Yet the business isn’t coming in. Your thoughts: my marketing isn’t working!

Is it not?

Have you ever employed someone? Or, have you ever worked for someone? You were given a task – or a set of tasks – and you called that…your job.

What are your marketing method’s jobs? What’s Facebook supposed to be doing for you?

The universal answer is “make me more money” or “bring in clients” or “spread awareness,” but unfortunately, it’s just simply not specific enough.

It’s no surprise that the number of clients I have has increased dramatically – people looking to really maximize their presence on the web. But the trend with many of them is the same – they’re frustrated because “nothing is working,” when in fact, they can’t know if it’s working because they never gave it a job.

Here’s an exercise:

1. Ask yourself, “What’s my overall goal for my marketing methods?”
2. Ask yourself, “How will I know that I’ve reached that goal?”

Your ability to really answer those questions will directly impact your marketing’s ability to work for you. You can’t employ vague marketing techniques and then expect specific results. If you want a bigger list, determine how much bigger is big. Does one additional name count? Does five? What about five hundred?

Example: Heidi’s overall goal is to make more money (problem A). Her marketing methods are a newsletter, a blog and some social networking – she can hardly remember which ones she has (problem B). She also wants to increase hits to her website (problem C) and build her list (problem D).

Over the past year, Heidi’s business has stagnated. She doesn’t ever go on her social networking sites because she doesn’t have time. She gets little to no leads from her website. She posts a blog once or twice per month.

“My marketing isn’t working!” she said.

“Isn’t it, though?” I ask calmly.

“What do you mean? I am getting no business!” Heidi exclaimed.

“Oh. I think it’s because your marketing methods didn’t know that was the point.”

Do you see where I’m going with this? Her marketing methods have no focus. They don’t have a job to do. People without jobs are considered unemployed. Marketing tools without jobs are considered unfocused. They don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing.

Part of focused marketing is deciding what you want your marketing to do and then specifically determining how it should go about doing that.

In Part 2, I’ll talk about how to give your marketing a job along with how to give it a performance evaluation, so you can know whether or not it is really working for you.

© 2008 – 2009, Tia Peterson. All rights reserved. This text may be reproduced with permission. Please contact tia@tiadpeterson.com to request permission to reuse this content. Thank you!

He’s a Marketing Guy. That’s not his official title, of course, but he knows his stuff. Just look at his resume or testimonials to figure that out.

But I’m writing because I was reading a marketing article of his and I am compelled to share it! Never mind that it says Seattle Marketing Strategy – the advice is actually completely independent of Seattle (he probably did that for SEO purposes – learn it!).

Virtual assistants, marketing assistants, etc – we’re as in demand now as it’s ever going to get, so if you’re not getting business, you really need to re-think your marketing strategy.

Read Joe’s article here and if you’re brave and/or smart, you really should join me on Biznik and follow my lead so you can get clients (good paying ones), too. I am a paid member but didn’t start out that way. A Biznik membership is completely free. Even if you just want to learn from some experienced folks, you need to be networking.

© 2008 – 2009, Tia Peterson. All rights reserved. This text may be reproduced with permission. Please contact tia@tiadpeterson.com to request permission to reuse this content. Thank you!

Am I being clear? NO! I’m definitely not. From my website, you’d think that I am casting my net as far out into the sea as possible, hoping to catch everything from the smallest shrimp to the humpback whale. Ridiculous! The thing is that it’s not even what I’m after. I have a particular type of client in mind with particular needs. Why am I so afraid to communicate that?

Anyway. You may have a similar problem. Or, a different problem, but with the same solution – re-vamping. Re-vamping, as I define it, means to re-create your material in such a way that new energy and life is brought to it. In my case, my website should be re-done immediately – like, by Monday – so that my marketing efforts are not in vain.

I don’t want my marketing efforts for my website to be like the good seed that fell on infertile land. Wasted. A total waste. That’s not what I want. That shouldn’t be what you want either.

