As a small business owner, storefront or home-based, marketing is crucial to your success.
Every business that wants to stay in business must market itself, its products and/or services – that’s the nature of business. So if you want to succeed in your business, you’ll need to market your products and services through a variety of channels in order to reach a variety of customers.
Now let’s briefly talk about marketing from a slightly different perspective because when you totally understand the game of marketing, you’ll be able to detach your emotions better and handle the mental aspect of your business so much easier.
Let’s discuss big businesses for a second and how they market. Traditionally, they’re putting ads on TV, in newspapers, in magazines, on the Internet, sponsoring events, running promotions, hiring celebrities, etc. Lots of money in upfront costs. And thinking about all the advertisements you hear or see in a day, how many do you actually pay attention to? Probably very few, right?
We’re bombarded so much that we typically become numb to many of them as they fall of deaf ears. Of those few that you pay attention to, how many of them get you to actually say “yes”? A very small percentage, I’m sure.
What I mean by saying “yes” is that the ad inspires you to act and get the product or service that it’s pitching. And the main reason most people say yes – THIS IS HUGE – is that the ad pitched something they were already looking for – whether it be dinner, a new sofa, a movie, or some headache relief potion.
Smart marketers do not go after people who have no interest in their products and services and make it their mission to change the prospects’ thinking so they become a buyer. And neither should you. That takes too much effort and has an extremely low success rate. As if you didn’t know that already! 😉
As you market your own business, you’re much better off trying to find people who are already looking for what you have, and offering it to them. Anything else is like getting in line for an emotional roller coaster. I suggest you don’t get in that particular line!
Now here’s the million dollar question – when you completely ignore an advertisement from a huge business like Microsoft, do you think Bill Gates is emotionally crushed? Do you think he asks himself whether he has what it takes to run this business? Or wonders whether or not he’s good enough to succeed?
Of course not.
Why don’t he and the marketing directors do that? Because they don’t ever experience your rejection. You simply don’t go buy his stuff, and that’s it. You don’t call up Microsoft, let them know you saw their ad, and you’ve decided NOT to buy, do you?
The only people Microsoft really deals with are paying customers – people who’ve already said yes. Obviously, this example is a totally different ballgame from direct sales businesses, and tomorrow I’ll go deeper to help you understand some very important concepts about marketing in general that do pertain to you 100%.
