Have you ever spent money on your marketing and wondered if you were throwing your money away? As a small business marketing coach, every day I meet small businesses who tell me their woeful tales of hiring some form of help in marketing and being disappointed. Here are 3 hints that you’ve indeed gone and hired the wrong marketing help.
1. They are an expert in implementing one element but not the strategy
If I had a dollar for every client who had hired a social media expert, an SEO guru, a website designer or a telemarketer to help their business growth and not gotten a single new client from their efforts, I’d be living in Hawaii on my retirement funds right now. An expert in one field of marketing can’t be responsible for the STRATEGY of your business. For that, you need to hire an expert who can help you determine your most viable niche, your ideal target client and your messaging. Without any of these, how can you expect anyone to really be able to help your business grow?
2. The things you’re promised are not happening
A client once cried to me about her web designer who had promised her the moon. He’d promised to help her find her niche, determine her messaging and to help with targeting her ideal clients. Of course, months later my client fired them because they weren’t capable of delivering what they promised. Please understand that there are companies who are actually capable of doing that but beware of generalists. Also beware of anyone who says they can help you determine your strategy without doing consumer research. My clients and I research their niches as the first starting point in our relationship. Research is the only way to figure out which way you should go with your marketing and if your vendor is promising you results without it, I would be very wary.
3.  You’re getting no new clients but are assured of long-term ROI
Listen, I know that online strategies take time to make their way to SEO rankings and to help you get found. However, even those should start to yield some new clients of the quality that you want within a few months. If you are not getting any new clients as a result of your investment but are being assured that it’s good to build general brand awareness of your industry, I would sincerely suggest that I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. If you are getting brand awareness but that’s not translating to at least 1 new person a week asking you the question “how much do you charge?” then you’re not getting any leads from your efforts.
So wizen up to how you spend your marketing dollars and realize that strategy and implementation are two completely separate subject matters. Paying for any one element without having a strategy first would be like trying to build a new house first and paying an architect to draw the plan later. Worse yet, is to try to build a house without that plan-which is sadly what most people do, because they simply don’t know what they don’t know.
Need more chicken soup for your biz? Follow me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook, watch me on YouTube or connect with me on LinkedIn –and let’s talk