The basics of marketing success.

“Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying the basic fundamentals.”? Jim Rohn.

Lately I have been listening to Atomic Habits, by James Clear. It is a great book and I highly recommend it. As is my wont, I have also been immersing myself in many of his other interviews, writings, etc. I do not know who was interviewing him, in particular, as I was driving, and it just came up next on the cue.?

Anyway I heard the interviewer quote him by saying :

“Most people avoid the fundamentals because they don’t have the guts to become great at them. When you eliminate everything that is unnecessary, there are no details to hide behind. You’re left with just the basics and whether or not you have mastered them. It’s easier to tell people that you’re “working on a new strategy” or you’re “doing more research.” It’s hard to say, “I’m focusing on the basics, but I haven’t made much progress yet.” I actually pulled off to the side of the road, under a big shady tree and replayed it a couple of times, to be able to write it down correctly. It just leapt out at me. It is my blessing to know a few really great sales people, a couple of great business owners, a few great sports people, and one great musician.?

The consistent thing about all of them is they are great, at the fundamentals of their chosen path. When I say great, I mean really great. They have achieved a level of personal mastery. It is my belief that business owners can also achieve personal mastery with their businesses. Mastery is always a part of success. With that in mind I share what I feel are the 4 basic fundamentals of marketing small and medium businesses.?

They are what I refer to as the R4 framework. The four R's of the R4 system stand for reputation resell reach and retargeting or referral. What I have found is that there are four key Marketing Systems that every small business needs to have in place to optimize growth, at their business.?

The first one is a reputation system. Your reputation is the foundation of your business's success I don't need to tell you but if you know customers are coming in here, and they're not happy with products and services and they're going out and telling the world about it it's very easy for them to spread that negative reputation now due to how easy it is with social media.

The first thing that we need to do is we need to protect and enhance, and grow your reputation, and have a have a deliberate system in place to does that not leave it? chance. That's number one, that's the first R the second R is Resell. Every business needs to maximize every customer relationship ! Just getting a customer in for the first time, you probably don't make any real money off of that customer, because of the cost of sales, advertising and marketing.

So we have to bring them back, you know better than I do that it's your loyal repeat customers that are the most profitable ones. We call that resell,? we want to have a system in place to again make sure that we are proactively bringing people back into your business that's resale.

The third then is Reach. Once we have those two Marketing Systems in place now we have a really solid foundation that we want to Reach out to as many new prospects as we can.? and bring them in.?

A very common mistake that businesses make is they actually invest in reach and advertising,? before they have the Reputation and Resell in place. Then what happens is they're actually driving people into their business without those first systems in place, and it's actually just accelerating getting negative reputation negative reviews out there. Because they don't have these proper Marketing Systems in place first. Or the ads just don't look like they're positive Roi, because they're not following up effectively.?

So we make sure we have those foundations in the first place. then we invest in reach to expand our audience, and then finally retargeting. You know that we are bombarded with messages and ads everywhere these days and so we have to make sure we're staying in front of our prospects and customers repeatedly.

What I'm communicating is that every business needs to have these four Marketing Systems in place.

“There are endless exercises for arms, but the basics are best are chin ups and pushups “ ? ? ? Sylvester Stallone.

“If you spend too much time learning the 'tricks' of the trade, you may not learn the trade. There are no shortcuts. If you're working on finding a short cut, the easy way, you're not working hard enough on the fundamentals. You may get away with it for a spell, but there is no substitute for the basics. And the first basic is good, old fashioned hard work.” John Wooden