Simplicity, Simplicity, Simplicity!

By: Janette Burke, ‘Your Marketing Magnet’

If you’ve recently visited Amazon.com or made a trip to your local bookstore; browsed the business section and took stock of all the titles promising an array of keys, secrets, tools and formulas for marketing success – and feel overwhelmed.  I don’t blame you!

It’s not that these titles and authors don’t provide useful suggestions. It’s that the vast amount of information they offer tends to leave small & mid-size business owners, entrepreneurs, book authors and even a few marketing directors with the impression that marketing their business has to be difficult and complicated.

If you lack time, resources and know-how, this may be the case. However, it doesn’t have to be!  In reality, marketing, publicizing and promoting your business should be fun. 

When it comes right down to it, marketing and business success come from adhering to and applying fundamental, tried and true principles with slight twists or variations. 

If you stop and think about it, you’ll realize I’m right.  Why?  Because there are only three foolproof ways in which you can actually make more money:

1. Find more customers

2. Make more from your existing customers by increasing the value of each sale

3. Increase the frequency that customers buy

Therefore it stands to reason that boosting your business revenue is best achieved when you follow and implement a combination of simpleon & offline marketing strategies.  The trick is knowing when and how to take these principles from the theoretical to the practical - so they fit your specific context and circumstance – and then allocate the proper resources, timelines and planning stages to them. 

Remember the old saying that you can’t be everything to everyone?  Well, this is especially true in business. Big department stores still have a measure of success with the generalist approach - although even they are struggling to break even. We live in an age where customers demand an ever increasing degree of specialization. So make sure you are able to offer this by developing a precise target customer profile and a strategy for delivering what they want. Turning away from the masses to service the few may sound slightly counterintuitive, but it remains the simplest way to build a loyal customer base that is appreciative of the fact that your business is geared toward meeting their specific needs.