By Jim Connolly
I recently spoke with a businesswoman, who’s Company ceased trading earlier this year; primarily through a lack of sales. When I asked her what she had been doing in order to generate sales, it turned out that Sheila, like many small businesses owners, was marketing her business based on ideas from various marketing books and audio programs from a decade ago or more.
She quoted marketing books and programs to me, that sadly you can still buy from Amazon etc – but are totally ineffective in today’s VERY different business environment.
BUT JIM – MARKETING IS JUST AS IT’S ALWAYS BEEN ISN’T IT?
No! Marketing today is very different. Today, we live in an age where you can write to a million people for free using email. We can broadcast a video to millions of people via YouTube for free.
We can even advertise our services to millions of people each year via our website, for the same cost as a one page advertisement in a very average magazine! My work, for example, reaches 3 million people some months – and all for FREE!
The things Sheila was doing wrong are actually quite common to many small businesses. Take a look below and make sure YOU are not making the same marketing mistakes!
SHEILA SENT MAILINGS WITH A DOZEN PAGES OF MARKETING INFORMATION
Sheila had been sending out mailshots with a dozen or more sheets of paper inside, in the totally false belief that it would increase her response rate. She not only received nothing from these mailshots, they cost her around £20,000 ($40,000 US) in the process.
In the eighties and early nineties, there were a few marketing ‘experts’ who said if you stuffed a dozen or so sheets of marketing material in with your mailshots, it would increase the number of sales you make or the number of enquiries you get.
Even back then, it was very expensive and not very effective – but today, it’s far worse! We now live in an age where people are extremely environmentally aware and are not too keen on people wasting all that paper! We also live in an age where people have never been busier – too busy to plough through stacks of paper trying to sell them something! Click on the envelope and I will show you how to make your next mailshot more effective!
SHEILA HAD BEEN COLD CALLING PROSPECTS
She had been using cold calling – something that WAS effective up until around 6 / 8 years ago. Today, however, her target prospects (like most businesspeople) are shielded behind voice-mail. As a result, you can now waste a whole day on the phone and get the same results you would have got in just an hour – only a few years ago!
SHEILA SPENT £600 ON HER WEBSITE
Although Sheila spent heavily on mailshots, she saw no reason to have a professionally designed and optimised website. A website that’s designed by a professional and then optimised, will attract regular leads and enquiries. That’s because it will look professional AND be fully visible to people who are desperately seeking YOUR kind of services!
Most small businesses are genuinely unaware that they could have stacks of phone calls and emails all day long from interested prospective clients; if only they had a professional looking website that has been search engine optimised by an expert. There’s NO POINT in you having a website that gets little traffic and provides few sales or sales leads!
Most marketing books and audio programs (including the very best known) from the 1990’s and before either don’t mention websites or hardly mention them. For example; even marketing books from THIS decade will not highlight Google as a major marketing tool, unless they were written in the past 5 years or so!
A COMMON PROBLEM FOR SMALL BUSINESSES
Most small businesses rely heavily on marketing books, marketing audio programs and free online marketing tips in order to help them make more sales. If you want to avoid wasting stacks of money and missing countless sales opportunities, throw your old marketing guides and audio programs in the recycling bin! You need to know what works today.
Here’s a link to stacks of excellent, free sales and marketing material!
Filed under: Business development, Marketing, small business | Tagged: small business, internet marketing, marketing ideas, marketing blog, marketing tips
Jim, we bought a marketing program recently that told us to send mailings filled with pages of information. We mailed a list of 500 people three times. We got no replies and lost over two grand on the cost of the mailings. Turns out it was written years ago and a total waste of time and money. We even got one nasty call from a tree hugger telling us we were out of order for using so much paper. It was impossible to disagree.
Hello Paul,
Sadly, there are still some marketing programmes out there, which advocate sending pages and pages of material with a mailshot.
One business owner emailed me via my newsletter, who was actually black-listed, after using the “stuff your mailings with paper” approach. Some people are extremely opposed to wasting paper in this way.
Jim Connolly