You are a Marketing Company (Whether You Know it or Not)
Rethinking Your Business’s Primary Goal
What would you say your primary goal as a business owner is?
While your first thought may be to effectively manage things like product development, customer service, operations etc. (all very important!), I am going to propose to you that it should not be any of these things… First and foremost, your primary goal should be to effectively market what you have.
Let’s start by debunking a myth that costs companies millions of dollars every year… marketing is NOT just a department.
“Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.” ~David Packard (Co-founder of Hewlett-Packard)
When we think of marketing as simply another department, we forget that when a company cannot market itself effectively, it eventually ceases to exist.
So at the end of the day, your job as a business owner is to bring your product/service to market successfully. If you don’t market effectively, you go out of business and the culture, operations, services, etc. that you worked so hard to build, dissolve into nothing.
What’s more, if you can market effectively, you can sell anything!
If you have built a strong brand presence for your company and done marketing right, it becomes easy to pivot in other aspects of business down the road.
Want to own your upstream processes (manufacturing, supplying)? If you’re effectively taking the products to market already, why not?!
Want to launch a sister brand? With strong marketing, you can cross promote to all with success!
Want to open up shop in a new metro? A well-established brand and messaging will allow you to grow quickly.
Want durability in case a manufacturer or supplier cuts your top selling products? Strong marketing builds customer loyalty to your brand, not just your products.
On the flip side, a weak brand presence or lackluster marketing puts you at enormous risk and causes each of these forementioned situations to become stressful. Think about it, if you’re already struggling to impact your current market:
Why would expanding into a new metro or adding a sister brand be any more effective?
Why would adding new products be any easier to market?
Without the revenue and brand recognition that comes from strong marketing, any one of these situations/opportunities can easily spread your finances too thin and sink your company.
To become impenetrable, you must stop seeing yourself as a furniture store, a jewelry store, a software company etc. and you MUST start seeing your company as a Marketing Company that sells __________.
Knowing How to Market Well
“But I wasn’t trained in Marketing!!!”, you may object.
That’s okay! But you’ll want to find someone to come alongside you who:
Understands that marketing strategy needs to encompass all aspects of your company and its direction.
Accepts financial responsibility for the growth (or lack thereof) of your company.
This is what we as wizards do, which is frankly a terrible business model if we cannot successfully grow our client’s companies. That’s why we only take on about 40% of the businesses that reach out to us.
We’ve found some of the biggest indicators of a business’s potential are determined by the owner’s character. We look for these three things:
Integrity. Without it, any “success” is short lived and followed by a quick downward tragectory. No thanks.
Long-term mindset. Does your business have the capacity to scale operations to support growth? We love helping David take on Goliath... but if David has two broken arms, a peg leg, and an ego the size of California, we’ll wish him the best and keep our distance.
Courage. To stand out in the market, you have to be willing to stand out. That means some people will love your marketing, some will hate it. We know who your target audience is, and we are not concerned with the rest.
Interested in working together to turn your business into a marketing behemoth? Put time on my calendar and we’ll begin plotting your world domination!