The Single Biggest Problem in Marketing

I had had some experience of marketing before I was making a living as a business consultant in London, but it was in London that the practicalities of marketing first struck me.

Amongst other things, I am a consultant in business and personal effectiveness with about 30 years’ experience in human resource and organisational management within small and medium-sized enterprises in the UK, Australia and the U.S.A. specialising in organisation design, staff development, training and counselling.

As far as marketing is concerned, I worked with a national intelligence broker in the City, where I succeeded in quadrupling company turnover within a year.

I worked with an internationally famous camera partnership in the West End where I helped to increase turnover from £20-30,000 a week to £150-200,000 a week. It’s now probably the most successful camera shop in the world.

I also worked with a musical equipment rental company in West London where I increased company turnover and profitability by 33% within a year. This company is now the largest of its kind in Europe.

I did some work with one of Northern Ireland’s largest chiropractic clinics, increasing throughput from an average of 200 patients per week to 500 patients per week.

This is the power of marketing.

While I was working in this field in the 1990s, 8 out of every 10 small enterprises in the UK were going out of business within the first 3 years.

They had no grip on marketing. The truth is, they didn’t really know what it was.

What is the single biggest marketing problem faced by small businesses?

They don't know what their product really is.

That's right: they don't really understand what it is that they're making.

If you really understand what your product is, you immediately know who your buyers might be. Then you can concentrate your efforts and get results.

What small business owners who want to do well and who consider marketing, usually do is:

1. They throw money and time at it.

They spend hours, if not days or weeks, putting together detailed advertising and promotional campaigns upon which they base a great deal of hope. If they are lucky enough to actually get the campaign accomplished, they breathe a sigh of relief, sit back and wait for the results, and then get caught up in other things, imagining that they have 'done marketing' and will soon enter into a new zone of operation.

Unfortunately, they’re wrong. They have succeeded only in scratching the surface. Within a year or so, if not less, their sales will have declined again even if the initial campaign was successful. They conclude that they 'have to do the whole thing again'.

2. They throw people at it.

If they can, the other thing that business owners often do is that they hire someone to 'do marketing' for them. They get in a company which claims to specialise in the subject and think that they are 'covered'. This sometimes has an effect because in doing so they accidentally hit upon some key marketing points - but more often than not they are still left with similar sales, and they haven’t really grasped marketing at all.

There is a successful approach to marketing, however. But it begins with something more basic.

It begins by defining exactly what it is that you are creating.

Forget 'campaigns'; forget 'consultants'.

Define your product.

I mean really define it.

Not just 'pizzas', for example, but an exact, detailed description of the pizza that you (and perhaps only you) make.

For writers, this means defining exactly what it is about your work which makes it special, desirable, unique, wonderful.

If you don't know what that is, you're about to begin a wonderful journey, at the end of which you will know who your buyers might be, where they are, and, most marvellous of all, you will feel reinvigorated about whatever it is you produce.

For more, get my e-book Marketing for Writers.