But here’s the key: when you figure out that it’s time to re-vamp, re-vamp and be quick about it. Honey, you don’t have time to waste, really. If you’re like me, there are a million and a half (not literally, I hope) other people out there offering what you do and chances are at least 10% of them are clear in their marketing message (well, I’m being generous). You get my point. Be out front. Lead the pack. Pave the way.

Re-vamp and be quick about it. I decided tonight that by Monday my website will be totally re-vamped, so help me God. If it’s not, I’ll change it in such a way that only the home page and contact page are available, buying me a little bit more time to change up the rest. Seriously!

This sort of falls under the theory out there about being radical in your business. When you get that “feeling, GO with it. There is a reason you are feeling it. So thank God that you “got” it and then do something about it!

Well, anyway, hopefully if you’re out there and you’ve felt the need to re-vamp something related to your business, this blog has given you the motivation to just do it. You have a lot to lose. Yes, I said you have a lot to lose. In the small business world, every time that a client visits your website, looks at your business card, or picks up your direct mail piece and then never looks back is a major loss for you, because each client represents the three clients they might have referred to, if they had given your business a try, and so on and so on, exponentially.

Don’t gloss this over! Re-vamp and be quick about it now.

© 2008 – 2009, Tia Peterson. All rights reserved. This text may be reproduced with permission. Please contact tia@tiadpeterson.com to request permission to reuse this content. Thank you!

We did the usual – eat, play, sing, chill out, etc. Then I caught some time to myself as he took a snooze. That’s when Marketing Mania Day began its onset.

It started out when I decided to build out my new Linkshare program (Join B2B LinkShare Now!) which I actually found when browsing a competitor’s website (you can find really interesting things while browsing competitor’s websites…). I was creating links to add to my page and found a really great one for Vertical Response. Well, I decided that not only did I want to promote them on my website and earn money, I wanted to use them, too.

VR offers some really cool tools for direct marketing and e-mail marketing. I had already decided that I wanted to send out a launch e-mail to my “circle of influence”. VR’s tools just made it way easier. Instead of having to send a huge, mass e-mail from my webmail account that wouldn’t look so nice anyway since I can’t create cool-looking HTML e-mails with it, I was able to use VR’s e-mail marketing tool to make this amazing launch e-mail to send to my friends and family. I am so pleased with it! (If you want to find out more about it, click here.)

But anyway, the real point of this blog is to discuss circles of influence. I really had no idea that I had contact information for as many people as I do. At the end of the day, I had over 150 bonafide e-mail addresses of real family and friends to contact regarding my new business. That number will either seem small or large to you depending on how much you use and believe in circle of influence. If you had asked me how large my circle was prior to today, I would have guesstimated somewhere around 20 or 25. Obviously it is much larger than I thought. Why? Because I never looked! I never really looked into it until today.

How did I look into it? Well, this isn’t a how-to article but maybe one day I’ll write one. All I did was go to my contacts list in gmail and export it! I was shocked to see just how many “contacts” I actually had. After cleaning it up a bit and removing people I don’t consider part of my circle of influence, I ended up with somewhere in the 150s and that was darn good enough for a great launch.

Thus, I created a tres chic Pass-It-On campaign letter in which I simply asked those in my circle to pass on the news of my new business to someone in their circle who could use it. In effect, I was asking my friends and family to do me a favor by doing a favor for a small business owner that they knew, because I truly believe that my services can help small business owners. It was an earnest request that I know will have excellent results.

So I used my circle of influence today and I’m so proud of that. These are the types of activities that separate the small business wheat from the small business chaff. Seriously. I got a boost of self-confidence today from something so small – sending an email!

There you have it, folks. Everyday you can do something to take a step in the direction of increasing your small business’s value. Even on Sick Sunday!

© 2008 – 2009, Tia Peterson. All rights reserved. This text may be reproduced with permission. Please contact tia@tiadpeterson.com to request permission to reuse this content. Thank you!