SMALL BUSINESSES - the realities, and some real Marketing pointers for the 'little ones'.

I do love marketing textbooks, evidence, fundamentals & case studies, but they always cite market leaders or well funded 'start-ups' who can acquire customers at a loss. But what about the small ones?

Base Photo Source : Daniel K Cheung

One of the things I have seen evolve within Front of Mind’s subscriber base is the amount of small businesses, young entrepreneurs (including students). Of course, this is in part due to a massive QR code I stick on a slide in guest lectures and presentations to scan to showcase an example ‘call-to-action’ (scan to Subscribe)x But it also makes me think of the needs of the marketer audience, all of which have common but unique challenges, and the majority on a likely shoestring budget.

There is so much out there in industry press, the big industry lecturers, ‘famous’ characters and panels extolling the virtues of their work when it’s invariably an established brand already. But to many of you it may feel a little daunting, or at best indifferent.

I get it. I started my career in telesales, working for big data company selling risk and marketing data solutions. that was to small businesses. Things have changed and the sales process in that way is now scorned and frowned upon, but I will always credit the ‘introductory calls’ as a grounding researching experience, and was truly an ethnographic study on the realities and needs via actual conversation. Budget often an objection. I then went to work for advertisers, media sales, my first business venture, more roles in marketing agencies nationally and globally, and now 4 years in, I have a varied marketing consultancy, from working with the largest in the world to the ‘solopreneurs’, attempting daily to connect my varying skills to help out varying clients with very different challenges.

I need to highlight the word different here, as there is one thing I can confidently say - there is no dogmatic , once-size-fits-all approach. Yes of course, there are marketing fundamentals, proven evidence and research which everyone should know about, but we have to be realistic in terms of budgets/needs/the view on marketing/the day-to-day pressures of the founder wanting to feed their family. So next time you hear of best practices or 10x hacks, please take a moment to reset your compass to your own business need. A corporate or we’ll funded start-up you’re likely not.

FIRSTLY, 7 THINGS I HAVE NOTICED WITHIN SMALL BUSINESSES

So back to what I’ve seen, good or bad, over last 19 years, that I can confidently share here? They have been particularly prevalent in the past 4 years both working IN client businesses and ON own business :

1. There is often more than 1 answer - binary/pragmatic thinking can be problematic. Dogma sells, gets the likes, engagement and the biggest followers. It makes sense to the untrained eye and the social proof feeds the beast, but think about it, sometimes things are a little more complex.

2. Yours is not always the right answer - I generally know what a client’s marketing challenge is and what they need to do, but to reiterate there is invariably more than one answer, and I am therefore by this definition sometimes wrong along with being right. You make bets, based on the data in front of you, the anecdotal experience, what the audience will like, the product fit and so on. That is what we are doing, making informed bets to increase odds. No guarantees.

3. Builders sometimes live in crap houses - Do we always practice what we preach? Honestly no. I try to lead by example but of course cannot always get it right. I myself run a lean business with limited ‘marketing’ funds or time, so why would I insist on the little businesses adopting big ideas when I myself have not? I know what works/has worked for me, from simple plans to use of Social, Networking, Lead Gen, PR to productising service and pricing plans. There is more kinship on shared experience with a small business rather than a large corporate client, however there is STILL so much difference between each. My business is nothing like yours. Likewise, in your own business, do not expect people to respond to just your ROAS driving activity when selling your coffee beans when you yourself get annoyed as a founder for a cold outreach from one of your prospective manufacturing suppliers. There’s a job to be done to become trusted and memorable, not just reduce cost of conversion.

4. Small businesses are hard wired for ROI - founders, solo businesses and even small business boards including COOs/CFOs, they love the pragmatic, excel-friendly flowchart energy of an in>out system generating immediate return. Marketing is not a guarantee of this, but again if elements are done right, it will improve these metrics, some now, most over time. It is also worth noting that these are not the only metrics that matter. Growing the awareness by reaching your audience, getting people signed up for future (majority of prospective buyers are that, prospective not there right now). Getting people recalling and liking you. They are borne from growth and sales first, so they know the strain of selling the product, and that in itself can be a good approach early days.

