One of the services I offer clients is small business marketing coaching.
It allows me to work with early stage start-up businesses who focus on creating their products or services, not thinking about how customers will learn about their brand. Marketing rarely makes their to-do list. From artists, coffee roasters to ice cream cone manufacturers, many of these clients just need a “marketing whisperer” to guide them in the right direction and to give them some simple, but powerful advice.
Most of these coaching sessions are an hour per month, and I love being able to share my experiences with companies with big dreams and ambitions. In one hour, it is difficult to cover too many topics, but three themes are the framework for most of my initial coaching sessions.
Three Themes for Small Business Marketing
FOCUS
Why be a generalist when you can by an expert? People like to buy from someone who is the leading expert in one area with a remarkable product. They don’t want to buy from someone who is good or average at a bunch of things. Get rid of products or services that aren’t at the core of your growth potential and that distract you from becoming known for that one thing. I spent more than a decade making one product – a double chocolate brownie. The President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, said they were the best brownies he ever ate.
LEVERAGE
Someone else in your eco-system has a common customer. They may sell something that is significantly different from you. But they have a relationship with customers who you want to get in front of with your product or service. Find businesses with common customers and see how you can collaborate.
The natural, organic soft drink company that sells a syrup should be partnering with the maker of soft-drink machines. The realtor who focuses on people downsizing should be working with divorce or estate attorneys. The vegetarian restaurant might find an alliance with the local gym or bike shop as their clients has healthy lifestyles in common.
DIRECT
A conversation that comes over and over with my clients is about selling through distribution versus direct to end customers. Since most of these clients are small, I like to keep them on track by finding more direct customers so that they can have a clearer feedback loop to understand if their product or services can be improved.
Recently, I told one client that I’d prefer that they have lower sales in the first year with 1,000 direct buying customers than 20 distributors. Distributors won’t be focused only on your brand, they won’t provide enough unfiltered feedback. They typically won’t really help you grow in the early stages.
For about five years, my wife and I sold our brownies directly to individual retail stores without selling to any distributions. When we did get our first distributors, we understood how to train them, how to help them with merchandising and how to gain success. Had we tried to do that too early, we wouldn’t have experienced the same growth rate.
Interested or know a small business owner?
If you know of someone in a small business who could use some guidance, please share this post with them. By the way, Small Business Saturday is coming up on November 25, 2017. Don’t forget to shop local and find small businesses in your community that you can help.
To learn more about my small business coaching services, click here or call/text me at 919 720 0995 or email me at jeffslater@themarketingsage.com
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
