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Quiz: is your business ready for a marketing campaign?

Contrary to popular belief, not everyone is at the right place to get the most out of a marketing campaign.

In our experience, most small businesses think that good marketing is essential to their business.

But is it always?

Gasp! We’re a marketing company, and we’re asking this? (You should know by now that we try to be a different type of marketing company, but enough about us). The reality is that not all businesses, especially very small or very new businesses, are ready to get the most out of a marketing campaign. And there’s nothing more frustrating for a business owner — or, frankly for a marketing consultant — than when a company spends money that is a stretch for them and doesn’t get the results they want.

To prevent this sort of thing, here’s a quick quiz to see if you’re really ready to spread your marketing campaign wings:

1. Do you have a product or service that people want?

  • Yes: go on to the next question
  • No, or you don’t know: pause here and do some interviews with potential customers. Get honest feedback, from people you trust to give you real feedback. Is your product/service good quality for the price? Do people need it? Don’t just listen to your friends and family (who love you and support you no matter what); get the hard truth from people who don’t care about you. This may be a painful process, but it’s a lot more painful to invest in a lot of marketing and find out that people don’t want what you’re selling.

Why this matters: this is pretty self-explanatory. If people don’t want what you’re offering, no amount of marketing lipstick will help the pig. The reason we bring it up at all is because people can often become so invested in an idea (or the dream of being an entrepreneur) that they don’t do a develop and research it properly before they spend money on it.

2. Are you priced right?

  • Yes: go on to the next question
  • No, or you don’t know: see above; do some focus groups and/or play with your pricing until you get to that sweet spot

Why this matters: pricepoint is a huge part of any brand, and a large part of how customers perceive you. Your brand needs to reflect your price point, and your price point needs to appeal to the people you are targeting. If you miss on these fronts, you’ll learn an expensive lesson by driving people to a product or service they won’t buy — or worse, won’t buy and will complain all over social media how pricey you are.

 3. Do you have a website that you know works to convert customers?

  • Yes: go on to the next question
  • No: build one and test it thoroughly (note, this is a really good time to involve experienced marketing help in order to achieve results)

Why this matters: if your website doesn’t work, you won’t sell anything, no matter how many people you convince to visit. This is especially true for extremely competitive industries; you’ll lose every time if people are comparing you to others in your field, and your site isn’t great. Of course, if you’re a brick and mortar company you may say this doesn’t matter as much — and, true, it doesn’t matter as much, but in this day and age, it still matters. Don’t kid yourself.

4. Do you have a track record of sales?

  • Yes: go on to the next question
  • No: proceed with caution to the next question

Why this matters: a sales track record shows that your funnel works. It shows that people want your product, think the price is reasonable, find your site or store compelling, and will ultimately purchase. In other words, it’s a proof-of-concept for your company. It means that starting a marketing campaign to drive more people to your business is highly likely to be effective (assuming the campaign is built right and targeted correctly). That said, if you’re a new company, the fact that you don’t have a track record of sales doesn’t mean that a marketing campaign won’t work; it just means that you don’t know, yet, and should test the waters with caution. Of course, if you have been in business for a while and have never really managed to sell all that much, you may want to take a good hard look at the rest of the questions in this quiz.

5. Is there something, like a lot of bad reviews or other reputational issues, that may stop people from buying your product/service?

  • No: go on to the next question
  • Yes: pause a bit and work into repairing your reputation, or fixing the issue that causes problems. Do you know you have trouble fulfilling orders on time? Fix that problem. Bad reviews? Do everything you can to get a lot of really great reviews to balance out the bad ones

Why this matters: Marketing delivers potential customers, but it can’t make them buy. If people are researching your company or your product and read a lot of bad reviews, or hear from their neighbors or Facebook friends about a poor experience, they’ll go elsewhere. You don’t want to spend money driving customers to you only to have them flee in fear.

6. Is now a good time to advertise to your audience?

  • Yes: it seems all systems are go! Go ahead and launch your marketing campaign!
  • No: hold off until the timing is better.