5. Therefore, a lot of marketing is not seen as the investment/integrated business goal it should be, but rather a ‘thing to do’ - ‘we have spent money on this/that/website/positioning/product, but we haven’t done any marketing?’ You have; remember advertising is a part of marketing, you unlock this right when the basics are done. You mean you have not spent on promoting yet, therefore you do not know your return, long and short term, on ad spend. Even then when you promote you need to do a job of both reaching audience (creating awareness for future and long term brand growth) and generating conversion/sales/leads (in the shorter term). Different campaigns do different things sure, but without being a known brand without relative credibility, you have to get real with doing just the ‘performance only’ stuff. Doing just ‘performance’ stuff is fine to a degree, but you will hit what we call diminishing returns. All the fish will be caught. So create the social proof we know that works. These things take time. If it was all so easy for us, we would all be on our yachts.

6. ‘Agility’ reduced to ‘reactionary’ - it is great we have things at fingertips and the ability to change things up, knock out new ‘content’ as the world seems to demand it, and the ability to pause/change campaigns on a moment’s notice due to the ease of the tech out there, from a Canva logo redesign to a platform business manager budget ‘Pause’ button. Then what happens? Knee jerk = inconsistency. I always hark back to Jeff Goldblum’s character Ian Malcolm and his cautionary tale in Jurassic Park…. “Yeah, but your (scientists) were so preoccupied with whether or not they COULD, they didn’t stop to think if they SHOULD!”

7. Finally - some slightly flawed comparisons - to say delusional would be harsh. But when I hear founders say, look at Steve Jobs, he said this, or Quoting a pithy Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos quote, I know we’re in trouble. Different laws apply to small businesses, who don’t have the awareness, scale or delivery of these monsters. Yet or maybe ever.

To note on the above, these are all observations aggregated over time and not criticisms. I’ve kicked the watch outs. Some have some, some have more, but all have at least one. If you feel this is you, it is not your fault but more the business-land world and hustle porn short-termism you have imbued yourself in. But here I want to delineate between the common (albeit correct) stuff and the stuff that is correct for you and your small business.

So when I break it down, what I learnt, experience versus evolving in the line of duty, this is where I land….

THE 9+ POINTERS TO CONSIDER FOR SMALL BUSINESSES

Based on all the experiences, reading of marketing theory, practice in the field, the warts-and-all witnessing of hand to mouth business operations with barely pocket money, and adapting the utopian Proctor & Gamble theory to the one-woman-band in Sheffield which I’ve tried to distil for last 50 months of my life, we get to some fundamental considerations that are all within our control*. Whether you have £500,000 or £500, everything below is a checklist for you to consider and adopt to have a chance to truly get ahead and get front of mind for consideration of purchase now or in the future.

*These will also be adopted by larger businesses too btw, they will just have more cash / departments to go into things in a bigger way. But simply doing them is half the battle won.

1. THE BUSINESS GOAL is reality. Know what you are. It will guide the extent of marketing impact

Generally speaking, if you’re not a corporate with swelling coffers, nor a venture-backed or seed raising start-up who has runway to burn money to acquire customers as cost, then you are most likely a small business who wants to grow organically, hopefully raise cash on own terms, slowly grow, hire a few staff, or even a lifestyle business / micro-businesses / consultancy. They are all great in their own right, but self awareness is key. You cannot expect results like a corporate if you don’t have the funds to create brand growth via physical availability or distribution of your product, nor increasing advertising and with it the mental availability (increasing salience) all of which requires cash. I am not saying this to be restrictive, nor am I saying the above is impossible, but reality is the first step. You are small, self funded, there are limits. You are not Coca-Cola, and you cannot rely on outliers as examples (see term going viral).

2. MARKETING IS YOUR BUSINESS. Your Business Goal should almost = Marketing goal

Now we know the business. The baseline. You have a business goal, a target. Marketing is not silo’d, there is no excuse, it should be hand-in-glove. Marketing objectives should be so wedded to your business goals that clarity throughout the organisation prevails. Firstly, being clear what marketing is and is not is key. It is not something you do a bit of, it is something all people in your fledgling enterprise should be thinking about, from creation of great product, through to communications and even customer services. Marketing is essentially a cross-functional discipline of taking your product and service to market and selling it. More definitions/depth to come. But is is not just an ad. An easy way to think of it in early days : every touchpoint, sale, networking event, box delivery or email is increasing your perception +/_ 1% in any direction!

