You are a small business owner. Cash flow is an ongoing battle. Just when you think you are getting ahead you get hit with a deluge of bills and suddenly your little nest egg in the bank is gone.

Time, or a lack of it, is a constant challenge. You always seem to have a million and one things that need to be done and all at the same time. Sometimes you find yourself wondering if it’s worth it.

And of course it is. In the end, you decide that despite the downsides, you actually enjoy what you do and couldn’t imagine working for anyone else. Besides, you still want to grow your business and take some time off with your family for an overseas holiday. So the question is ‘how are you going to do that?’

After searching the web with Google and speaking to your accountant and some people ‘in the know’, you arrive at the answer - you need to grow more sales and that means you need more customers.  Sounds straight forward so how do you get more customers? The answer is marketing.

In my experience, small to medium business owners are passionate hard workers expert in what they do. But none of us are experts in all things and that’s why it makes good sense to engage with the people who are the experts. For example, when I need legal advice, I talk to a lawyer, if I’m sick I see a doctor and if I need accounting work done, I use an accountant.  Using experts frees you up to focus on the things that you are expert in. For businesses looking to develop their marketing, I really encourage you to get advice from professional marketers.

At The Marketing Tree, we’re always happy to catch up for a coffee, listen to what you want to do and offer advice on how you can achieve your goals. The first meeting won’t cost you anything, (we’ll even buy the coffee!), and it’s a good way to get your questions answered before you decide on your next steps. It’s a great way to make your marketing easy.

Marketing is important for the success of businesses. It connects businesses with customers and generates demand for the products and services the business sells.  

Marketing employs a range of activities known as tactics to achieve this. Tactics are aimed at achieving specific outcomes such as creating awareness of the products and services the business offers, communicating the value of the products and services to potential customers or growing the reputation of the business. The range of tactics businesses can employ are almost infinite and are only limited by their imagination, time and budget. 

Undertaking multiple marketing initiatives across multiple communication platforms at the same time while staying within a finite marketing budget can be complicated. To co-ordinate and keep track of all the activity, it pays to have a plan.

Planning is perhaps one of the least appreciated parts of marketing and in my view this is a mistake. Planning is and should be seen as an essential part of the marketing process. Marketing without planning is a bit like ‘feeling in the dark’. You really are just guessing and hoping.

The key marketing planning document for a business is the ‘marketing plan’. The marketing plan sets out what you are aiming to achieve i.e. your marketing goals and how you will go about achieving them.

Marketing plans should include additional information to provide context to your goals and the marketing activity you plan to undertake.  For example, the environment in which your business operates will have a significant influence on not only what you do but how you will do it. Include things like the prevailing economic, social and environmental conditions and any trends. Identify the markets you will be targeting, who your likely customers are and the resources such as budget you will need to deliver on the plan. In short, it’s your map to get you from where you are to where you want to be.

Marketing plans are important documents for your business. If you’re not sure how to develop them, we can help you. They’re well worth the investment of your time and effort to create them. So where’s the plan Stan?

You work hard in your business. While the hours may be longer than ideal, it’s not a hardship as you are doing something that you enjoy and you’ve been doing it for a long time so you’ve become a bit of an expert. There’s no doubt that you are good at it. Your customers recognise this too. You get a real sense of satisfaction when your customers leave you happy and they tell you that you’re doing a good job. All in all, you’re proud of what you do and what you’ve achieved.

So why do you have a worried frown?

Is it because after all this time you don’t seem to be making any progress? Is your business still only surviving instead of thriving?

For many small business owners just surviving, while an accomplishment in its own right, isn’t rewarding enough. They want more. Maybe they want to grow, recover market share, respond to new competition or try and get a better understanding of new technologies impacting their sector. Whatever it may be, they recognise they need to change but aren’t sure how to take the next step.

When change is required in business, often the answer is going to involve Marketing. The trick is figuring out exactly what marketing is needed, who is going to do it and how much is it going to cost.

But before you can answer these questions you need to ask yourself one really important question ‘What is it that you want to achieve?’

This is perhaps the key question. Get this question right and the answer will lead you to developing a targeted solution to the specific problem you want addressed. Get it wrong and you can end up with a solution designed to address a problem you don’t have.

So if marketing is the answer, make sure you take the time to know in detail what it is you want to achieve before wasting valuable time, energy and business resources into developing a solution you don’t need.

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.