This comparison is analogous to marketing. Mass marketing activities, such as promotions, direct mail, or print advertisements, are intended to increase awareness of your business by broadcasting information to the general public. These tactics will disperse information about your business just as a light bulb disperses light throughout a room. Mass marketing creates attention for your business, but it isn’t enough to drive ongoing sales since there is no certainty that the recipients of your mass marketing have a need for what you sell.

Targeted marketing tactics, such as strategic partnerships, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), or Google AdWords, focus on a specific type of customer that is most likely to buy from you. The necessary first step in this approach is to define the target. In the case of laser surgery, the target might be a tumor. In the case of marketing, the target might be a group of customers in a lifestyle category or psychographic profile – for example, parents of children with allergies – who share a set of needs you can fill with your product or service. These tactics allow you to focus your marketing resources of time and money more tightly on the potential customers most likely to buy, thereby leading to a bigger impact to your top line.

So, which type of marketing should you use to grow your business? Which type of marketing is more effective? The answers are: both and it depends. These two approaches work in tandem. Referring back to the analogy, a surgeon needs a light bulb to see while using a laser to cut. Each tool has a role to play. The goal is to remove a tumor, which is the job of the laser, but the light bulb is necessary to create an environment in which the laser can be used.

When you think about the variety of actions you are taking to grow your sales, be sure that you employ some targeted marketing tactics as well as mass marketing tactics. Keep in mind that mass marketing shines a light on your business, increasing awareness and familiarity of it, while targeted marketing connects you potential customers who are likely to buy and more leads to an increase in sales. Once you have decided to use both approaches, you can experiment to find the right balance between the two for your business.

To get help determining which best practices and market strategies will grow your sales, contact us. You can join one of our Business Roundtables or engage us to develop a strategy specific to your business needs. In the meantime, try to think like a laser and like a light bulb!

Gas fuels your car and enables it to function. Without gas, you aren’t going anywhere. If your car doesn’t use gas efficiently, you will need to fill up more often. Cash is to business what gas is to your car: it makes it run.

Once you decide on a destination, you must figure out how to get there. When you drive, you can use a map or a GPS to determine your route but, either way, you will need a plan if you want to end up in the right place in a reasonable time frame. In your business, the route you take to achieve your goals is your business plan.

Your team is like an engine. A well-maintained engine runs at peak performance while a neglected engine is sluggish and unresponsive. Similarly, when you invest time and effort in developing your employees into a team, they will be motivated and perform well; when you neglect them – by a lack of communication, for example – your team will become disinterested and unproductive.

Your dashboard has instruments that monitor your progress and the condition of your car. Red indicator lights on your dashboard communicate that something in your car needs attention. These instruments are like the performance data you need to run your company, such as your financial reports and more specific metrics. Without this information, you could still operate your business but, just like driving a car with no dashboard, you won’t operate it effectively and may miss the opportunity to prevent a problem.

Does that mean you need cash, a business plan, a high-performing team and performance data to run a profitable business? YES! A few thought experiments might help make this point more clear…

What would happen if you embarked on a trip without your route planned in advance (business plan)? You might get to your destination, but you also might get lost, drive around aimlessly, and run out of gas (cash) before you make it there. Without a plan, you would be leaving much up to chance.

Imagine that you didn’t bother maintaining your engine (team). Perhaps it would still run, but not efficiently. In that case, your engine (team) would use too much gas (cash) to go the same distance as a well-maintained engine (team). In a very subtle way, a low-performing engine (team) would cost you money because you would have to refill with gas (cash) more often. And you would probably be distracted from your trip while you constantly hunted for more gas (cash).

Could you drive a car without a dashboard (performance data)? Yes, but you would never know how far you’ve gone, if you had enough gas (cash) to get there, and if your engine (team) was working efficiently.

What if you had a dashboard (performance data) but not a route (business plan)? In that case, the information on your dashboard (performance data) would be out of context. You wouldn’t know if you have enough gas (cash) because you wouldn’t know how much you actually needed.

Do yourself a favor: before you embark on a long journey to a new place, plan your route, tune up your engine, fill up your tank and keep your dashboard visible. This is the only way that you will be able to get where you are going and truly enjoy the ride.

I also launched an e-pamphlet called Seven Things To Do When You Feel Stuck. This list contains simple and practical tips that are surprisingly powerful for helping one overcome blocks.

If you would like to stay updated about upcoming events as well as receive a copy of Seven Things To Do When You Feel Stuck, please join our email list. We would love to welcome you into the community!