Why this matters: there is nothing that will kill a great marketing campaign faster than launching something when people aren’t buying it. Most businesses have a sales cycle of ups and downs throughout the year (think of painters, for instance; nobody is thinking of having the exterior of their house painted in November). Or there may be larger issues at play, from a recession to a global pandemic. Don’t spend money trying to attract customers when customers don’t want to buy.

This may all sound pretty obvious, but unfortunately, it still needs to be said. Too many small businesses make the mistake of thinking that marketing might be able to “fix” their business when things aren’t going the way they’d hope. Unfortunately, marketing isn’t a magic bullet.

In fact, there’s an old saying in the industry that nothing shows up a broken business like great marketing. The best marketing can do — even the very best marketing — is to attract lots of people who are likely to buy your product and service.  It doesn’t make up for bad service, poor reviews, a product or service nobody wants, slow ship times, or a myriad of other blemishes. Don’t expect it to.

To recap then, marketing is an absolutely essential part of a thriving business ecosystem. You’re only very rarely going to be able to grow and expand without it. But it isn’t a fairy godmother that will wave it’s wand and get you sales without any other effort. 

Our advice? Get your business house in order, THEN spring for the marketing campaign. That will ensure you get the most bang from your marketing buck.

Happy small business marketing,

Katie & Theron

At Urban Sherpa Marketing Co. we offer marketing advisory, strategic planning, and marketing services for small businesses and startups. Our goal is to make high-quality marketing — from search marketing and social media marketing to website strategy and direct mail marketing — possible for every business, no matter the size. Think of us as your outsourced marketing department, strategic marketing adviser, or even your phone-a-friend marketing lifeline.

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Content marketing: when are you really ready to publish?

AKA: How to get past the doubts and get your content marketing program firing.

It would be awesome if your computer had a little pop-up timer (like a Thanksgiving turkey) that popped up to let you know your latest blog or social media post was “ready”, wouldn’t it? Then you wouldn’t be constantly second-guessing what you’ve written, agonizing over every last comma and semicolon, wanting to make sure it’s absolutely PERFECT before publishing to the world wide web…

But the reality is that no such device exists, right?

The good news is that we really don’t need any fancy gimmicks to know when our marketing content is “ready” for prime time.  The fact is, it’s probably ready much earlier than we think. 

Frankly, we’re our own worst critics… and we’re really much more critical than we need to be. A few of the common pitfalls we face are:

  1. Knowing Too Much. As the owners of our own businesses, we are sometimes just too close to things to be good judges of what constitutes useful information for our audience (aka customers). We fall prey to the assumption that everyone knows as much about our business as we do, and therefore torture ourselves trying to come up with something never-before-written or talked about in our industry.  But the reality is that no one knows as much about our own business as we do, and so we can’t assume they have the same knowledge level; in fact, they undoubtedly don’t. So don’t be afraid to talk about the basics from time to time. It’s a good refresher even to people who have some familiarity with your industry.
  2. Telling Too Much. Because we know our own industry inside and out, we sometimes feel like we have to include everything we know… in every article.  The fact of the matter is that good short-form content (like blogs or social posts) generally stays pretty close to conveying a single idea or topic. More than that and we risk losing our audience. Tell it well, and then get out. Just for reference, blogs are usually in the 500-1000 word range. If you find you need more than that, you may be trying to convey too much information and might want to consider whether you’d be better suited with longer-form content, like a whitepaper or ebook.
  3. Criticizing Too Much. We are our own worst critics. Heck, it’s part of what makes us successful business people!  But it’s worth remembering that we’re probably not award-winning authors (unless you are, in fact, a writer by trade), and no one really expects us to write flawlessly. Nobody is looking at your subject with the same magnifying lens that you do, or picking apart every last thing write about (like you do). Conveying a good idea effectively is all we really need to do. So as long as there are no blatant typos or spelling mistakes, and your content makes sense and actually conveys useful information, then it’s probably ready for publication.  Pro tip – sometimes reading what you’ve written out loud will help. If something sounds strange when you say it, you may want to re-word it.
  4. Re-Writing Too Much. If you’re baking biscuits and you knead the dough too much, the final product isn’t flaky and delicious — it ends up tough and dry.  Your content is much the same! While it’s important to edit and make sure what you’ve written is accurate and reads well, don’t rewrite and redo your content endlessly, or you’ll suck all the life out of it.

