You can’t grow any business without marketing to your potential clients. Marketing and sales are more important to your company’s success than the actual product or service you sell.
Don’t believe me? Subway doesn’t make the healthiest or best sandwiches, but you bet your a$$ everyone eats there. Why? They are marketing heavy. You see them on TV, hear subway commercial on the radio and get even coupons in the mail.
Many business owners say their competitor’s products are inferior, but are consistently out sold by them. They get frustrated and invest more into the packaging, developing and distribution of their stuff but neglect the one area that matters – marketing.
Here’s a knowledge bomb for you: the majority of the marketplace does not care about which products are inferior or superior, they care about which ones they know.
How does a product become known?
One way and one way only – marketing. Only through marketing can your product be known by your prospects. So if marketing is so important to your business, why isn’t it a bigger part of the budget?
Often times, business owners assume they can market their entire business by word of mouth. They think their happy clients will send them more happy clients and so on. While this is one way that will eventually work for you, you can rely on marketing to bring what would be strangers, to your business and convert them into clients.
There are two ways to market a brand. One way, which most business owners use, is to rely on word of mouth, cold calling and other dated, but free, modalities of marketing. Maybe they go to a networking group, hang flyers on door knobs or car windows, or some other low budget, useless way of spreading the WRONG message about your brand.
Meanwhile it’s only $27/15 second commercial spot on cable TV. Thanks to the internet you could place a banner ad on someone’s website or blog for free. With facebook you can spend as little as $10/day to get your brand in front of 1000s of potential prospects.
The truth is, you’re going to earn market awareness one of two ways. The fast way or the slow way. The slow way is old school and cheap. The new way is to use paid marketing and advertising to gain momentum immediately.
The best part is that when you use paid marketing, your competition is virtually non existent in most cases.
While most business owners operate in fear of losing money on “marketing schemes” you can catapult ahead of the game and to the top of the market simply by paying to skip the line. The brands that grow the fastest rely on paid marketing. The brands that last the longest rely on paid marketing. The companies that grow the biggest rely on paid marketing.
If you DON’T rely on paid marketing, how can you EXPECT to grow like one of these top companies?
Sure, we’ve all been burned by investing in marketing and not getting the ROI we expected. Mainly because business owners blow off the details and trust the salesman at his word. When you invest in marketing you need to have all the details. If not, you could also blow potential deals on accident, due to lack of knowledge.
Even doing something as simple as learning how to use paid ads on facebook can increase your business way faster than any word of mouth or flyer can. Word of mouth spreads faster on social media than it actually does when it comes out of people’s mouths.
Bottom line: You need to be asking yourself everyday If you’re not investing a significant amount of your budget into marketing, you’re not investing your money in your company correctly. There are a million types and reasons to market to your target audience, and you’re missing out on massive amounts of moolah if you’re not doing it.
