When you go on a journey, it pays to know three things – where your journey starts, where your journey ends and how you are going to get there.

We instinctively know them for journeys we make every day. Just jump in the car, start the engine and off we go on our merry way. Simple!

The journey to growth for many small to medium businesses is often not planned as well as it should be and so the outcomes seldom match the aspirations. 

Part of the reason is that it is not an easy task. It takes time and effort to decide on where you are going and to develop the right strategy and plan to get there. (I will cover these in a future blog). For now, I would like to focus on the starting point for the journey.

Establishing the starting point is an essential part of the process. Imagine astronauts planning to land on the moon with only a vague understanding of earth gravity, orbit, rotation and the distance to the moon. It would either be a very short trip or a very long one with the chances of a successful mission considerably reduced! From a marketing perspective, I like to start with a marketing audit. The audit does a number of things. Firstly, it is independent and not biased by internal perspectives. Secondly, it verifies what marketing activity is actually taking place as opposed to what is supposed to be happening. Thirdly, it assesses how well the marketing activity is performing against marketing goals. Perhaps most importantly, it makes recommendations on how marketing can be improved to help your business get to where it wants to go. 

So before your business sets off for new horizons, take the time to have a marketing audit and you will markedly improve your chances of getting to your destination.

On the seventh day, when God sat down to rest, he grabbed his tablet and googled 'marketing'. Ok, maybe God didn’t but I’m pretty sure if he was a small business owner he would have. 

Most small business owners know that marketing is important to their business. Yet few have a good understanding of what it is or how it works. This isn’t really surprising. A single search on Google will generate over one billion results in less than a second offering a bewildering range of perspectives on what marketing is and how to do it. It's no wonder that marketing remains a mystery to many small businesses. 

The definition I like to use with my clients comes from Dr Richard W. Buchanan in his book ‘When Customers think we don’t care’. He proposed that marketing could be defined as any activity aimed at minimising barriers to customers purchasing your product/service. 

What I like about this definition is that it is easy for my clients to remember. It also implies that marketing is more than just advertising and everybody in the organisation has a part to play.

For example, if a potential customer walks into your business and it’s dirty, what impression do you think that makes? Or if a customer receives bad service at the front desk or the product is poorly made or the business owner didn’t return a call to a customer. In each case, these are barriers to customers purchasing your product or service. 

Marketing is about knowing your customers and minimising barriers to them purchasing your product or service. It’s not easy but done well it will set your business on the path to growth.

The Marketing Tree limited started Wednesday 1st April 2015. Perhaps not the most auspicious date to start a business but an important date for me as it marked the realisation of an answer to a question that I had had for a long time. The question was ''how could I make the place where I live better for my children and all the other children in the community?"  

The seed (pardon the pun) for the question came from a conversation I remember having with my father when I was in my late twenties helping out on the family dairy farm.  We were over the back of the farm and I distinctly remember dad saying "We are just caretakers. The land will be here long after we're gone." It was something that resonated with me and I would often think about it.

After working internationally for small to medium businesses and multi nationals, I returned home and spent eleven years in the tertiary education sector. I gained a real appreciation for the positive changes education can bring to peoples lives and it reinforced the importance of having thriving businesses both for and not for profit in the community. Slowly the idea came together of how I could use my marketing skills and knowledge to contribute to the community by helping businesses.

For me, The Marketing Tree contributes to the community by nurturing businesses to grow or helping them to start afresh. Growing businesses provide more employment opportunities and are better resourced to contribute to the community. For example, many local businesses provide direct sponsorship of community events, schools and charities. Indirectly, they pay taxes which benefit us all. 

Even though the part we play may be small, if it contributes to better communities or provides more opportunities for our children, that's got to be a good thing. It is something that a responsible caretaker would do.