One last pro tip: if in doubt, get a second opinion. Since we’re often our own worst enemy when it comes to content marketing, it also sometimes helps to have a friend or family member take a look at what we’ve written before sending it out into the world. We’ve both written many things that we thought were bad or not worth publishing, but other people gave us a different perspective!  Again, we often “know too much” about our business and aren’t always capable of seeing the forest for all the trees around us.

Finally, what’s the most important way to know when your content is ready to publish? When you finish writing it! The worst thing you can do is NOT publish because you’re waiting to make your blog, post, etc. perfect, or you’re wondering if your topic is OK, after all, or you are questioning if people will care. 

It’s much more important to continue to get marketing content out on a regular basis — in order to build awareness for your business — than it is to agonize over every last adjective.

If it’s accurate from your point of view, and not actually offensive to people, put it out there and see how your audience reacts.  If they hate it, you can always edit and republish or delete it altogether. 

But they won’t. Because as the owner of your business and expert on your subject, you’ll be providing them with valuable information… even when you don’t think you are!

Happy Small Business Marketing,

Katie & Theron

At Urban Sherpa Marketing Co. we offer marketing advisory, strategic planning, and services for small businesses and startups, including content marketing. Our goal is to make high-quality marketing possible for every business, no matter the size. Think of us as your outsourced marketing department, strategic marketing adviser, or even your phone-a-friend marketing lifeline.

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The “this is not really your job” weekly small business marketing checklist

Picture this: you’re busy, doing your job. Or, as the owner of a small business, let’s say, “jobs”. Between the juggling of customers, accounting, taxes, scheduling, stressing about the current economic/health situation, and managing your staff, suddenly someone brings it to your attention that your website is down.

Bum, bum….

And, worse, you check on your web traffic on Google Analytics, and it shows that your site has been down for weeks. Your heart sinks. Imagine how many potential (and past) customers have visited during that time, only to leave with a rather poor impression of your business.

Because you were too busy — with other, super important things — to check.

Hey, we get that. As a small business owner, making sure your marketing is up and running at all times is not your full-time job. And in a perfect world, you should be able to just set things up, get them running and forget about them. But unfortunately, this isn’t a perfect world.

To make it a little easier, though, we’ve put together our 10-minutes-once-a-week checklist to catch marketing problems before they turn nasty. Here goes:

  1. Make sure your website is up and running, and check some of the most important links to make sure they are working. If anything’s broken, fix it. 
  2. Go to Google Analytics*, and do a quick scan. Has your web traffic dropped or changed in any dramatic way? If you see something anomalous, dig down a little deeper to see if you can find out what’s up. If your social traffic is down, for instance, you may want to go to your social media ad platform(s) and make sure everything is running fine. 
  3. Check your social media accounts. Are there any comments, questions, or reactions that you’ve missed? The last thing you want is someone’s profanity-laced off-topic comment staying up on a popular post for weeks. 
  4. Check for new reviews. If you see a bad one, it’s best practice to respond to it as soon as you can. 
  5. Quickly scan your advertising platform(s). Is everything running as normal? Are there any alerts? They will tell you if something is up, like your card on file has expired and your ads aren’t running. 
  6. Bonus: If you have a content marketing program, check for comments. If you need to review them before they go live, do so. If you don’t review them, and there’s a bad one, deal with it.

There, that’s it. Of course, we recommend taking more time than this once a month or so to really dig into your data and test and tweak your ads (should you be inclined that way), but for the most part, doing this diligently every week will keep you confident your marketing basics are in order and healthy.

As always, happy small business marketing.

Stay safe and healthy, friends,

Katie & Theron

*Don’t have a Google Analytics account? We HIGHLY RECOMMEND that you set one up so you can monitor your web traffic and the effectiveness of your advertising.

At Urban Sherpa Marketing Co. we offer marketing advisory, strategic planning, and services for small businesses and startups, including content marketing. Our goal is to make high-quality marketing possible for every business, no matter the size. Think of us as your outsourced marketing department, strategic marketing adviser, or even your phone-a-friend marketing lifeline.

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Marketing in the time of Covid-19: our small business thoughts

We didn’t want to write this guidepost. First, there’s the obvious reason: the fact that we even need to write it means that a lot of people are suffering, and worse. Our hearts are breaking.

