You know fellow business owners (maybe even you) and non-profit directors who find themselves muddling their way through their day-to-day business operations, with little hope of increasing their effectiveness or reach compared to last year or the year before? have a weak marketing plan (or no marketing plan) that needs help, have run out of fresh ideas to increase memberships, revenues and effectiveness, or are frustrated because they don't have a solid marketing strategy?
One of the primary concerns that boils up from this frustration is spending money on the intangible (for marketing truly shows intangible returns when those returns aren’t being tracked.) Most small business owners either can’t afford going to a large, established marketing firm, or they can’t rationalize the decision to spend tens of thousands on having a firm develop a marketing strategy for them. As a result, they attempt to take on yet another role in their company—creative marketing director.
Over the years, I have had many small business owners, operators and officers approach me for ideas by which they could market themselves. Sometimes it was a shoestring budget they were working with. Other times, they were fortunate enough to be pulling from the company well. For the folks with the smaller budgets, I came up with my ‘One-Hour Power Paper’, where I would charge for a single hour’s worth of putting marketing ideas to paper, tailored to their particular company. This was good, but had a few disadvantages for both the client and myself.
First, these documents were short; maybe only a few pages, containing twenty top-of-the-brain ideas, at most.
Second, these ideas were based on my limited knowledge of thcompany, usually derived from an hour to two-hour conversation and some pre-meeting research online.
Third, I always spent more than an hour on them, even though I was only charging for one.
Marketing is not an exact science. In fact, it’s part science, part magic and intuition. In the science, you study your options, clients, goals, prospects, strengths and competition. In the magic, you devise the plan, craft the message and direct resources in a particular direction, based on an educated guess based on the data you collected. Finally, you end with more science in studying the ongoing results for further refinement.....
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