Small business marketing can be an expense that you might not be able to cover with your meager budget when you’re first starting out, but as soon as you are able to cover some Google Ad Words placements, a few print ads or a radio spot, you’d have to be crazy not to do everything in your power to get the word out.
When is it Time to Spend Money on Marketing?
If you look at any successful business then you will notice that they have a very strong marketing presence. The question here is whether a company needs to market to be successful, or if a successful company can afford more marketing to hold onto their place in the market. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
Nobody else but you can dictate when it’s time to buy more ads through Google or when it’s time to go ahead and splurge on that TV spot. Sometimes, marketing can get you past a slow sales period that much more quickly. Other times, marketing is an expense that you can’t afford until business picks up. It’s your call.
How Much Small Business Marketing is Enough?
Some small businesses go under trying to buy a lot of ad space, believing that just one more yellow pages ad or radio spot will do the trick. Unfortunately, if you don’t have a solid product or service underneath all of the marketing then there’s never going to be enough marketing in the world to keep you afloat.
Maintaining a good business is the first step to good marketing. By offering something worth promising, you allow your marketing team to make big promises. By offering something that matches up to the commercial, you don’t have to worry about what’s going to happen when word gets out that you stretched the truth in the ad.
“Enough” marketing is simply enough marketing to bring people in and get them trying your product or service, and later, enough marketing to maintain your place in the industry and win new markets over. Once you lure your prospects in and convince them to try what you’re offering, it’s up to you to keep them interested.
This is where a lot of business owners flop: they know how marketing works, they study their demographics, they know what kinds of businesses do well and which ones flounder, but they never once stopped and asked themselves whether or not what they’re offering is worth offering, whether they’re doing it better than the next guy, whether they’re just wasting their prospect’s time or not. You have to ask yourself the hard questions: “is there really a market for this, or am I just hoping that the numbers add up?”
Marketing your small business is incredibly important, but remember that at the end of the day your TV ads and radio spots and newspaper ads are only trying to tell a story, and if that story isn’t true, if the facts do not hold up, then the biggest marketing budget in the world won’t save you.