We also didn’t want to write it because of the sheer blizzard of communications from every last company that we ever gave our email to about how they are responding to the pandemic. One of our core tenets is that doing what everyone else is doing is a really good way to not stand out from the crowd. In other words, a marketing no-no. Bad idea.

But we’re doing it because many of our clients are struggling with decisions right now: should we communicate with our customers? What should we say? Should we promote something? Should we stop all marketing altogether?

So here are our thoughts. With, of course, the caveat that these thoughts are for the world situation as we know it on March 20, 2020. This all could change as the situation shifts. These are also just our thoughts, based on past experience. We highly encourage you to go with your gut, since nobody really has the roadmap for this.

  1. On no account do anything that seems like you’re profiting from a global pandemic (i.e. celebrating the fact that human misery is helping your company). Do not offer a Covid-19 sale, unless your target audience is made up of anarchist #$%ers. Even then, please don’t. And don’t jump all over-communicating why you’re better than your competition at weathering global suffering. 
  2. If your customers may have a legitimate question about how/whether your business is still functioning, a customer-facing email and social media posts are a good idea. If you’re unlikely to be much affected by the situation (say, us here at Urban Sherpa, since we work virtually the majority of the time), then you probably don’t need to clutter up people’s inboxes with more announcements at this time. 
  3. If there’s something related to your business that you can safely do to help your customers, employees, and/or your community, consider doing it, especially if it comes from a place of honestly wanting to help. And it’s absolutely fine to share that with the world. 
  4. Whether you continue to advertise or not will depend entirely on your business and your industry. If you sell a product online, for instance, now is actually an excellent time to bump up your ad spend. Lots of people are stuck at home, a little stressed, with nothing to do; they are gonna shop (again, do not offer a pandemic sale, just use your normal value propositions). If you’re closed because of restrictions on your industry, you probably don’t want to spend ad dollars, but now is a really great time to up your social media game and maintain contact with your customers. I’ve seen several yoga studios do a really great job of this. 
  5. That said, we don’t think you should make any huge marketing investments right now (yeah, we’re a marketing company saying that). Play it conservatively until you know where the crisis and the economy are heading. But also resist the urge to freeze up in fear. There is nothing as detrimental to getting customers in the door as cutting off all marketing efforts. Be smart. We’re probably in for a really tough time for a lot of small businesses, and it may be a longer time than we’d like. Think for the long term.

Last, do what feels right to your brand (your promise to your customers) and your business. You are not required to put out a statement about Covid-19 at all, you know. Unless your normal marketing tone could come across as insensitive, you can honestly just keep on with your normal marketing activities. Again, trust your gut.

As things continue to change and shift, we’re happy to answer any questions you may have, give you our two cents on what you should do, or just act as your sounding board, whether you’re a client or not. Just reach out and we can set up a time to chat.

As always, happy small business marketing.

Stay safe and healthy, friends,

Katie & Theron

At Urban Sherpa Marketing Co. we offer marketing advisory, strategic planning, and services for small businesses and startups, including content marketing. Our goal is to make high-quality marketing possible for every business, no matter the size. Think of us as your outsourced marketing department, strategic marketing adviser, or even your phone-a-friend marketing lifeline.

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The top marketing strategies for small business, examined.

You’ve decided to take the plunge and up-level the marketing of your business. Congratulations, that’s awesome! Deciding to take control of your destiny by efficiently driving new customers to your company is a huge, (if sometimes daunting), decision.

Of course, the first question most business owners ask is “OK, so what do I need to do?”  And this is a great question; there are a lot of different marketing vehicles (also known as marketing channels) out there, and they all serve a useful purpose. But some are better than others for small to medium businesses without huge marketing budgets.

