I started my career educating customers on technology products for a major computer manufacturer. My pathway into marketing - from educator to technical marketing to product manager to marketing director and now small business marketing coach and mentor – was a natural progression for someone with an educational background. I have always believed that marketing was a multi-faceted education for your prospects:

• How do they go about finding the right solution to their particular need.
• What do they need to know to get the best solution.
• Who should they be working with to get to where they want to go.
• Why there is value in doing business with you.

Whether I was marketing software products, business to business services or consumer services, marketing is more successful when you focus on educating your prospect rather than selling them your products or services.

SYMS – an educated consumer is our best customer™

SYMS – the Off-Price representative of over 200 authentic designer and brand names, is a company that was ahead of its time with its tag line – an educated consumer is our best customer™. Until recently, many companies didn’t want people knowing details about their products and services. But the folks at SYMS made sure the consumer was educated on their merchandise and understood the value and quality they were getting when they shopped there.

In my experience, business owners who try to push themselves on prospects rarely achieve the results they expected and therefore, are never as successful as they would like. Now in today’s Internet economy where people don’t need to identify themselves to find out who you are, what you do and how you can help them, you must become proficient in educating your audience so they come to you when they are ready to buy. But isn’t that a much more rewarding experience?

I’m thrilled when the phone rings and the person on the other end has found me on the Web and likes what I have to say. And I’m doubly excited when my clients get inbound leads that turn into sales making their jobs a little bit easier.

How do you educate rather than sell?

Educating your prospects is answering your audiences burning questions, through writing, presentations or conversations (both online and offline), and enabling them to visualize the solution to their problems. Once your prospect understands how to solve the problem and the associated benefits of getting an expert to help them, the more likely they will seek help with doing so. Knowledge is only power when it is shared. Your future clients will be attracted to you for your candor and expertise.

Does your business educate your audience so they can decide how they will solve their problem? If not, how can you start to change your marketing so that you attract your prospects and they want to work with you?

Striving for perfection is a nice goal, but sometimes waiting for perfection can hold you back.

The beauty of marketing on the Internet is that, in most cases, you can test, change, modify and update your campaigns once they go live. Having everything completely perfect prior to getting out there and being seen is no longer a necessity. It is more important to take action and become visible, even if it’s not perfect, than sit around and wait.

Recently, I’ve noticed this trend of waiting for perfection with some small business owners. The problem with this strategy is:

• The longer you wait, the more chance you give your competition to be found before you, potentially stealing the thunder from something you thought was unique;
• The Web changes too quickly to worry about finding small imperfections that can be fixed quickly once they are discovered;
• Marketing takes time to work and waiting just lengthens the time before you will see results.

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The final post in the year end marketing review series to help small business owners get their plan ready to kick off a successful year.

So far in this series we have:

• Identified whether our ideal client has changed over the last year;
• Set our goals for our business;
• Tweaked our product and service offerings to align with our ideal client;
• Determined our differentiator and reviewed our messages to ensure we are communicating it effectively;
• Reviewed our marketing content for consistency and accuracy;
• Evaluated our marketing results to determine what’s worked and what hasn’t;
• Assessed our online reputation to see what is really out there.

Armed with this information, we can now put a marketing action plan in place that will grow your business and achieve the goals that you set for yourself. I want to emphasize the word action because a marketing plan that sits in a drawer will not help grow your business. The marketing action plan sets priorities and dates on all your marketing activities to ensure they get done.
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Eight down and one to go in the year end marketing review series to help small business owners get ready for a wonderful new year.

Before we plan our marketing activities for the new year, we have one more review  – do you and your business exist online? As a small business owner, how you are perceived when people search and find your information will determine whether they contact you about your products and services. So as hard as it may be to know the truth, we must understand whether:

1. We have an online presence or not;
2. Our online presence consistently projects how we want to be perceived.

Do You Exist?

This may be the easier issue to deal with as you get to start with a clean slate and do it right from the beginning. Make developing your online presence and marketing your business online the major part of your marketing plan this year. If you’re not sure how to go about developing your online presence, it may just be worth it to hire someone to help you make choices. Make sure this person has strong marketing experience in both online and traditional marketing and understands the challenges of small business owners. Make sure this person will guide you through the entire process, from brand and message development through implementation.
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Whoo-hoo! Seven down and two to go in our year end marketing review so we’re ready to hit the ground running! Hope you’ve found these useful so far!

Do you regularly review the results of your marketing efforts? Is your marketing plan a living document that ebbs and flows with what is happening in your business? As a small business owner, you should try to stay aware of how your marketing is working throughout the year so you can make adjustments as the need requires.

How Did You Find Me?

Throughout the year, you should track how you acquired new clients. The easiest question to ask when someone calls you is to find out how they heard about you. If you have not been doing that, add “track marketing activities” to your goals for this year!Make it a habit to ask – you will be glad you did. If you have a contact form on your web site, add some way to capture that same information. Knowing how people found you is an important way to get a feel for how your marketing efforts are working.

Simple way to review your activities

Even if you didn’t ask for how your clients found you this year, you can still determine how your programs are working through a bit of intuition and gut feel. I know most of my clients are through referrals or through online activities. To get a better idea of where you want to put more effort and where you should abandon your efforts and use your resources more effectively, we can do a simple analysis.
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