Sales and Marketing Consultants are Killing Small Businesses

Small businesses are losing huge portions of their revenue to sales and marketing efforts that never amount to anything. These small businesses are held out the vision of more leads, more sales, and less worry. What they end up with is a $50,000 hole and no ladder to climb out.

There are a couple of specific reasons for this.

1. Sales and marketing consultants are charging significant monthly fees to develop strategies for small businesses. The magic number seems to be $5,000 per month.
2. Those strategies are not providing much, if any, results for the business.
3. The cost of the consultants is too high for the business to carry long enough to realistically see any results begin to happen.
4. Because of the general distrust of sales and marketing consultants, these same consultants are spending most of their time trying to concoct ideas that will sound good to their prospects, not implementing strategies that will amount to a measurable increase in sales conversations and, consequently, an increase in revenue.

The reality of marketing for small businesses is simple.

This isn't rocket science, folks. As I've mentioned in other posts, the reality of small businesses marketing is attraction marketing. It's a very specific and straightforward set of principles that anyone can follow.

1. Prove that you have the knowledge and experience to accomplish the business objective that your prospects desire.
2. Give away everything that your prospect needs to accomplish their objectives without you.
3. Develop an ongoing conversation with your prospects through your generosity.
4. Provide a clear and simple way for your prospects to engage with you when they are ready.

Whether they realize it or not, this is what is working for small businesses that are growing. The reason they are gaining new clients is because they are ATTRACTING them.

This marketing strategy has 3 specific elements.

Element #1 - The Website

1. Release 3, 2000+ word blog posts every month detailing the exact steps your prospects need to follow to accomplish their objectives.
2. Place a free, valuable resource at the top of your website homepage in exchange for your prospects email address.
3. Place a link at the bottom of every page on your website inviting your reader to download your free, valuable resource in exchange for their email.

Element #2 - Email Marketing

1. Gather all of your current customer and any prospective customer emails that you have now and put them in an email marketing platform.
2. Schedule 1 email every week to go out that contains a 300-500 word snippet from your blog posts.
3. At the end of the email, place a button inviting your email list subscriber to read the rest of the blog post on your website.

Element #3 - The Initial Offer

1. Create a page on your website dedicated only to a low-cost high-value offer for your prospects to engage with you at low-risk.
2. Place a link at the bottom of every blog post inviting your readers to check out your low-cost, high-value offer.

Getting Under the Hood

An important aspect of this marketing strategy is that it is very specific and only utilizes a small portion of the available marketing techniques and platforms. You will notice that there is no mention of social media in this strategy. There are also no webinars. This approach is specific, simple, and straightforward. All that is necessary is consistency and time.

The number one reason marketing campaigns fail is that they run out of money before they realize a return on investment. The second reason is that they run out of content. The focus of this marketing strategy is to remove both of those obstacles. Content creation fails because there are too many types of content being created. A small business will never be able to sustainably create content for social media posts for LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and more while also developing webinars, managing emails, writing blogs, creating videos, and any other content creation “pillars” they are trying to maintain.

In pursuing these marketing strategies, small businesses will hire social media managers or email marketing managers to attempt to cover all the bases they’re being told they need to cover. The problem is that those employees will never generate revenue or results to justify their existence at the company. 6-12 months later, the business will let them go and the only thing they have to show for it is a hole the size of that employee’s salary. Businesses may also hire a marketing consultant. This usually fails because the consultant usually costs around $5,000.00 per month themselves, but then they require that the business spend more money on top of that in order to implement all the marketing strategies the consultant recommends. Small businesses simply cannot bleed the kind of money that most marketing and sales consultants demand in the hope of seeing some return.

This is why any marketing efforts that a small business is going to use needs to have two elements.

1. They need to have a low enough content requirement that the content creation can be sustained.
2. They need to be a price-point that the business can maintain for a significant period of time without it hurting them.

This is exactly the marketing system outlined here.

All a small business needs is a few keystone marketing efforts that are applied consistently and given the time they need to realize their potential. This means that the business needs to have enough money to finance the marketing efforts for 9-12 months and they need to have the patience to do the same few things over and over, month after month, until they start to see results.

What It Really Takes

Let’s go back to the strategy itself and detail the requirements for a small business to sustain this marketing strategy.