It must be said, first, that the most important factor for choosing any marketing vehicle is how well it supports your marketing strategy, fits your budget, and targets your customers. But, with that in mind, let’s take a look at the pros and cons of some of the common media types you’re likely starting to consider:

The top marketing channels for small business

  • Paid Search Marketing (Google ads and Bing ads, aka PPC or Pay-Per-Click). This is best for: Driving highly targeted, ready-to-buy, traffic to your website. 
    • Pros: Very cost-effective, and can be run on any budget. Because you can target the specific terms customers are searching for, the customers who end up on your site or in your store are highly likely to be interested in what you’re offering. 
    • Cons: Can be complicated and confusing to set up and run correctly. You may need to hire an (ahem) marketing company to help with that part. Yes, we can help with your search marketing!   
  • Paid Social Media Marketing (ads on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) Best for: Building brand awareness and driving targeted traffic to your website
    • Pros: Very cost-effective, and can be run on any budget. Because you can target customers based on specific attributes (things they’re interested in, job titles, industries, etc.) you can be sure you’re reaching an audience that’s likely to be interested in your business. You can also create retargeting ads (ads shown to people who have just visited your website or put something in their cart), and these can be very good for driving revenue.
    • Cons: It’s pretty easy to set up and get running, but many small business owners have trouble accurately targeting their ads (there’s just too much choice!). You can also get a lot of “just-looking” type traffic — people who click on your ad because you have a pretty picture, but don’t really want to buy. Good targeting helps with this, but not all businesses will see a good return on their ad spend from social ads – at least not right away.   
  • Social media community engagement (posting on Facebook, Instagram, etc). Best for: creating buzz and brand recognition for your company 
    • Pros: This is one of the best ways to engage potential and current customers in a personal way. It’s also excellent for giving people an idea of the “who” and “what” your company is all about.
    • Cons: To do well, you need to post a lot of relevant content, and this can take a lot of time. It’s also not as good for driving direct inbound leads. Think instead that social media community management is a long-term, brand-focused play, not a conversion channel.
  • Your Website. Best for: Let’s face it, if you don’t have a website these days, people tend to wonder if you’re a “real business”. It’s really not even an option anymore. 
    • Pros: Can showcase all sorts of great information about your business, products, and services — in exactly the way you want to showcase them. It gives customers a place to contact you directly and allows you to post highly relevant content (blogs, photos, videos, etc.).
    • Cons: It takes time to set up a good site, and it’s important to make sure it’s optimized so customers use it in the right way, and so that Google ranks you highly in its organic search results pages (SERPs). It also won’t drive traffic to itself, so you’ll have to use some of the other methods in this post to help get people to visit you online.   
  • Email Marketing. Best for: Reaching out to customers who have already signed up, made past purchases, or otherwise expressed interest in your company, in order to drive repeat business and/or referrals.
    • Pros: These are people who are interested in you, so they’re likely to listen to what you have to say! Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective (and flat-out effective, if you have an engaged, large email list) way to drive revenue.
    • Cons: It can be difficult to craft a compelling message that makes customers open your email and respond. There’s a definite art to it. People receive a lot of emails every day, and unless you’re highly relevant and engaging they’re likely to ignore you… and, worse, unsubscribe from your list. Also, like all marketing, email marketing is a game of numbers; you need a big list to get good results, and you need to build your list organically over time (sometimes a lot of time). Purchasing a picked-over email list from a list source company isn’t worth the effort or the cost.
  • Google Display Advertising (and other display networks). Display network ads are picture (and short video) ads that are placed on a variety of websites across a VAST network of partner sites. Think web ads, but on more than one site. Best for: driving traffic to your site inexpensively. 
    • Pros: Display ads can be targeted to geographic, demographic, and, to a certain extent, interest targeting. This means that you’re much more likely to get people who are actually interested in your product than you would from, say, a newspaper ad. You can also run display retargeting ads (see above).
    • Cons: Google Display Ads are a little harder to set up than paid social advertising, as they are on the Google Ads platform. You also are more likely to drive a lot of traffic to your site, but it’s not all very engaged traffic. Be prepared for a smaller conversion rate on your site than from other vehicles. 
  • Print advertising. You know, the good, old-fashioned, ad-in-the-paper or magazine. Best for: creating brand presence in a particular community 
    • Pros: In the case of smaller local papers (the only ones we recommend at all), a newspaper ad can show community support, especially if you run an ad consistently over a long period of time. 
