If you are like most business owners, you probably have in depth knowledge and expertise in your particular industry. You’ve honed your craft and learned all the ins and outs of your field over the years but of course, this doesn’t mean that marketing is your forte. You can’t be all things to all people and if you aren’t in the marketing or advertising business yourself, you are often better off working with marketing consulting firms than you are trying to promote your business on your own. If you’d like to learn more about the benefits which your business stands to enjoy by hiring a marketing consulting firm, then read on.

It Saves You Money

If you’re not experienced in designing, implementing and tracking the results of advertising or marketing campaigns, you could end up spending far too much money without seeing any appreciable return on your investment. As retail magnate John Wannamaker is reported to have said, “I know that about half of what I spend on advertising is wasted. The problem is that I don’t know which half.”

This could be your situation if you don’t know how to create campaigns which really get the attention of your potential customers and even more so, if you can’t identify where your marketing is getting the best results for your business. This is one way that choosing to work with marketing consulting firms can save you quite a bit of money over the long run.

You also won’t have to consider the expense of hiring an in-house marketing department for your business, since this is work which can be outsourced to another company at a cost which is generally lower than that of hiring and maintaining your own marketing department.

Outsourcing Saves Time

As the owner of a business, you know all too well that time is one of your most valuable resources.  We’ve all heard that time is money, but many successful business owners who would tell you that this is only half right – time is MORE valuable than money. By hiring marketing consulting firms to take care of your marketing, you can free up time which you can use on other, more profitable activities.

A Better Return On Investment

When you choose to hire marketing consulting firms, you can also get more results out of your marketing budget. Since you’ll be working with experts in their field who know their business like you know yours, you can rest assured that you’ll be able to see a significantly higher return on your marketing investment while you take care of what’s the most important to you – serving your customers and getting ready for the rush of new business which an experienced marketing consultancy can bring in for your company.

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On first glance, this business owner was happy with his 412 visits.  Unfortunately, that didn’t tell the real story.  This is a local business, selling products to other businesses in the Phoenix area.  They don’t ship to or do business overseas.  So the fact that 140 of the visits were from outside of Arizona (some were even from China!) makes those visits pretty useless to them.

We also found that 232 visits were either from the visitor typing in their web address or clicking on a link (maybe in an email or on a business card).  Now if the business owner had tagged all the links in their email newsletters and other sources, they’d be able to tell exactly which of those efforts were working for them.

What about traffic from the search engines?

It looks like 115 visits were from a visitor typing a search term into the search engine and then finding this business’ website in the results.  But let’s look at that a little closer.  Remember, we only care about traffic from Arizona and people who didn’t already know the business name (because they would find us anyway).  So the only ones we care about in this case are search terms without the company name, in Arizona.  Turns out there were only 15 of those searches.

So the real story was…

This was a real eye-opener for the business owner who initially thought his internet marketing strategy was performing pretty well for him since he saw 412 visits.  It gave a pretty good explanation for why the phone wasn’t ringing!

Stay tuned for my next post which will give details about the Best Practices for setting up your Google Analytics to give you better results.  And you may be interested in our August Special: a Google Analytics Check Up (or new installation) for only $49.  Call us for more information.

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Strategy is the name of the game when it comes to any marketing, but it becomes so much more important for the small business marketing consultant. Small business owners are working on a limited budget of both money and time and they need all their strategies to be efficient, which is what makes outsourcing different areas so attractive to them.

When it comes to outsourcing the marketing department, things may seem different than they did just a few short years ago.  Obviously, the internet has changed the way prospects look for and find information, but is it really all that different?  Let’s look at the different internet marketing methods and see how they compare to more traditional ways.

Brochures have been a mainstay of marketing for decades but the “new” way is to have an interactive website with all the information your prospect is looking for.  But without a strategy to get your website seen, it’s really no different than printing thousands of beautiful, glossy brochures and sticking them away in a drawer.

Internet advertising can be compared easily to buying ad space in the newspaper or a magazine.  The key difference is how effective it can be.  When an internet advertising (pay per click) campaign is handled well, it is the most cost effective use of advertising dollars because it is targeting only your prospects without wasting precious marketing dollars on the thousands of newspaper readers who will never be your prospect.

So I can hear you saying that word of mouth is the only marketing strategy you’ve ever used or needed.  What is Twitter or Facebook if not word of mouth?  And just as with the face to face interactions, some of it may be good and some of it may be bad.  Part of your internet marketing strategy should be, not only maximizing this new form of word of mouth, but also “listening” for any negative comments that need to be addressed immediately.

What’s the bottom line for small business marketing? Develop your marketing strategy; then stick with what works and change what doesn’t.  And just as with other areas of your business, if you find yourself without enough time to spend on marketing, it’s better to outsource it to a reliable marketing consultant sooner than later.

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(This article was originally written by me and published as Developing a Small Business Marketing Budget on Technorati.)

Many small business owners feel like they’re running their business on a shoestring budget, and of course, that wasn’t the intention when they set out to follow their passion in their own business. Just like many young families have to pull back the reigns on spending and follow a budget, the smart business owner must develop a plan and then stick to the plan in order to become profitable. The Small Business Administration offers some help with budgeting in all areas of business expenses but determining the ideal marketing budget doesn’t seem quite as straight forward as other expense areas such as rent or salaries.

You will find many different formulas for the ideal amount to spend on marketing including a percentage of sales, a flat dollar amount, or matching the competition — and of course the ideal amount will depend on your industry, the age of your business and how competitive your marketplace is.

Another approach is to determine the value of new clients and how much you’re willing to spend in order to acquire those clients. Continue reading →