Most people start a new company on the back of a great idea and lots of confidence in the demand for your product or service. This early optimism is often fueled by early success in obtaining contracts and sales from within your existing network of contacts, possibly previous customers and contacts or sometimes simply by being in the right place at the right time.

As your business grows, you hopefully do a good job, providing great goods and excellent service for customers which can pay off if as a result they recommend, refer and give you repeat business. In this way your turnover and orders grow and at some point, you hit the decision about how to grow by extending your operations to meet the demand. In other blogs and content we discuss the issue of bringing in new staff, and perhaps you have to take a decision about premises. This article is focused on going beyond the organic growth described above to apply the art and the science of good marketing and a robust customer development system.

Focus On What You Do Best

For any business to succeed you need to balance time and resources in each of these three types of activity:

1. Doing the business (making and delivering the products and services that it sells)
2. Managing the business (operating the finances, managing staff, planning, retaining existing customers, administration, supplier contracts etc.)
3. Getting new business (networking, marketing, sales calls, researching and building relationships with customers, new product development etc.)

When you started out, perhaps you did all of this for yourself, gradually bringing on more people to support you. It is a crucial decision to bring on board staff. What role(s) do you need them to fulfill? What skills and experience can they bring? Ideally, everyone would be great at each of these three areas above, and would understand instinctively just how much time is required on each activity to ensure the business performs optimally. The reality is that even if you have all the skills available to you, most businesses seldom allocate the time to each of these areas in the best way. As the company grows, it becomes harder and harder to focus enough time on them all and to do them all well. First off, you need to take a long hard look at yourself and acknowledge not just what you are good at, what you enjoy most, but also from a commercial perspective, what it makes sense for you to spend your time on. In other words, can anyone else do aspects of what you are doing more effectively or even more cheaply than you?

Getting The Biggest Bang for Your Buck on Marketing

In my experience, many small business owners balk at the idea of paying someone else to market their business. They see it as a slice right off the bottom line, a cost with no corresponding income. And actually, the way that many businesses operate, this is true. That is where an integrated marketing system can help. It ensures that you are optimising your internal resources in the most effective way and deploying external expertise cost effectively. A marketing system does this by:

• providing a framework in which full-time staff can operate more effectively.
• providing clear roles and expectations of time required for internal staff.
• ensuring that marketing is evaluated for its effectiveness and so spend is optimised and return is maximised.
• presenting a more professional, consistent and persistent view of your company to the market place and your existing customers.
• differentiating you from the majority of other SMEs in your area and market place.

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An external specialist marketing organisation can add to the above benefits by:

• utilising their expertise, specialist skills and tools as well as purchasing power, as you need them, without adding to your headcount.
• keeping your marketing spend within range of your acceptable budget.
• supplementing your internal staff resource and ensuring you are paying them to fulfil their other roles well as opposed to having them half-heartedly doing marketing type activities.
• complimenting your internal staff with the opportunity for them to learn and develop their skills and knowledge and involvement with growing the business.
• being accountable for their results (if you are asking your unqualified staff to deliver marketing, are you also making them accountable for results? If you are not, who is responsible for establishing whether your marketing works or not?)

Marketing is an investment, not a nice to have. If you are treating it as the former, like any other investment you want to understand how it is performing. If it is something that someone picks up occasionally, and its effectiveness is not measured, I’m willing to bet that you are wasting your money.

Marketing Challenges Facing Owner Managed Businesses

The main challenge for most owner managed businesses is in differentiating themselves from other providers of the same products and services, in their chosen market place. This can be for a number of reasons:

• lack of a recognised brand.
• lack of a unique proposition or position in the market place.
• lack of awareness.
• lack of a voice in the market place.
• lack of feedback on what is happening in the marketplace.
• lack of consistent effort and investment to identify and build any of the above

The Art and Science of Marketing

Marketing is a mix of art and science. It takes not only planning but also implementation and evaluation. The world is littered with thick marketing plans gathering dust but never implemented. While they contain great ideas they lack that crucial attribute – implementation! Marketing plans that get implemented are characterised by being able to match the opportunities that exist in the marketplace, to the strengths and resources available to the plan’s owner. In other words, the strategy is fit for purpose, the objectives are achievable, if challenging, and the tactics are within the capability of the organisation for whom the plan was written. This means that they should have people with the right skills, knowledge, information, time, budget, tools, and authority to carry out the plan.

Who’s In Your Market?

Then there is the science of marketing – it isn’t purely about being soft and fluffy and image conscious. In fact a lot of it is numerically based beginning with segmentation (more of this another blog!). Each segment (group of customers with similar traits) has its own particular profile, characteristics, size and value to an organisation. But generally speaking, for any organisation, at any given time, the market is made up of:

• suspects (people who have never bought from you but could do as they resemble your customers in some respect).
• prospects (people who could well buy from you – they may have made an enquiry, buy from a competitor, or have the attributes of your existing customers, and you have the ability to contact them).
• customers (who have purchased at least once from you).
• loyal customers (who have repeatedly purchased from you).
• customer advocates (who are enthusiastic supporters of your product and company).

This is sometimes known as the ladder of loyalty.

The science of marketing begins by identifying each of these segments from your market or database, understanding their value to your business before deciding where and how best to target them and implementing strategies to reach and develop them effectively. As you know from your own experience as a customer, it is quite insulting to be treated like one of the anonymous herd, especially if you are a regular customer and it is almost as bad when organisations make incorrect assumptions about you and your loyalty to them. So these dimensions of marketing are important.

There is an element of trial and error to marketing and this requires evaluation of what is done, what is spent and how prospective and actual customers respond to it.

Cutting Through The Noise

If that is the science then the art of marketing is to create the strategies, key messages, associations, images and means of being seen, heard and contacted by potential customers that separate you from other suppliers and competitors. Doing this is increasingly difficult in a world where we are bombarded by data and information, messages and communication from all around. The ability to differentiate yourself from similar suppliers is a crucial feature of modern marketing, as a means to cut through the noise.

As marketing has become increasingly sophisticated, so have consumers to the point that they are often skeptical and no longer persuaded by most marketing pronouncements and claims made by manufacturers and advertisers. The focus has shifted towards not only newer media, but also towards peer recommendation and content that provides value to customers. The balance has moved from spending money on outbound marketing to stimulating inbound contact from prospects.

It’s A Matter of Time (and money)

Having worked for global corporations, SMEs, voluntary and owner managed organisations, I can safely say that they all would like more marketing resource – time, people and budgets. Whether those resources are organised to specialise in product lines or markets, brands, communication or research, by marketing channel or customer relationship status, there will never be as much of them as we would like! However, the real question is how much you can afford?

For any small business trying to grow, one thing is for sure, the growth will not come until there is emphasis, energy and effort put into it. Ensuring that these three “e’s” are directed in the best way comes down to creating an effective marketing system that integrates the effort of your resources and ensures they work in a complimentary way.

How Neontics can help

Neontics Ltd offers support aimed at businesses with ambitions to grow their customer base more profitably AND who recognise they need to invest in more resources to provide focussed time, money and expertise to achieve it. Email Liz for a no obligations chat about how we could help your business.