Marketing Meetup Founder Joe Glover delivers a perfect equation in his marketing Week column for small businesses, and in his words also boils marketing down in a great way :

“the equation : their problem + your solution + communication = marketing”

Mapping the identified and researched customer need to 1. the well Priced Product in the 2. Right Place (solution) 3. properly Priced and Promoted (solution) = marketing done right. Further common sense on the example of how marketing is not just a bit of the business, or something you ‘do a bit of’, it IS your business. Your revenue creator. Your product development fulcrum, your subsequent comms of it to an audience who may buy it. That is it. Increase your odds.

Increasing the % s to sell more product or services across business, I often use this!

Increasing your odds. Marginal gains. Have a clear strategy i.e. what you intend to do and what you do not intend to, and within the strategy maintain an adaptive mindset and plan campaigns and action based on budget/circumstance and open minded testing. Once you have a researched product, odds are increased a % or 2. Strategy, that increases your odds % by batting in right field because efforts are focussed on quality not quantity. Your clarity of messaging, your creative assets, then serving the right message to what you think/know is the right audience. It is all basics for exponential performance growth and all good stuff via those increments!

Double Jeopardy (big brands get more ‘loyalty’ as they are bigger / more out there) states that you’re probably a little f*cked, but it’s OK, because the business you build will be great for your customers, and if delivered and communicated correctly, you will be considered for purchase a more than the evil big ones, over time.

3. RESEARCH - Do it, it doesn’t have to be daunting/boring/expensive

The big marketing conjecture typically claims you you should spend 5-10% of your budget on research, and of course that makes sense, as it helps with everything, from going to market to planning a campaign. But reality is, people skip it due to perception it is timely and expensive. Sure and I agree. Some popular planning tools in my own day-to-day job have 4-5 figure annual licences, and it puts those off. But do not write it off; crafting your product fit-for-market, or identifying the comms and unique selling points (USPs) you communicate will all be helped by research, and if you hold fire and go through this little process, you will increase odds of getting ahead. You don’t need a big budget to do it either. You can create simple forms to ascertain qualitative and quantitative data. Ask your customers current customers what they love and hate (will inform comms and future product development accordingly, as well as make them feel special and heard), ask prospective audiences in forums similar questions (what drives them to buy, what detracts). Find out desirable product features. You don’t have to be data scientists yet. But just combine this with data available, albeit public such as a Google Trends or Statista, industry publications, or with Google Analytics or purchase data. Finally, the importance of real ethnography. Stuff not on a spreadsheet, only felt on a human level. Get out and spend the day with your consumers or clients. Go into shopping centres, meet them at conferences. Watch folk using your products. That combination of human insights, opinions and evidence is already giving you a head start. Just start anyway, get curious and find stuff out, hell I’d bet the business was derived from yearning to solve a human issue; ask your parents, now that is some interesting BS free feedback!

4. POSITIONING - Work it out. You can’t be everywhere

With your data, and this ‘insight’, you can work out your place in the market, and be comfortable with it. You do not have the resource to dominate, and it is fine that you do not want to. That is not your fighting weight. But what you DO have is a chance to utilise this trove of research you have duly collected, the. make and action quick decisions a global business could only dream of turning around. You have an edge, and only you can have it and use it. So use it! What is it telling you you are good at? What is the majority of your sold product/service/audience? What are you really not very good at? Start where you are good, in your strengths. This will work out your main unique selling point (basically the product benefit hill you will confidently die on in your communications) then based on growth, you can always evolve ‘weaknesses’ over time. But to be honest you are small so you probably will not get chance to for a while anyway without being stretched. The specialist Independent Italian doing 5 dishes brilliantly is better than Pizza Hut. Enjoy your position. Less is more. Find the place on the beach, put that towel down and settle in for the day!

