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 noticed 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. Often 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. We will briefly outline the issues here and then delve deeper into each one in separate blog posts.
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 so overwhelming! Running a business and running the marketing for that business are two full time jobs. If you are trying to do both, you are most likely overloaded and can’t be expected to be successful at both.
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 plans from other small businesses as a short cut to balance out the previous capacity reason listed earlier. But here’s the thing: marketing plans created for an entire franchise system or for another company are 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.
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, both because of seasonality and also just because things change. Additionally, the algorithms change. That means that something that was absolutely what you should be 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.
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 own 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.
We worked with a franchise that has a tried and true evergreen message. They used it all the time, changing the artwork, photos, and word placement, but the message largely stayed the same. Sometimes they would slightly switch it up for the holidays or something, but the sentiment stayed the same. And it worked! It got customers in the door and spending money. Shortly after some new leadership at corporate came in, they decided to change the messaging to see if it was more effective because they assumed people were tired of the old message. That whole campaign flopped and when they went back to the previous message, they saw results again. 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.
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’re failing because they’re trying hard at the wrong layer. Too much 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 ever really heard them. These aren’t marketing problems. They’re foundation problems. And once you know where to look, they’re fixable. That’s exactly what a diagnostic conversation is for.
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.