Continuing on with our series of 7 Ways to Avoid Costly Marketing Mistakes, check out these simple and effective strategies:

3. Create a marketing calendar. This way you won’t be tempted to give up. Grab your planner, Outlook, or your Post-It notes -whatever you use to organize your time. Make a day each month that you will dedicate to marketing. There is the creation of your project and the implementation as well. For example, if you are going to have a newsletter sent on the 10th of the month, you may need to get your self sitting down and creating it by the 3rd of the month! And you know what I’m going to tell you, my busy business owners………..OUTSOURCE! Don’t make the mistake of thinking you have to do it all yourself because truthfully, you can’t and you won’t! Get yourself a great assistant (either live or virtual) and have most of this stuff done for you. As Nike would say – Just Do It. You’ll thank me later.

4. Systematize or suffer. You may have heard talk about how you need to have systems in place. Well you don’t really, unless that is, you want to have insanity in its place. You get to choose! What I mean by systems is that with the newsletter example, you have a template already created, you have the format down, you have the VA or other administrative assistant primed and ready, so all you need to do is create content. No reason to reinvent the wheel. For each marketing piece you do, create a file detailing all the steps you went through. Yes, there will be more work up front, but in the end, you can hand the file off while you are sitting on a beach somewhere. That’s my hope for you!

5. Don’t guess, test! That’s the biggie in marketing. How do you know what works if you don’t test? You may need to have a “How did you find us” question, or some other way to capture that info. Test your marketing pieces on your target market, and not your husband, wife, friend or neighbor! If they aren’t your market, their opinions don’t count. There are way too many ‘dream stealers’ out there who don’t get what you do and can’t really be a good resource for your questions. Find a group of your target market and ask them if you can run by some marketing pieces with them. You can incent them with freebie stuff, but very often people LOVE to help and give their opinion. Just gotta ask.

Do research to determine what your market responds to. How do you find these???? Check out discussion boards by doing a Google search for your content ideas, or send your clients a survey. I’ll give you an example of why testing is important…One of my clients recently wanted to conduct teleseminars for her market to highlight some classes she wants to offer. She was getting advice from a speaker friend of hers in how to do this, but when we poked around a bit, we discovered that while the speakers target market would participate in teleseminars, this may be a really foreign concept to my client’s market. It would have flopped for her, so we got from her market how they best would like to receive the information.

Are you seeing it yet? A few simple tweaks can make all the difference in creating a focused, successful marketing strategy. Join me next time as I share my final two suggestions.

Blessings,
Therese