5. STRATEGY, a big word and a big thing, but a manageable step

What to do and what not to do. Strategy is simply a rule your company sets to do certain things (and not others) in pursuit of a business objective over a set time period, usually long term and short terms. The challenge of course is many businesses (especially ones with angel investors breathing down their neck; I believe Scale-Ups is the popular parlance) like the idea of strategy but they become short-term and tactical to achieve external fundraising objectives. You don’t have that pressure. You have agility on your feet, but time on your hands, so think what you want to do, based on this sense of positioning in the market, and own it. Then create a plan to achieve this marketing strategy / objective. No pressure to get it right first time, but good to have from the start the rules and red-lines. Trust me, some of the biggest advertisers have these all over the place because, again, trading monthly reports etc.

6. YOUR BRAND - Be Memorable, Be Distinctive

Distinctive Brand Assets (as cited in Professor Byron Sharp’s seminal How Brands Grow, worth a read if you are reading this) are the elements of your brand that helps buyer create memory structures, thus helps you be memorable, the aim of the game. It could be a product, a mascot a sound, a logo. Delivered consistently, over time, creates memory structures. The more assets you have and points of reference, the more likely you will be remembered when it is time to purchase your things. I’ll use a corporate reference (forgive me), but McDonald’s have been excellent purveyors of DBAs. Golden Arches. Fast Food. Ronald McDonald. ‘I’m Lovin it’. All phrases you could use without the M word and know who the are. That is the power.

This matter even more for you than Maccy Ds. They probably can get away with slack as they are so famous they can be subtle. But it is unlikely you have that luxury. I mentioned about being knee-jerk, reactionary and chopping and changing/affecting the easy things to change quickly when you assume things are not working. But I have to reaffirm this with my small clients a lot. Consistency. Consistency. Consistency. Codify. etc. Your websites, your landing pages, your packaging, your proposals, your social media presence, your everything. Logos. Colours, slogans. it all needs to feel the same. and right. and yours. The more ways you can be remembered, and connected, the more chance you have of sales when the need comes.

Also you are small so this is exciting. From creative ads and images through to product design. Sometimes, being exciting means being fun, and indeed funny. There’s no serious shareholders in head office to placate within global brand guidelines. Have a laugh, be different. BE MEMORABLE (basically the point of marketing to enter consideration sets)

7. TACTICS & ACTIVATION - pick your battles and be realistic

Again building on the strategy, we are doing what we are told by ourselves. Now within this container of YES or NO, you can try things. Not knee jerk, but make a plan of activity. Campaigns. Which messages to talk about when. A popular tactic is one of Big Rocks some of my clients have successfully adopted. When low on time and resource and humans. Have a couple of core pieces of ‘content’ or assets/rocks around particular campaign or product, and think how you can cut that rock into pebbles (e.g. a Video could be transcribed into a Q&A Blog, then sent to email subscribers, an audio for a podcast, vertical cuts for social etc). This is of course campaign or client dependent, and not right for some, but the point of this example is to be your own north star. Where I see small businesses let themselves down is copy, knee jerk. ‘I’ve seen so-in-so do Snap filter, or partner with XYZ, they post daily’ 2 things to ask yourself.
1. Do I want to be distinctive from my competition?
2. Is it fitting within the strategy?
Invariably the answers will be YES & NO respectively, and will answer your own question on a new tactic. Sense check your own ideas. Pick your battles. Yes try things, but through a lens. Don’t let the tail wag the dog by channels either, and just because it is easy to access, does not mean you should, like Jeff Goldblum said.

8. MEASURING and monitoring the impact of your efforts

Reporting and Measurement is another thing like research, where people put their head in the sand for the fear of financial spends and resource faff. Most little ones I know do not have facilities for high end reporting suites or even econometric modelling powering it. But even on a linear, simple basis, you want to be tracking your efforts. On a simple macro level. Keep a track of marketing investment month on month (including things such as product launches, web designs, SEO copy etc) and plot sales as well on a line graph/histogram. You will see short and long term effects, and do this for at least 12 months or if you can 2 years to iron out anomalies and understand context. Most things are little efforts over time, and with brand growth most things are small and not sudden. Then, on a micro level (i.e. breakdown by medium) be sure to be tracking your performance of each ‘channel’. not just ads on a channel like Search, but also traffic on your Google Analytics or similar, or doing before/after conversions once updated your landing page, or site visits after a trade show. Points make prizes, use to inform but do not overthink a variance after £25 spend. Some measurements lead to kneejerk - this is not the point. But it is equally important to be able to showcase, on some level, the impact of marketing on the business goals. the when you feel you have that in place, start to look into Data Driven Attribution (DDA), which is basically a way of assigning credit across channels. But one step at a time. Overall Marketing and Sales first.

