During one of our recent management meetings, our Director of Operations was describing to our team a recent thread she was following on a Facebook forum. The thread centered around a small business owner that was asking everyone and anyone for marketing ideas. One responder posted many ideas and was immediately attacked by a flood of requests to be contacted privately by other small business owners.
What stuck out to our Director of Operations noticed was that these ideas, while good, were not novel or overly creative. She mentioned that Monkey Bizness should think about starting up a consulting agency in addition to franchising since many of these ideas and much more, we are executing right now. While we aren’t seriously contemplating starting a new marketing consulting practice, it did inspire some of this blog post!
This experience is not uncommon and illustrates what has been a consistent issue for small businesses. In a time where marketing tools are more prevalent and powerful than ever before, small businesses continue to struggle with their marketing. This is not just a personal observation, but something that is shown to be true based on countless surveys and studies. The InfusionSoft 2018 “Small Business Marketing Report”, found that the owners who do their marketing themselves are the least satisfied with their results. The most satisfied? The owners who outsource their marketing. Almost all owners who do their own marketing believe they are actually losing money on their marketing activities.
While I believe there are many reasons, inspiring small business owners should think about franchising, one of the biggest is because many of them don’t particularly like doing marketing or have a lot of experience with it. Along with customer service, there is not a bigger determinant of business success than marketing.
While reading a book, a blog post, or taking a marketing class can be a good start, there are two keys steps that every small business owner must do to successfully market their business. One of these keys, your franchisor can help you with, the other, your own your own.
Key #1 – Effort
Without effort, any plan you put together will fail. We all know what effort truly does and doesn’t look like (if you have kids, this is especially true). Many small business owners trick themselves into thinking they are putting forth the effort needed to market successfully. However, when you look down your priority list for the week, how many of those tasks will truly drive customers into your business and are marketing focused? 9 times out of 10, daily operations of your business get in the way In order for the second key to matter, you must start with effort.
Key #2 – Have a Plan for Your Business
Any marketing consultant can tell you to market on Facebook. However, what should you say and who should you say it to? These, along with many other questions are much more important than merely determining that you should market on Facebook. The fact most small business marketing books don’t tell you is there is no cookie cutter, one size fits all approach to marketing. Each business must determine the best methods to market their business. There is no silver bullet to figure this out. There will be some trial and error and along with that comes failure at certain points. However, the small business that perseveres through this failure is the one most likely to succeed over the long haul.
I am proud of the Monkey Bizness marketing team because they took these two keys and began to unlock the door to successfully marketing our brand and business. We have had failures and successes along the way, but the marketing methods we are employing have seen real results in the stores who use both keys above in executing them.
If you have any interest in owning your own Monkey Bizness, don’t hesitate to contact us to learn more about the opportunities we have available.
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