Why marketing is expensive & how to make it affordable

It's a beautiful day. You decide to go for a drive and get some ice cream. You start the car, and see that the gas tank is near empty. You drive to the ice cream store you've heard everyone raving about, but your car stalls halfway there, and you're stuck.

This is exactly what small businesses do with marketing. You should've gone to the ice cream store near your house.

The key to marketing success -?being direct

To reach the moon, you need a space shuttle, and that costs money. Small businesses try to reach the moon with just enough money to afford an airline ticket. It's bound to fail!

The secret to small business marketing success is to first invest in marketing activities that will bring you?direct results. Don't spread yourself thin by trying to do everything that bigger brands are doing. Don't do everything you see in a marketing webinar - there's never a one-size-fits-all key to marketing success. Apply your mind.

Break through the noise

Marketing has a lot of noise, and everything you hear about will not work for you. It's tempting to attend a webinar that promises you a laid-out strategy to bring you results. It's tempting to see a bigger company in your industry post on social media and get a ton of likes. It's tempting to hear about what worked for your friend in the industry and want to try it out for yourself. When you get tempted,?stop yourself. Trying to imitate others almost always leads to failure in marketing.

I've seen two companies in the same industry, of the same size, try out the same strategies, and get different results.

This is because there are a lot of variables when it comes to marketing. It's not just about getting the leads in, or even running the same ads with the same budget - no two companies are the same. Right from the people running the company to what happens after the leads come in, everything impacts the success of your marketing efforts.

Make the right choices

Would I, then, say that hiring a marketing agency or an expert is important for your business??Being completely unbiased, yes. To illustrate, we hired a social media expert as a consultant for one of our clients in my company, because our strong suit as a company wasn't social media. In marketing, it's better to hire and learn than to try to figure it out yourself.

However,?you need to beware?while choosing someone.?Marketing, being so subjective, makes it easy for just about anyone to get into. This is why the barriers to entry in marketing are so low, and you find a large number of marketing agencies around. This is also why a lot of people don't see results with their marketing efforts.

In brief, you need to make a hiring decision based on their understanding of the fact that there is never a one-size-fits-all solution to marketing. If, without asking you too many questions, the agency/expert starts giving you advice on what would be the right approach for you, be careful. Hire them only if their strategy makes sense to you.

Going to the ice cream store near your house

How does all of this connect to the ice cream store analogy that we spoke about at the beginning of this newsletter?

As a small business, whether B2B or B2C, if you're only starting your marketing activities, you need to approach it with the right perspective.

The business venture perspective

If you undertake a new venture as a business, you will probably take calculated risks with your money. However, when it's about marketing, a lot of business owners see it as a 'need to have', not another business venture that may or may not work out. As a result, they behave more freely with their money,?which is a recipe for disaster?(marketing is a need-to-have, but it is still a new venture for your business at that point in time, and should be treated as such).

The direct approach

When I say calculated risks, it doesn't mean you need to refrain from spending; you need to put your money in the right places. When you start marketing, for most really small businesses (of course, there are exceptions), it's important to look at activities that would directly bring in cash flow. For instance, posting on social media, in most cases, will not bring your business a direct influx of cash. It may be tempting, but don't do it.

Instead, for instance, you may find Google Ads to be a good alternative for driving direct conversions.

Once you see direct conversions from your marketing activities online, you might then want to reinvest that money to increase budgets, and/or explore new opportunities for marketing. It's important to only focus on result-driven activities until you build a solid foundation of cash-flow upon which you build your brand.

With cash flow from your marketing activities, it's easier to freely spend on activities that contribute to brand-building.