    • Cons: Newspaper/magazine advertising is some of the least targeted marketing you can do these days. Plus, fewer and fewer people even read print papers anymore.   
  • Billboards/outdoor marketing. Best for: Capturing the attention of people in a specific geographic area. 
    • Pros: Most outdoor advertising is situated in high-traffic areas, so a lot of people will see your message every day, and chances are, they’ll see it many times over the time your billboards are up.  
    • Cons: Good outdoor locations tend to be on the pricy side, so outdoor marketing can quickly get expensive and is therefore sometimes out of reach for the small business owner. It’s definitely not the first choice for someone on a tight budget. It also takes some skill to put together the creative message so it’s quickly absorbed by people flying by in their cars on the way to work.   
  • Direct Mail/Postcards. Best for: Targeting customers in a specific area with a specific offer. 
    • Pros: Reaching people in the area around your store (if you’re a shop owner) or who are potentially looking to sell their homes (realtors) or upgrade them (contractors) can be highly effective. And lately, because companies have been sending less and less mail, it’s becoming more effective again. 
    • Cons: Response rates for good direct mail pieces are typically in the 1-2% range, so if you mail out 1000 pieces, you can reasonably expect 10 to 20 of them to respond. And direct mail pieces typically have no long-term effect, so once they’ve been received, you’ll get all the responses you’re going to get within a week to 10 days… unless you figure out some clever way to get people to keep them around. It also takes some skill to target the “right” customers or households to make sure you get those most likely to respond. All of these factors mean that costs can add up quickly.   
  • Television. Best for: Branding messages, showcasing products or services. 
    • Pros: TV ads are a great way to showcase your business and get your brand message out to the world. If you’re selling products, you can really highlight one or two and potentially even get a sale message out. 
    • Cons: It’s really expensive to do correctly. Between media costs and production (the cost of putting together the actual commercial), TV can get costly quickly and so is usually out of reach for the average small or start-up business. It’s definitely a poor choice unless your budget is large. There are packages that some stations offer that sound enticing on the surface, but we always advise that you take a good hard look at these before diving in. They often aren’t nearly as good as they look, as they only show the ad on certain channels, and at times that won’t do you any good.   
  • Radio. Best for: Promotions, driving short-term sales and events 
    • Pros: A good way to get your message out to a wide audience quickly and drive a sense of urgency around short-term sales or promotions, at a fraction of what television will cost. 
    • Cons: Still fairly expensive for the small business owner. Like TV, stations will often have special packages available that sound attractive, but again, look carefully before deciding to sign up. What are you really getting? It’s also harder than you may think to get your messaging across in a radio ad.  
  • IP Targeting/Geo-Targeting. Best for: Targeting all the people in a single area, such as every member of a household, or every person in a business 
    • Pros: A good way to make sure your message reaches the decision-maker in a family, group, or business (or that a child keeps bugging their parents to buy that cereal).
    • Cons: IP Targeting isn’t something you can just do yourself. You’ll need the help of an agency or a platform that specializes in this sort of targeting, and that can get pretty pricey. It also is just another type of display ad (like Google display ads), and, like the others, tends to have a very low conversion rate. 
  • SEO. Best for: long-term brand awareness and traffic generation
    • Pros: placing well in the organic listings (the goal of SEO) is a really good way to get people to visit your website, trust what you say, and ultimately buy from you. Traffic from organic search results generally performs much better than that from search ads, for instance.
    • Cons: SEO isn’t something you turn on and bang! people start showing up. It’s a long-term, long-term play that may never play out for you. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, but don’t rely on SEO as your only channel to drive customers.

These are just a few of the big media strategies we’re asked about on a regular basis. There are, of course, many others out there, and as marketing continues to change rapidly, many others will crop up in the future. If you have a question about any specific vehicle that we haven’t mentioned, drop it in the comments below and we’ll give you our thoughts.

As always, if we can be of any assistance in sorting out the differences and helping you to pick what’s right for your business, let us know! We’d love to hear from you.

Happy small business marketing,

Theron & Katie

At Urban Sherpa Marketing Co. we offer fractional marketing director services, strategic planning, and marketing execution for small businesses and startups. Our goal is to make high-quality marketing possible for every business, no matter the size. Think of us as your outsourced marketing department, strategic marketing adviser, or even your phone-a-friend marketing lifeline.

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