Common sense marketing

From time to time we are guilty of trying to make a lot of the things in our businesses more complex than they need to be and marketing is no exception.

Time after time I read business books talking about how to revolutionise certain aspects of your business and I am always struck by how much of the underlying message of what is being proposed is “common sense”. Now, before you say that I am missing the point of these books, let me say that I think where all of these authors (the good ones anyway) really hit home, is in encouraging us to stop for a second and re-evaluate what we are doing.

To pull back the clouds that obscure our vision of what we should be doing in our businesses that gather because we are focused on the day to day grind of “getting stuff done”.

Speaking from experience, as a small business owner for 15 years I can absolutely subscribe to this notion – I spent thousands of dollars (funded by a second mortgage) on campaigns and activities that totally missed their mark because I was looking to try to be too clever in my process and approach and forgot about the basic issues that my customers were trying to solve and addressing those easily and simply in the way they wanted.

Take marketing for example.

John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing in Kansas City, a well known speaker, writer of books and advocate for small businesses says that marketing is getting those people that have a need to know, like and trust you so they can try, buy from and refer others to your business, which when you stop and think about it, encapsulates exactly what we all do everytime we engage with companies out there in the market.

The whole idea of building a brand centres around the concept of know, like and trust – although many agencies can wrap it all up in a package of jargon designed to make themselves look like they deserve to have you spend huge amounts of your hard earned cash with them.

So I am going to spend some time in my next couple of blog entries delving down in to some practical ways you can put the concepts of know, like and trust in to your marketing plans or better still start building marketing plans that are based on this common sense approach.

So, in my next blog entry we’ll talk about how you can get potential customers to know that you are out there and that you have a solution to their problem.

Talk to you again shortly.

Richard