If your approach to winning customers is to offer the lowest prices, you might want to rethink it. A competitive advantage based on price alone is almost impossible to sustain. Very few companies successfully pull it off. Walmart is an anomaly.

Competing on price is widely regarded as challenging for small and mid-sized businesses. From a sales perspective, being the “low-cost provider” of a product or service is easy for a competitor to replicate, which puts more pressure on you to drop prices further. Every time you drop your prices, your total sales volume (in terms of dollars) decreases. If your cost structure isn’t low enough to support the low prices you offer, your margins get squeezed and less money ends up in your pocket. You may have heard the saying, “We’re losing money on every one, but we’ll make it up in volume.” Not a good place to be, and definitely not a practice that will bring you business success in the long run.

However, there is another less obvious reason why offering the lowest prices can be problematic: If you are competing on price, you are leaving money on the table. You are probably asking for less money than your customer is willing to pay.

The value a customer perceives in a purchase is not dependent on price alone, but is primarily a function of how well the purchase met a set of needs. Often, those needs are emotional and therefore not obvious without some deeper consideration. The emotional needs can be the most interesting, and the most actionable.

Consider hiring a plumber. It may seem like a service that affords little opportunity for differentiation. Yet, I can personally vouch for the fact that it’s not just what a plumber does, but how he or she does it, which matters. One day when my son was only two months old, I was home alone with him. I heard a gurgling noise and, upon investigation, I was appalled to find that raw sewage was backing up through the shower drain in our first floor bathroom. My obvious need was to clear whatever was blocking the sewage line, but I had emotional needs as well:

• I was home alone and my husband was two hours away, so I needed an extra set of hands to enable me to care for my two month-old baby while also dealing with the sewage problem.
• I was a new mother, so I needed to feel like I was creating a safe and clean environment for my newborn son.
• I was sleep-deprived from being up all night with an infant, so I just needed someone to help me feel less overwhelmed.

Two hours later, I didn’t even think twice when I wrote a $350 check to the plumber, even though it was a completely unanticipated expense. I was relieved that the plumber responded immediately and eliminated the health hazard. I was appreciative that he was reassuring and calm. I was grateful that he took charge of the problem, freeing me to care for my son. I was glad that he was conscientious about keeping our house clean while he worked. Of course, I needed the service that he provided, but I also found a lot of value in how that service was delivered.

It’s the same for your customers. Perhaps they need to save money or they need something on short notice. Maybe they want something highly customized and are willing to pay for it. Or they need someone to solve a problem without requiring them to think twice about it. This applies when selling to businesses as well. On one hand, the person in the business to whom you are selling has emotional needs, such as a desire for a promotion. On the other hand, the business itself has needs, for example, needing an investment into a new market segment to bear fruit. Imagine how it would benefit your business to understand these needs and find a way to meet them.

If you haven’t done so, take the time to consider the layers of needs your customers have around the product or service you provide – and the way in which you provide it. The energy you spend thinking about your customers’ needs will enable you to make other decisions, such as how to set prices, a lot more easily.

Do that and you will be well on your way to growing your revenue without leaving money on the table.

UPDATE: The day after I posted this article, I met John Majeski, who owns SERVPRO of Eatontown/Long Branch. His company specializes in cleaning up after water or fire damage, and the business’ tagline is: “Like it never happened.” What a great example of positioning business based on the how you meet a customer’s emotional need.

Social media is a type of marketing channel, as are websites, print ads, and direct mail campaigns. The purpose of any marketing channel is to communicate with your target customers. Therefore, the extent of your participation in social media is completely dependent upon whether you can reach your target customers using that particular marketing channel. In simple terms, are your customers using social media platforms? If the answer is “yes,” then you should have an active presence there.

Even if your potential customers are not spending their time participating in social media networks, a basic social media presence is a must-have, just like a basic web presence is necessary for credibility. You can limit your time investment in social media – perhaps by posting only once every two weeks – but it is still worth having a presence and not letting it sit dormant. Think of it this way: at some point your target customer probably will decide to become involved, and it would be better if you were involved first.

One additional consideration is that social media platforms provide unprecedented two-way communication with your existing and target customers assuming that they are active on these networks. When you think about how you can use social media, don’t just think about what you can TELL your target customers, but also think about what you can ASK. It’s not the most scientific way to collect market research, but I can guarantee it will be pretty interesting and in many cases, eye-opening.

Let us know if you need help developing a marketing strategy or managing your social media presence. And if you are looking for us on social media platforms, we can be found in the networks below and would love to connect with you…