The Website

1. For a person who is comfortable with their topics, a 2,000 word blog post takes roughly 3-4 hours to create.
2. You should spend no more than 4 hours on your free resource giveaway. A few examples of giveaways are the following:

• Guide to fixing a common problem in your industry.
• 21-Day challenge to make some sort of positive change for your prospects.
• Cheat-sheet or reference guide for common technical terms or mistakes people make about your industry.
• How-to for a specific issue that you solve for your prospects.

The Emails - Since you’ve already done your content creation when you wrote your blog posts, the emails are much less time consuming.

1. Writing your weekly email and scheduling it to send should take about 30 minutes per week.
2. You can design a template in your email marketing software and then simply change out pictures and texts for each new email.

The Initial Offer

1. The only time-consuming part of this is developing a specific webpage designed to sell your high-value, low-cost offer. This will take around 10 hours most likely.
2. Once you’ve developed the offer page, you can leave it alone and it will do it’s thing.

When all is said and done, in month one a business is going to need to invest 15-20 hours in getting their website adjusted, adding the initial offer page, and developing a list of blog topics. From there, the monthly time investment will be around 12-16 hours per month for blogs and 3-4 hours per month for email marketing. So roughly 16-20 hours of work per month to maintain this marketing strategy.

From a cost perspective, there are two ways to look at this.

The first is that in a small business scenario, it is usually the case that the business owner is the most qualified person at the company to write the blog posts. Most business owners I know bill themselves out at between $100-$200 an hour. We’ll say $150 as an average. So for a small business owner to spend 12-16 hours in a month writing blog posts, that’s roughly $2,400 - $3,000 in their time per month.

There is usually someone in most small businesses that already handles email marketing and this would simply be a change in how they were handling the emails.

From a website perspective, if the business has a company that manages their website already, they will most likely charge around $1,500 - $2,500 to build the offer page and adjust the homepage and the footer.

In this scenario, the business will likely have “hard” costs of about $1,500 - $2,500 in website fees up-front and “soft” costs of about $2,400 - $3,000 per month in ongoing time that the business owner spends writing blog posts. The most difficult part is sustaining the writing. The blog posts are the cornerstone of this marketing strategy and cannot be neglected.

Your Expectations

Understanding why this strategy works is necessary if you want to pursue it. There are a couple reasons why this is the best way for a small business to maximize their marketing efforts with the least effort and expense possible.

The first reason is that SEO is one of the most powerful ways to drive traffic to your website. As the web has progressed, Google has only become more and more obsessed with websites that are proving to be customer-centric. One of the ways that Google measures this is through blogs, specifically long-form blogs. Google loves to see long, well-written, educative blogs and it favors websites that do this.

The second reason is that email marketing is the most effective way to communicate with anyone. Email is still the most highly opened and engaged form of communication available. So long as you are providing real, actionable information that is valuable to your subscribers, your email marketing efforts will generate significantly better responses than any other type of mass communication, including social media.

The third reason why this strategy works is that the likelihood of a customer buying from you increases exponentially along with the number of times they have already bought something. This is a fancy way of saying if someone buys from you once, they’re more likely to buy again, and if they buy again, they’re way more likely to buy again. The use of the initial offer, the low-cost, high-value offer, is essential to creating a base of customers that have already agreed that you have something valuable and are willing to pay you for it. Once you’ve done this, you will be able to engage with them as customers, not prospects. This is a very important distinction.

The last reason why this strategy works is because it is both cheap enough, and simple enough that a small businesses can realistically sustain it for 9-12 months without needing to see results. This is perhaps the most important element of this marketing strategy. Without time, no marketing efforts will succeed. Again, content creation and cost are the two main reasons marketing campaigns fail. This marketing strategy fixes both of those problems.

Wrapping It Up

If you're a small business that is engaging with a marketing consultant and you're starting to wonder how much longer you can keep paying them, stop working with them. In order for marketing to see results, it needs to be consistent and have enough time to start working. If you know, right now, that you can't maintain the monthly cost for 9-12 months, then stop immediately. You are literally wasting your money.

At the same time, everything I have outlined in this article is completely doable by any small business. There aren't any special skills required, just knowing which actions to take and how long to take them.

Marketing is more straightforward than many people think, the real trick is consistency and patience.