Marketing Strategy · Small Business
Four reasons small business marketing falls short
What we’ve noticed
Most marketing problems start before before you ever post, advertise, or promote.
We’ve been seeing a pattern in the marketing of the small businesses we work with. Whether it’s franchisees who are following franchise guidelines or small business owners having a go at it on their own, we have noticed that often the marketing tactics themselves are not the issue when it comes to successful marketing. Sometimes there are other things at play that are holding them back. As we diagnosed their marketing issues, we generally found four key reasons their marketing fell short, and it’s not because they aren’t trying hard enough. Of course there are other reasons, but these are the four we run into the most frequently.
The diagnosis
Number 1: business owner capacity
We’ve seen first hand small business owners trying to be all the things to all the people. You’re the opener, the closer, the scheduler, the payroll department, HR, and more. Small business owners wear so many hats that it can be overwhelming! Running a business and running the marketing for that business are two full time jobs. If you are trying to do all of it, you are most likely overloaded and can’t be expected to be successful at both. This is an impossible ask.
From our own co-founder’s experience as a small business owner previously, she saw how marketing could get pushed to the background. She was always trying to think up marketing angles because she knew they were important. Most of the ideas were never used because of time or capacity. There was always something else more urgent that would get in the way. So marketing was always the last thing, but it was so important. She never felt she could give the time or energy to it that it deserved. It felt neverending and took up way more brainspace than it should have. That’s not because of anything except she was trying to do too many things at once and they were all vying for her attention. She should have recognized this and put things into place to take that burden off her plate. Read more about this issue here →
Number 2: someone else's plan
One of the benefits of participating in a franchise is having access to their playbook that includes sales plans, marketing plans, and other important parts of owning a business. Other small businesses may use marketing strategies found on social media, from networking groups like BNI, or from any number of places as a shortcut. Maybe you saw the success of another company’s viral moment or read about how some company saw 200% return on their ad spend when they did something specific and thought you could repeat it. But here’s the thing: marketing plans created for an entire franchise system or for another company are most likely going to be less effective for your business than one tailored to your specific needs.
We have seen this as we have worked with several different franchises. Franchisees are usually given a playbook for marketing and it works well for the majority of locations. However, once we dig in and really look at their situation, we sometimes discover that there were things that could be adjusted to boost their marketing efforts. For example, we worked with a small business owner who owns a retail shop in a small town where people from different states came to do their “big” shopping trips. Following the playbook meant they were using the standard automated ad setup and were accidentally restricting their digital outreach. That was inefficient for getting customers into their store because a lot of their customers lived further away. Once we diagnosed that problem, we were able to adjust their ads so they had a much larger radius, but were targeting their actual audience. The problem wasn’t that the store wasn’t doing marketing right. The problem was that they were using a marketing plan that was tailored for a larger city and not catering to what the smaller market really needed. Read more about this issue here →
Number 3: when your marketing falls behind
Something that we find that many people forget is that marketing is kind of like a living, breathing entity. Your business is changing all the time, as are your customers. What may have worked six months ago may not work right now. Maybe you had something great over the holidays that doesn’t work anymore. Maybe the algorithm updates to change what posts are successful. Maybe a trend that was fresh now feels outdated and cringe. Maybe your messaging is performing differently based on a recession or a boom. Basically, there are any number of things that could affect the success of your marketing based on the timing factor. That means that something that was absolutely what you should have been using to market your business last year may or may not still be the most effective.
It’s a lot of work to keep up with so many changes. If your marketing seems to be falling flat right now, it could just be that your timing is off. You could be using an outdated marketing plan or the type of posts that went viral last month might not even be a type that the algorithm pushes out to people anymore. That is why auditing your marketing is so important: so you can assess how successful your marketing efforts are. If you need help auditing your marketing, that is a service we offer. Reach out and we can help you with the audit. Read more about this issue here →
Number 4: your fatigue isn't their fatigue
We know how hard it is to come up with a continuous stream of content for posting to social media and as ads. It’s easy to feel like you’ve exhausted a slogan, topic, or post because you’re sick of it. However, often small businesses mistake their own fatigue of their messages for their audience’s fatigue. It’s been said that people need to see a message more than one or two times before it hits home to them and they remember that they’ve seen it. So, you getting tired of something doesn’t necessarily mean that your audience is tired of it or that they’ve even seen it half of the times you’ve put it out there. You’re not tired of saying it because your customer is tired of hearing it. Your customer has barely heard it at all. That fatigue is yours, not theirs.
It’s important to remember that positioning and copy are not the same thing. Once you determine your positioning, you can say it 1,000 different ways and still be on point. It’s when you stray from your positioning that becomes the problem. And just because you feel like you’ve seen your marketing a million times, doesn’t mean it’s time to stop. Sometimes you have to remember that marketing isn’t about you, it’s about your audience and getting results. Tactics are supposed to come and go, like trends. Positioning isn’t. It should survive platform changes, and it should survive your audience aging into a completely different generation. What changes around it is the copy. Not the position. Read more about this issue here →
The Takeaway
The tactics aren't failing you, but your marketing foundation might be.
Most of the small businesses we work with aren’t failing at marketing because they aren’t trying. They are failing because they are trying hard at the wrong things. Not enough capacity going into execution, plans built for someone else’s business, strategies that haven’t kept up with how things have changed, and messages abandoned before the audience really ever heard them aren’t marketing problems. They are foundation problems. Once you know where to look, they are fixable. That’s exactly what a diagnostic conversation is for. Reach out today to schedule your diagnostic conversation.
Not sure if your marketing foundation is solid?
That’s exactly what a diagnostic conversation is for. We’ll take a look at what’s actually going on and tell you honestly what we find.