This afternoon, I came across Jim Connolly’s post about the common approaches that a typical small business owner takes with his or her marketing campaigns.
While working with business partners, I routinely notice that we often use a blanket approach to reach our target market. However, on the other hand, one of the most successful business partner that I know routinely uses a more focused and personalized approach to reach his market. This helps him in establishing a strong relationship with the client. It also helps gain them higher margin as the focus shifts from hardware to a ‘quality service’.
In a personal conversation, he was very happy and proud to mention that he gets around 40% of his business through referrals now. For a guy who has only been in this business for 2 years, this is a heck of an accomplishment.
Check out the following post by Jim, a SMB marketer.
It’s all about focus
Whenever you write any form of marketing material, it’s extremely important that your message is focussed 100% on your core prospective client base.
Many small businesses use a scatter-gun approach to their marketing messages and as a result, they write copy, which is vaguely relevant to everyone who reads it but directly relevant to no one!
By diluting your marketing message, you always reduce it’s effectiveness.
For example, let’s imagine that Bob provides a ‘Virtual Assistant’ service. He is particularly keen to work with web designers, software developers and SEO experts. Bob will get a far, far better response from his marketing if he writes a tailored marketing letter/email for each individual group – rather than a vague, generic one, which is aimed at trying to be relevant to all three industry types.
Bottom line
Vague marketing messages will not motivate people to respond to you! However, a marketing message that clearly shows how your service will solve the readers problem, is extremely attractive and will inspire far more people to respond to you!
I highly recommend checking out Jim’s 10 marketing tips for a small business owner.
