Small Business Marketing Secrets

Need more marketing? Of course you do. Need to spend money on it to make money? Most of the time...not! Small business marketing has to be the least understood aspect of business ownership so let’s explore this very important subject to make it simple.

Marketing includes advertising, but it also includes selling, customer service, team building, pricing, stock control systems, dealing with suppliers, merchandising and more.

Few people understand the definition of marketing. They often believe its something big companies do, but not small businesses. Or, they believe marketing is just about getting new customers – i.e. advertising, buts its not. Its so much more. Marketing is about the total movement of goods and/or services to the market place.

Marketing when effectively carried out becomes a phenomenal tool to massively increase profits while spending very little!

The purpose of marketing is something else again.

You may have read about it, looked the word up on the internet, but you still wouldn’t be able to define it in essence for what its purpose is.

Before we define its purpose we have to first understand the working environment of small businesses. So first of all, let’s look investigate this.

FACT: The majority of small businesses operate with a low net profit margin.

Your net profit margin is the percentage of net profit your business makes, or the net profit $ figure divided into turnover expressed as a percentage.

90% of all businesses operate with less than 10% net profit margin. Businesses don’t fail or go bankrupt while making lots of profit, so how efficient your business is can be measured by your net profit margin. This figure reflects how well your business operates and plays a large part in whether your business will still be operating in 5 or more years from now. Your priority as a business owner is to always increase net profit margin.

When you increase your prices on your products/services you instantly increase the net profit margin, which solves financial struggle and pressure. Few business owners are willing to put their prices up by 10% when this is mentioned to them, as they ‘assume’ they will lose a heap of sales and profit by doing so. They believe they will lose customers because customers virtually always buy based on price (so they assume).

Business owners due to this fear are often operating their business in scarcity mode. They don’t make a decent profit (10%-20% plus) yet they believe they can’t increase prices to solve their low profit problem.

When people have a fear of losing customers (or sales) from a price rise that fear prevents them from acting and increasing prices to make a higher net profit (and margin).

The purpose of marketing therefore needs to be, to break the scarcity mindset of the business owner, by bringing in too many inquiries to  the business, so the owner isn’t fearful of raising prices and losing sales.

To generate too many inquiries or big volumes of sales (income) you have a few options.

You can increase inquiries, increase conversion rate from inquiry to paying customer or bring existing customers back more often.

Of the 3 of these conversion rate increase has to be one of the best, but also least utilised one. Nearly all business owners believe they need to spend money on advertising to grow their business. But that’s rubbish!

If you don’t know your actual conversion rate, it will increase by giving it your attention.

Then there are over 80 strategies (given to attendees of Business Freedom) to increase this area of the business, without spending a cent!

If you increase your conversion rate from 30% to 33%, your turnover will increase 10% as well. For example if your turnover per year is $500,000, going from 30% conversion rate to 33% conversion rate will increase your turnover $50,000 (all other things being equal)! How many people do you think even know this?

Would you like to make more money yet spend nothing on advertising? Conversion rate increase is by far the most powerful strategy for increasing profits. You just need to learn how to apply some of the 80 proven strategies to your business and bingo… instant profit increases!

Another great strategy is rewriting all your advertising, including website pages, flyers, newspaper ads, letters etc. Rewriting can easily double the response of any working marketing piece, using careful and proven design principles.

Finally you can spend money on advertising to obtain new, additional customers by getting an education on marketing principles and proven practices.  About 1% of all business owners have ever read one book or more on advertising principles, yet nearly all business owners have designed their own ads. That’s like doing an operation on a person with zero training!

Another area to boost profits in a business with marketing is to write letters, emails or SMS text to previous customers offering them an incentive to buy from your business again. Clients of Business Building Mentors have made up to $5,000 in a day from running a marketing campaign to previous customers.

Marketing also includes quote forms (if you use them), signage, team uniforms, letter heads, your website, selling skills, pricing and so much more.

If you are struggling or want to double your business profits in months, marketing education will do it for you. Very few other forms of education will do that for you. You could attend a College course on your industry to extend your training to become more qualified, but it won’t increase your profits much, if at all. Learning sales and marketing from a professional source, like Business Building Mentors, will give you the greatest reward for effort you are ever likely to find.

Marketing is just one of many strategies to increase your net profit (and margins). Team building is another great strategy, as is measuring and system implementation. There are hundreds and hundreds of strategies to increase your business profits and Business Freedom contains hundreds.

If you’re ready for extraordinary business profit growth and success why not come along to a Business Freedom Business & Management Training Session and see why it is changing people’s lives in just months!