Marketing is my jam!
I’ve worked on thousands of marketing campaigns, with thousands of companies, and the reason I get so excited is because marketing is how you scale your business!
This is the final key to creating a solid business that can withstand anything that comes its way. Learn more about the rest of this series and the keys to a solid business here!
Marketing is what scales a business once the business has fully established the other four foundations. It brings in warm leads who are easier to convert than cold leads, expands your reach, and helps to drive sales.
… When you do it right.
Unfortunately, way too many business owners make huge mistakes. So here’s what to avoid in your marketing…
Leaping In Too Quickly
This mistake stems from worrying that you have to get into marketing immediately when starting a business.
You don’t need to!
Instead of trying to put together a huge marketing plan from the get-go, small business owners need to initially be focused on sales activities like recruiting leads and getting sales appointments. Marketing takes time and/or money (often both); you don’t need to put an emphasis on marketing unless you have an excess of both of those things.
In other words, if you have the money that you won’t miss, and plenty of time before you HAVE to close a deal in order to pay your bills, (By plenty of time, I mean...a few months) you have time to put a serious marketing strategy into play!
If you need to close a deal by the end of the week, don’t go relying on marketing. It won’t bring in clients as quickly as you need, and it will steal your time from clients that are already warmer to your company.
Marketing in Isolation
There are two aspects to marketing, and they must go hand in hand: the marketing strategies and the branding.
Business owners often attempt marketing on a single platform and without a solid brand. The problem is that isolated marketing without a solid brand is like a bow without an arrow: ineffective.
Even if you’re using multiple platforms and sending out tons of marketing campaigns, no one will recognize your company from one ad to the next without a solid brand connecting the dots.
To avoid this mistake, you need to know what an effective brand looks like and create your own.
What is an Effective Brand?
The most important part of an effective brand is consistency across your marketing assets.
Marketing assets are the ways you attract attention to your company: business cards, emails, social media, flyers, website design, etc. An effective brand has consistent characteristics from one platform to the next, in components like…
Brand Voice (The tone and style of words you use in your marketing)
Brand Colors (The color and designs used in everything from your logo to your social media pictures)
Brand People (The same spokesperson or kinds of people represented in all your marketing)
Without a consistent brand in marketing, the power of marketing is negated because a different brand is going out in each marketing asset: no one can subconsciously connect the brand/company on one platform to the next.
An Effective Brand also utilizes the way that colors and shapes subconsciously influence emotions.
On the one hand, you don’t want to be spending a ton of money on marketing when you’re starting out. So you don’t necessarily need to be investing tons of time in creating logos and brand colors based on how colors and shapes subconsciously influence people. But…
When you are ready to start seriously focusing on your marketing to scale your business, you need to invest in a well-designed brand.
Whether we want them to or not, colors and shapes influence the way we perceive things and feel about them - especially brands. Which means that brand designs need to be constructed intentionally and with understanding of what colors and shapes influence people in what ways. Even something as simple as a straight, swerved, or curved line drives your viewers subconscious emotions.
Brand influence on viewers is complex, so bringing in someone who specializes in brand design might be what you need to invest in.
Which is why too many people jump into marketing too fast. Without understanding the intentional depth needed in marketing, you’re wasting your money and time.
To Build an Effective Brand...
Know what you want to represent in terms of character and message.
Brand message and the character of that message is going to be based on each business’s core values. The core values, or essence, of your business is what goes into your brand. And by brand, I mean everything. From the way that employees respond to customers, to the design outline for your graphics.
Take some time to document exactly what those core values are, so that you can go back and reference them every time you hire someone for marketing. Documentation helps keep a solid, consistent tone in your marketing regardless of how many different people you hire for marketing.
The reason for consistency
I’ve talked a lot about consistency because marketing must utilize multiple strategies. You can’t market on just one platform and expect to get the incredible results that marketing can bring, so you have to make sure that people can connect the dots of your company from one platform to another (E. G., Billboards to Facebook Ads).
Marketing with just one platform is like trying to build a house from the roof down: it just doesn’t work.
And I’ve talked about marketing a lot because it is such an incredible tool for scaling! Having an effective brand and different strategies that follow the Three Ms of Marketing (Check out the blog on the Three Ms here to learn how to apply them to your marketing) is what makes marketing such a powerful tool for scaling!
If you’re interested in going deeper on your marketing, check out our free marketing course here for some deeper insight and steps to walk you through creating your effective marketing.
Looking for your next event to create growth and evolve to the next level with your business? Make sure you check out Small Business Supercharge! We are bringing incredible speakers like Mike Michalowicz, Jeff Hoffman (The Priceline Guy!), and Dana Pharant to the virtual stage for 1 Day for absolutely free! But you have to register prior to the event happening, so check it out soon!