How To Kill Your Business: Reasons why most small business marketing fails.

If you’re a small business owner, you’ve no doubt given some thought to marketing and advertising.

What approach are you going to take? What are you going to say in your advertising?

The most common way most small business owners decide on this is by looking at large, successful competitors in their industry and mimicking what they’re doing.

This seems logical “do what other successful businesses are doing and you will also become successful”. Right?”

In reality this is the fastest way to fail and I’m certain it’s responsible for the bulk of small business failures. Here are the two major reasons why…

01. Large Companies Have A Different Agenda

Large companies have a very different agenda when it comes to marketing than small businesses do. Their strategies and priorities differ from yours significantly.

The marketing priorities of a large company looks something like this:

• Pleasing The Board Of Directors
• Appeasing Shareholders
• Satisfying Superiors’ Biases
• Satisfying Existing Clients’ Preconceptions
• Winning Advertising And Creative Awards
• Getting “Buy In” From Various Committees And Stakeholders
• Making A Profit

The marketing priorities of a small business owner look something like this:

• Making A Profit

As you can see there is a world of difference in the marketing priorities of small and large companies. So naturally there would have to be a world of difference in strategy and execution.

02. Larger Companies Have A VERY Different Budget

Strategy changes with scale. This is very important to understand. Do you think someone investing in and building skyscrapers has a different property investment strategy than the average small property investor? Of course.

Using the same strategy simply won’t work on a small scale. You can’t just build one floor of a skyscraper and have a success. You need all 100 stories.

If you have an advertising budget of 250million and three years to get a profitable result, then you’re going to use a very different strategy compared to someone needing to make a profit immediately with a 2.5billion budget.

Using a large company marketing strategy, your 2.5b is going to be a drop in the ocean. It will be totally wasted and ineffective because you’re using the wrong strategy for the scale that you’re operating at.