An increasing part of my business is providing coaching in marketing to small businesses locally.  It's a good option for people who want to build their own marketing skills and some momentum in their business through expert guidance and motivation, but without paying out for someone else to actually do it for them.  Individual clients have individual objectives for their business, and therefore their final actions will vary considerably, but there are a few common threads.

Many businesses are short on time and are looking for the great marketing idea that will bring in loads of business with the least effort.  Unfortunately good marketing is rarely achieved without hard work.  The bottom line is that inspiration or creativity in marketing is of no use without the hard work and application to put it into practice - hence the perspiration!   In approaching the marketing for your business there are 3 critical things that you must get in place to have any chance of success - barring pure luck of course!

1.  Know your customer

I've talked about this before. Without customers you have no market, and all customers are not created equal.  Understanding as much as you can about the particular group, or segment, of people that you are targeting with your product or service is where you must start.  What problems are they facing that you can solve for them?  What do they need?  How do they behave?  Where do they live?   How many of them are there?  What options do they have?  With this understanding you can make decisions and judge the likelihood of your inspirational ideas producing the desired results.

2.  Make a plan

Boring though you may find it ultimately you will not get the great results you hope for without a plan.  Hoping is not enough!  A key element of the plan, particularly difficult for many clients, is setting a budget for their marketing up front.  What is reasonable or affordable for you to be investing if your target is to make £100,000 or even a £million?  Knowing the budget you have, and the goal you are aiming at, are critical factors in making choices and decisions about which marketing activities you then detail in your plan.  It doesn't matter if your plan is only a page long - just make sure you have one and that you refer to it often.

3.  Test, measure, adapt

No matter how many years experience you have in marketing there are few dead certs when it comes to delivering success.  Look around you and you will see it is so.  What works today may not work tomorrow, what works for one company doesn't deliver for another.  It is impossible to control all of the factors that influence that elusive purchase decision, so you must gather information, look at what it is telling you and act promptly to stop what isn't working and do more of what is.  Marketing is not something you can do once every few weeks - you need to be on top of it all the time: building your reputation, generating awareness, interest and ultimately sales.

There is no magic wand in marketing, but getting the fundamentals right through hard work and perspiration means that you create the right environment for your inspiration and creativity to flourish.