Small Business Marketing Challenges - Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

A fairly common situation is when an entrepreneur hires an advertising agency or an individual specialist, and their work does not lead to the goal of increasing sales and income. For example, some SMM specialists can only buy Instagram followers to promote the company, but do not know how to work with the resulting audience.

Everyone is upset and most likely blames the other side for the reasons. And rightly so, both sides are to blame.

The reason is simple. The goals were set incorrectly.

For the convenience of work, you should use the following sequence of goals:

— financial. For this, entrepreneurs most often come to small businesses;

— marketing or the rarest goal, which reveals how it is planned to achieve the financial goal (what products to sell, how they might need to be changed, how to pack, how to make their purchase more convenient, what price to set, who to sell to). Despite its rarity, it can be called the most important in the initial development of a business. Without this, it is impossible to correctly draw up a marketing strategy and set the company up for sustainable growth;

— a communication goal that reveals what needs to be told, to whom and where. Even if you buy real Instagram followers, then you need to know how to interact with this audience in the future. Otherwise, you will lose the people you already have.

Communication is important both with potential buyers and within the company. If your team is close-knit and trusting relationships are built in it, then the company will successfully work on creating and promoting the brand.

Next, a strategy comes into play that answers the questions of how best to tell in order to maximize the effect and speak in a language that the audience understands. This is necessary to build a comfortable communication with clients.

At the same time, targetologists or media planners decide how to get the information to the audience in the most profitable way in the selected channel.

As a result, a creative brief appears, in which the original business goal is translated into a language that is understandable for designers and copywriters.

With this approach, at each stage, you can set clear performance indicators and control what can be improved or changed. Of course, in order for this mechanism to function quickly and efficiently, you need to have a large number of specialists from different industries who will analyze the market and draw up a company strategy. It is very difficult to build a large team at the initial stage, because entrepreneurs simply do not have the money to pay salaries to specialists. This is a problem that concerns all start-up businesses.

If we return to the problem, then we can say that it appears both due to an incorrectly set goal on the part of the customer, and due to the fact that the performers agree on goals that are completely independent of them.

What to do?

Customers need to set the right goals for the professionals.

Professionals must not deceive customers and themselves that your tool can replace all business processes and do its job well.