to social media and search for, for example, an auto repair place, or a beauty salon, or jewelry repair, or something like that. That’s not typically the first place they go.
Very often, they’ll go to a search engine, something like Google, and then type in what they’re looking for, and then go from there. Occasionally, social media sites will come up with that. It may have your site, but most of the time, people tend to get websites, and people go to those websites to look, and see if they should take it to the next level, which is contacting you, or coming into your store, or something along those lines.
If you only have your marketing revolving around social media and you don’t have another avenue or two such as a website, which is your first mistake, you’re missing a good portion of people. While the number of Americans who use Facebook, percentage‑wise, is anywhere between the low ’60s to the high ’70s, to ’80s, etc., the reality is people who have social media accounts don’t always check them. There are a certain proportion of people who are always checking, but there’s a large portion of people who have social media accounts, who have money to spend on your product or service, but don’t go on social media regularly.
When you’re revolving your whole strategy around that, you’re not necessarily getting the whole gamut of people who could use your product or service, and as you know, from posting repeatedly, not everyone is going to see what you post. You’re really keeping yourself busy, but you’re not necessarily reaching all of your target market when you need what they want.
Let’s go on to the third mistake, which is not putting revenue back into marketing. If you want to grow, you have to put money that you make back into the thing that’s going to make you reach more people, and reach your current customers even better. That’s something you want to take a look at.
Everybody knows that to save for retirement, etc., you’ve got to keep on putting money into retirement. It’s not like you put it there once, and then just stop putting money into there. You have to continually do that. It’s the same thing with marketing for your small business.
Every bit of revenue you get, you need to allocate. If you don’t want to grow, roughly five percent. If you want to grow, depending on if you want to grow aggressively, or moderately aggressively, 10 to 15,to 20 percent of your money back into marketing.
My recommendation is, make it an item on your budget, and go, “All right, this is it. I get a dollar in, I’m going to put 10 cents, 15 cents, 20 cents back into a marketing budget.” This way, you have the pool of money available, ready for you when you need it, to help you do such things as may be creating a website, which is really a requirement in this day and age.
If you don’t have a website, you’re really putting yourself at a disadvantage. Let’s focus on wrapping up here, with the three mistakes, which is not creating a website, revolving your market around social media completely, and then not putting the revenue back into marketing.
I think if you can avoid some of those mistakes, you’ll be much better off.
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