It really is. It takes time to grow your audience, customers and earn their loyalty.
You can make informed decisions now about where your market is – such as searching for information on the web – but you can’t psychically know at what stage your potential customer is in their purchasing cycle when they come to you. Sometimes, because of this, you’ll probably spend money on something that may not pay off for your business. Actually it may pay off – but not when you want/need it to, which is naturally right now.
I’m not suggesting you lower your expectations of marketing and advertising for your small business – it does makes a huge difference. But to be honest – the difference is made with marketing and advertising as long term investments – relying on consistency and thoughtful targeting. The short term scattergun approach is not the way to create the brand you want. By short term, I mean putting an advert in for one month and expecting long term results.
You’re Not the Only One….
Big corporations have huge budgets and factor their marketing and product development as long term investments. But not every dollar they’ve spent has yielded results. Think about how much Coca-Cola spent on the “New Coke” debacle, how much Vegemite spent on iSnack 2.0, how much Tourism Australia spent on the “Where the bloody hell are you?” Its trial and error for big brands too.
The Good News
The benefit you have as a small business is the control and ability to adjust your message, pull advertising, push e-mail newsletters without having to spend weeks/months consulting with upper level management/purse strings to make those decisions. You are a flexible entity – able to adjust to market changes in the blink of an eye. Use this to your advantage.The idea is to maintain a consistent presence within your market to enable your consumer to find you easily when they want to buy.
Has a quick fix ever worked for you?
your opening gambit – what other kind of strategy is there?
are they on the net? or infront of a computer and the net the medium in which we have the potential to engage them?
and one of the benefits of the internet is that interactions can be tracked/monitored so stages in the purchasing life-cycle can be ascertained without intrusion on the customer. etc etc zzzzz
The article is for small business owners who may expect their marketing to yield immediate results – when in fact it may not. So it’s more about not giving up on marketing if the short term gains are not as good as anticipated.
You are right that the interactions can be monitored – though this is only effective where the small business is selling products online and the full purchasing-cycle is conducted on the web.