It’s easy to ignore the obvious. The obvious simply looks too simple. Marketing for small business often ignores these three things and pays the price. These three things are:

o      Marketing on Purpose

o      Marketing Budget

o      Personal Branding

Marketing on Purpose

Return on Investment (ROI) tells you what’s working and what’s not. Marketing for small business needs to pay as much attention to these numbers as does big business. It’s easy to calculate and numbers don’t lie.

Marketing on purpose is the construction rebar that holds all your marketing programs together. Marketing on purpose is the focus of each individual marketing endeavor you undertake. Marketing on purpose is solution-focused and client driven.

Here is a mistake I see far too often. I call it “Marketing by Menu”. It goes like this:

If I give you the menu of all the products and services I offer, surely something on my list will be for you. Wrong! In my opinion the only place for a menu is in a restaurant. Reciting the menu says more about your ability to memorize than it says about your ability to match your prospective client’s problem with a solution you can provide. 

Marketing Budget

It is my experience that when it comes to marketing for small business, the budget for marketing is missing. With no dollars allocated to this budget line, dollars spent on marketing have no strings attached. The business plan is present. The budget for operating the business is present but the marketing budget is invisible.  How much money will you allocate to marketing your business over the next year? How does that break down month by month? What will you promote? How will you determine if your marketing was a success?

Personal Branding

Do your shoes and your belt match? I’ll bet you pay attention to your entire outfit.

What about you in your business? Here are some questions to ask yourself. Does your company’s personality match yours? Does your business card match with your personality and the personality of your business? If you, as the CEO of your company, were to implement a dress code for your company, what would that look like? What does that tell you about the dress code you tend to follow every time you take your business out in public? Is a change (of clothes) in order? Hint: If you have not given your company’s branding a whole lot of thought, maybe now is the time to revisit that concept before you step into personal branding on a bigger scale.

Ignoring these things won’t make them go away. You might be able to convince yourself that you don’t have to pay attention to what you don’t see. Is it okay if others see what you don’t and it affects your bottom line?

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Donna Dahl, author, speaker, trainer and marketing strategist, offers “Stuck to Start™” 90 minute consultations. She can be reached at donna@makoye.com Visit her show at www.thewinonline.com/shows/tenacious-marketer.com