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9. Sales then Marketing? Marketing then sales? Sales AND Marketing?

Another thought, and often something discussed, especially because when you are a small business in a very early stage, good old fashioned networking, referrals and sales/business development are the cornerstones of growth and revenue, and it is absolutely acceptable and attainable to grow this way I know this from my own business experience. I also know that you need a supporting army (whether that be personnel or pdfs) of promotional/marketing support. Sometimes, when you are truly embryonic you need to sell it in, get a few test customers of your product/service, then you are learning, iterating and growing. Sales is essentially part of marketing, a channel embracing the 4Ps, a human media if you like. For those with headcount dominated budget, it makes sense to lean on that. But a good marketing function treats sales as what it is, part of that, the human outlet and empowers them with the tools. And likewise, sales should feed back to the ‘marketing’ person/imitative the feedback/objections/product requests. You are a small business, no excuse right? No siloes, it is your advantage. Forget ABM and terms like that, a phrase which has infested the industry from tech companies, you are a unit selling more products, just through human and non-human channels!

10. Davids v Goliaths. The big ones usually win, but you will sometimes

Finally, building on the no silo/advantage piece, you have advantages being small, as well as the obvious challenges outlined. Accept the position, double jeopardy laws, especially the bit about not having swathes of funding. But it does not mean it has to be a problem. Think how 1. Small can be better and 2. Small is often more relevant to certain clients. In other words, use unique strengths of agility and service to compete, or do not compete at all and go after a new market, but chances are a tiny piece of the pie is just fine. Sometimes competitors aren’t who you assume, and in the line of duty new opportunities are unlocked.

This applies across marketing disciplines including advertising agencies. I wrote about this here, where actually, without emulating, the little ones can learn some stuff from the well funded big ones, like some of these processes above! But you can pave the way for creating your own ‘best practice’ that the big ones love to emulate/quote in their innovation decks.

EXTRA : Still not sure where to start? Here’s one I made earlier

You really cannot go far wrong with the 4 Ps. Product. Price. Place. Promotion. They cover the main areas of any marketing function and output. They have been argued and amended and extended, but that is just for creator’s fame most of the time. It all comes back to marketing being about your Product, distributing the Place, setting Price (don’t start by discounting please, setting a low price is different to varying price!) and planning and delivering Promotion (Advertising/Comms). Read one of my earliest letters below if you want to get into the 4P framework more..

FINAL WORD

There’s a lot in this, and I don’t expect you to have read it all or remember it, but I hope it has helped maybe challenge some current behaviours or activities, and maybe inspired the addition of a couple of pieces into your work to help you along. Please do save this link. Flag this email. Share with other business owners or junior marketers. Tell your boss. Tell your partner. Marketing is one of the most important factors to business success, so treat it with the respect it deserves, whether you are selling Lattes or Software Solutions. But by aligning marketing goals from your small business goal, researching a bit more, deciding what you will or won’t do, position yourself and have a clear strategy/rule, then ensuring consistency of brand, with manageable tactics, baby-steps measurements, and the human insights of the sales channel, these provide as good a start for anyone that there is.

There’s a job to be done, and it is yours to do. Do it properly. Add those steps. Watch those +1%s improve. Enjoy it though, its ‘just doing a bit of marketing’ after all! :)

SA

I really hope you are getting a semblance of value out of this. If so, and you think any other marketer or business owner would, feel free to share/forward this to them. Also, follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter or even my company page. If you want to discuss working together, or simply something I’ve said, drop me a line. Thanks and happy reading/marketing!