Why Small Business Owners Struggle to Make a Profit

Stop throwing your money away on marketing that doesn't work!

Have you ever wondered why your hard-earned marketing dollars fail to get a great return for you?

Have you ever wondered how you might improve your marketing return without spending more money?

Do you want to know why most marketing spending is a waste of time, effort and money?

Stop wasting your valuable time, effort and hard-earned money on marketing that does not work!

Understanding the purpose of marketing is the first step to making your marketing work better for you. By knowing what you are trying to do with your marketing activities and utilisation of those limited resources called dollars, you will dramatically improve the return on investment. So, understanding what marketing is all about is fundamental to getting optimum results and in this article I am going to demonstrate to you just what you need to know.

One of the most common mistakes small business owners make is to spend money on the wrong type of marketing. They spend money on something called tactical marketing. That is, how their marketing dollar will be spent. Things such as, "should we use AdWords or not, how much should we spend, what key words should we target, should we do direct mail or not, is my website due for an upgrade?" In other words, how to spend the advertising dollar as opposed to spending their money firstly on strategic marketing.

Strategic marketing is the message they want to send and who to send the message to. In other words, who is our most likely buyer, what are their pain points, what problem do they want solved, what solution do we have that is unique and what is the decision-making process those prospects are likely to follow.

Marketing is about understanding the needs, wants and desires of a market, how those needs, wants and desires are currently being met by competitors in the market and how you can take advantage of the opportunities that exist in those markets to make a profit.

To make the most profit from any market you want to create a market dominating position. That is a position that once identified can be communicated to your target audience with the clear understanding that you are the obvious choice for selection to solve their pain points.

This is done by focussing your advertising messages clearly to evoke an action from the prospective customer that starts them on the buying journey with you. It is not necessarily a message, in the first instance, to buy now! Unless it is an emergency service that you are offering, Your message should be to engage the prospect in the buying journey you would have developed that takes them through the identified buying process you discovered in your research. This could be a process involving a number of logical steps. You must take prospects on that journey.

Along the journey you will need to maintain some form of communication and contact with the prospect and that is one of the reasons why tactical marketing fails. It tends to focus on, "do it now actions". Buy now, call now, act now. Most buyers are not ready to, "do it now". Most buyers, in fact some would say more than 98% of buyers are not ready to buy now. Most buyers are still going along the buying journey. Only as many as 2% of buyers are at the end of that journey and are ready to act now.

If only 2% of buyers are ready to buy now and you have focussed your marketing activities on tactical marketing, i.e. using AdWords and bidding for keywords that get a lot of attention, then you are targeting 2% of the potential buyers for your product or service. The end results are poor returns and a tendency to blame the medium used for the poor results. AdWords works great when done right.

Put another way, tactical marketing means you are financially contributing to the research project of the other 98% of potential buyers who may just end up buying from your competitors. If 98% of buyers today are searching for information, after all we live in the information age, then why would you want to do that and not get to control the rest of the conversation, the education process with those same potential buyers?

Strategic marketing on the other hand identifies how to add to the education process and once a potential buyer engages with you, you want to capture them to be able to control the conversation, with you, AWAY from your competitors. This is what will provide you with the greatest return for your dollar. This is what will turn your business into a profit-making machine.

Focus on strategic marketing activities first. Get your messages right before you spend your hard-earned dollars making advertising platform owners rich. Let other competitors flounder around educating your prospects, but only until you decide to engage them in your conversation. Then keep them under control and watch the results grow.

David is an experienced business coach, marketer and entrepreneur with a passion for helping people realise financial independence through structured learning. Author of the book "Wages to Wealth... 11 Steps To Turn Your Wages Into The Life You Want To Live" David is able to share his knowledge and skills with people of all ages from 8 to 80 and can be contacted any time by visiting http://www.davidhnolan.com to learn how you can improve your financial well being.