Why your small business needs a marketing strategy.

Most small business owners struggle with marketing.  As a result, a very popular search term on the internet is Affordable Small Business Marketing Strategies.   If that’s what you’re seeking, then you’re in the right place because the number key to developing an Affordable Small Business Marketing Strategy is to tightly target your niche market! 

Many business owners often find themselves chasing after an array of marketing tactics instead of implementing a cohesive marketing strategy. Creating a cohesive marketing strategy is essential if you’re going to spend your marketing/advertising dollars wisely.  Be developing a marketing strategy, you’ll be able to define which marketing tactics will work best for your and your small business.

Unfortunately, marketing tactics which may result in great success for one business may fail miserably for the next. Yet many business owners attend seminars, buy books and subscribe to newsletters that do little more than provide a never ending list of various marketing tactics. These small business owners keep gathering these crumbs, hoping to collect enough crumbs and the finding the magical marketing tactic(s) that will turn this collection of crumbs into a slice of toast.

The search for tactics to increase the return on investment dates back to the earliest recorded history. One tactic used by early farmers to improve their farming “return on investment” was to plant discarded fish parts to improve their production of corn. Modern science has shown there are practical scientific principles behind this ancient practice. The decaying fish parts provide the steady supply of nitrogen which corn needs to grow abundantly. It seems the decaying fish parts are a great “lo-tech” method for providing the steady fertilization needs of growing corn plants.

It turns out that in ancient cultures there were two schools of thought about the role of the planting fish with corn. On one hand, there were the cultures that, at some level, seemed to recognize the science behind the practice. Farmers in these cultures believed that the corn was literally feeding upon the decaying fish. So while they used the “tactic” of planting fish parts with corn, they were aware of the overall strategy behind the tactic which was to provide nourishment for the plants so they could produce an abundant crop.

However, there were other cultures that also planted fish parts with their crops but did so without any understanding of the science behind the practice. For these cultures, the fish were thought to have magical properties. They believed that the spirit of the dead fish magically helped the plants to grow. These cultures were using the same tactic; however they were using it without any understanding of the strategy behind the tactic’s success.

From our 21st Century perspective, it’s easy to see that the farmers that viewed the fish as having magical properties were putting themselves at a severe disadvantage. Without being aware of the underlying strategy of feeding the plants, the farmers who subscribed to the fish spirit as magic tactic could not understand how placing too much fish in with each seed could actually lead to undesirable results. (If you are a dog owner and have brown spots in your lawn, then you’ve seen firsthand the results of excessive nitrogen on vegetation.)

Imagine that you were a farmer who subscribed to the fish as magic school of thinking. At some point as you watched your corn fail to grow, you would have to ask yourself: Is there such a thing as too much magic? How can some magic be good but more of the same magic be bad? Only when you adopt the scientific view of using the fish as part of a fertilization strategy can you begin to see where too much of a good tactic can actually lead to undesirable results.

The same is true in modern marketing. For example, offering a limited time discount can improve your sales initially but when used excessively, consumers become conditioned to wait until your next big discount to buy. Even the big players in the market, like GM and Macy’s aren’t immune to the underlying principles at work. No matter what size your business, the going gets tough when you learn that there is such a thing as too much magic.

When you understand the underlying principles behind creating a successful marketing strategy and successful marketing message, then you’ll be able to choose the right marketing tactics that will help you to achieve your marketing objectives.