Marketing is a System, Not an Event
Small business marketers love the chase - love the new fangled way to make the phone ring. They love to think of a marketing promotion as a single event. It's precisely this view of marketing that holds most small businesses back. They fall prey to the "marketing idea of the week" and never fully explore what it takes to create and build a completely functioning, consistently performing, marketing system.
Accounting professionals are no exception to this marketing phenomenon, but the good news is they also much more apt to approach any aspect of business from a systematic point of view. So, let's break down the basic steps that any business can follow on the way to creating their very own marketing system.
First, let's explore this word system in the context of marketing. Accounting professionals have no problem thinking "systems" when it comes to say, accounting or hiring. When it comes to marketing though, all bets are off. It's as if they are waiting for magic fairy dust to fall upon them with the next great marketing innovation.
Look, effective marketing is little more than creating and operating an effective marketing system. Now, when I use the word system, I mean several things. 1) The system is documented - You can't have a system or a step in a system unless you write it down. 2) The system is built on sound marketing principals and 3) You constantly measure, innovate, and refine the system.
Okay, so on to the system building steps.
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Small business owners love to say yes. "Sure we can do that." The next thing you know the target market is roughly anyone they think will pay them. You must commit to a narrowly defined target market and you must focus all of your attention upon serving that market like no one ever dreamed of. A narrow marketing focus might be - individuals with a certain net worth.
Until you can show how your firm is different and offers something unique, you will always compete on price. You must find a way to tell your newly defined narrow target market why you have something to offer that they value. Your core message might be - We show high net worth individuals how to keep more of what they earn.
No one like to be sold to and more and more advertising is falling on numb ears and eyes. Your lead generation system must be built on several fronts such as public relations, referral marketing, strategic partnerships, and targeted advertising. Your lead generation message must offer the target market a reason to want to know more. Forget about the sale; look for ways to build trust.
When you run advertising that offers more information, such as a free report or free teleseminar or workshop, your prospects can get a large dose of your expertise in a very non sales environment. If you present workshops for organizations such a your Chamber of Commerce, the attendees view the fact that you were invited to present this information as an endorsement of referral from the host group.
Writing articles and contributing to newsletters read by your target audience is another way to increase your firm's awareness and expertise status. When a reader views an article in a publication, they are much less likely to feel as though you are selling to them, but they can also get a good feel for your scope of knowledge. These types of soft lead generation tactics pay off very big when it comes to building trust.
No amount of leads in the world will help your business if you don't efficiently turn those leads into clients. You must have a plan that maps out what you will do when phone rings, when you make the sales call and when it's time to do more business with the clients you already have. Most small businesses completely ignore this aspect of their marketing, but this is where the real success in marketing lies.
Forget about the glossy sales brochure, use your marketing materials to teach how your firm is different, how you solve real problems, how you work, why you work, what you believe and your marketing will be much more successful. Your web site must come from this point of view as well.
Setting marketing goals for such things as leads, appointments, sales, phone calls, referrals, impressions, mentions and anything else you can think to measure is how you turn marketing into a game and how you keep score of the game. Everyone loves games, and the only way to improve something is to measure how well you are doing in the first place.
Once you have spent the time and energy to think through steps 1-6, you need to commit your plan to a marketing calendar and then allocate (or at least think about) the money it will take to implement your plan. Once you create a calendar, it is much more likely that you will look at the tasks assigned to each month like a "to-do" list. So, instead of whining that you should do more marketing, you simply scratch each item off your list and plan for the next. It's an amazingly simple but effective device.
Every system needs a champion. Either find someone in your organization who does little else but operate the system or hire a marketing professional and charge them with helping you develop, implement and run the system.
Properly fed and maintained, this little marketing system can become the engine that drives your firm's climb to the top.
John Jantsch is a veteran marketing coach, award winning blogger and author of Duct Tape Marketing: The World's Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide published by Thomas Nelson - due out in the fall of 2006.
He is the creator of the Duct Tape Marketing small business marketing system. You can find more information by visiting http://www.ducttapemarketing.com.
