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Small Business Made Simple Podcast


May 1, 2019

 

Why hello and welcome.  Welcome to Episode 18 of the Small Business Made Simple Podcast.

If you follow me on social media at all you might have noticed a post I put up a few weeks ago, in my group Like Minded Business Owners – and several other groups asking what people thought the difference between Marketing and Advertising was.

I can tell you  there are some VERY passionate people out there who contributed to the answer of this question.

Almost everybody got what advertising is – a process of marketing.  But there was many varied answers to what marketing is – so that’s the discussion on the podcast today.  What is Marketing?

But first, of course, our discovery of the week.

THIS WEEK’S DISCOVERY!

Again, if you follow me on Instagram @smallbusinessmadesimple you might have noticed that in my captions I’m playing with different fonts.

Not only is it fun to use different fonts and pretty cool, but I see different fonts as a way to differentiate my posts and stop the thumb scroll but “disrupting” the eye scroll – after all marketing is all about test and measure and this is one of my test and measures.

Not it’s not an app – it’s a webpage.  It www.lingojam.com – and you type in your caption (or the first part of it mostly), choose which font you’d like and then to copy and paste it into Instagram or into your Notes on your phone like I do.  Notes is where I create my captions and then cut and paste them into Instagram – that way I know the formatting will work.

Lingojam will of course work on any platform or in an email or any marketing but I’ve started using it for Instagram to look a little different!

It’s one of those little secrets that I would really like to hold onto as if everyone does it, it will no longer be different, so if we could keep it between you and me that’d be great!!

As always, just a little disclaimer, my discoveries are just that and I am in no way affiliated with any of them but promise to tell you if I ever am.  I just love them and from the response of my listeners, you guys, you are loving them too!

Hey and if you have a little discovery, or something you use in your business that you’d like to share, please do so.  Email me at jenn@jenndonovan.com.au or tag me @smallbusinessmadesimple.  I really love to know what tools you use to help make your life simpler!

WHAT IS MARKETING?

So, what is marketing?

My answer is simple and was drummed into me by my mentor many years ago for many years!

Quite frankly, marketing is EVERYTHING and it’s the business you are in.

No matter what your business is, retail, service, not-for-profit, whatever, you are actually in the business of marketing.

If you change your mindset from, I am a retailer – to I am a marketer you will change the quality of your results fairly quickly.

Why is it everything?  Because everything you do or say is saying something about you whether you meant it or not.  EVERYTHING!

For the sceptics – I really do mean everything.  Marketing is much more complex then running a big, expensive ad campaign and waiting for the sales to come in.

Marketing is across all aspects of your business and across all customer contact points including your website, your building frontage, how you answer your phone, your marketing campaigns, your sales process, how you and your team present yourselves (in person, on the phone and after hours), how you present your shop, how you present your products and how you deal with your customers – the good, the bad and the ugly – the list is endless because we are talking EVERYTHING.

I owned an amazing kitchenware business with my best friend for many years.  We built it from scratch.  We poured our heart and soul into that business which rewarded us in an endless amount of ways.  We built a successful brand – we worked extremely hard – but our brand became us, and we became our brand.

But owning a large retail shop in a regional area also meant you were well known, well respected and well-judged from the outside (we all know the feeling as business owners don’t, we!).

We never took that marketing hat off – well occasionally we did – outside our regional centre, well outside!  In the supermarket, I wore my brand because my customers were their customers.  Out for dinner, with my family, I wore my brand because my customers ate there too.  At school board meetings, I wore my brand because they were my customers also.

I’m not complaining – far from it – I’m just making a point.  Marketing is everything.  One of my favourite sayings is “your bank balance is not a reflection of you but a reflection on how well you market what you do”.

As Ralph Emerson put it “what you are speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you’re saying”.

So, I walk into your business or you hand me a business card with a mistake on it or a badly photocopied brochure and you say “I’m an expert at” … I’m thinking no you’re not – because what you are is speaking so loudly, I cannot hear what you’re saying.

It’s not so much about what you’re saying but what I’m hearing. 

It’s a noisy and competitive marketplace out there – I know I don’t need to tell you that – so what are people seeing/hearing from you.

You can see where marketing and branding start to cross over here.  Branding is definitely a part of your marketing.

So now you know or you have had it reinforced for today (never to forget again!) – have a look inside your business, perhaps from a customer’s point of view, look at your team, how you answer the phone, your uniform (or lack of it), your actual marketing campaigns etc and answer honestly this question “if marketing is everything – what message am I sending to my customers and is it the message I want them to hear?”.  Is the message consistent?  Is the message intentional?  Does it have the ability to grab or create attention, to nurture until your customer is ready to buy and then retain them as a loyal customer?

Maybe it’s time to look at

  • The quality of your marketing materials
  • The quality of your marketing methods
  • The quality of your marketing messages
  • The way you present yourself
  • The way you appear in front of people
  • The way you answer the phone
  • The message in your message bank or answering machine

Everything is having an impact on your business and people’s perception of your business.

So, the big question to leave you with is if marketing is everything how does your business stack up?

This Ep was short and sweet and just a wee bit poassionate! 

You can probably tell that I’m a little passionate about marketing – I just think its business owners can fall down – thinking marketing is just x or y when it is, in reality the whole freaking alphabet.

Change your mindset about marketing, treat it as everything, and your results will change and result the change in mindset, I guarantee you.

Let’s continue this conversation in my Facebook Group – Like Minded Business Owners.  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I’ll be back next Thursday with some more marketing know-how and another discovery of course.

If you’re liking the podcast – please head over to where you listen and leave a rating and even a review – those things are GOLD for podcasters like me!  I’ll be eternally grateful, and it helps others find this podcast and enjoy the free training, tips and tricks too.  It could be the best gift you give them!

Feel free to leave me a DM on Instagram with any comments or ideas (including fab discoveries)!  The DMs seriously make my day!

Catch you next week,

…….. and remember small business peeps, as my opening song says, there’s no point in dreaming small!