“Drive thy business or it will drive thee.” By Benjamin Franklin
How often do you reply to the question, “How is business” with “I am sooo busy”.
If you gently probe a little more, busy being busy does not actually mean more customers or more business from customers. It may just mean you are letting your business drive you and you are not in control.
Symptoms
- You spend more of your day, reading but not commenting on blogs, following others on Twitter and not participating, reading Google alerts and not taking some action
- You talk to your customers and do not make notes about the conversations to understand their needs better
- You start a project and then get side tracked by something more interesting so you get behind schedule
- You rewrite a proposal or final document or blog post 10 times just to get it perfect
- You read every email when you hear the beep for you have a new message
- You do not have a marketing plan and jump to use the latest and greatest marketing tools
- You spend more time worry about what you should do next than actually doing anything
There are of course many other symptoms but the one thing you may notice at the end of each day is that you have not really done anything to strengthen your relationships with your current or potential key customers. This results in not increasing sales or profit for your business.
As small business marketing should not be a “one size fits all approach”, how you treat these causes can vary depending on the severity and length of time you have had them.
e Treatments
- Be very clear on you want to achieve with your customers and marketing efforts even if it is for the next couple of months as a starting point
- Set simple and realistic goals for your marketing tactic so you can track the results
- Draw up a project timetable for your main projects eg. an email campaign so you are not always rushing at the last minute
- Utilise software to increase your effectiveness, such as using customer relationship software to record information from every communication with your customers to better understand needs
- Don’t just copy others using every new marketing tactic or tool because you read you should do it unless it is going to strengthen your customer relationships and get results
- Outsource activities that are not customer focussed
What treatments have you found useful to move your business along each day, strengthen your customer relationships and stopped you from being busy being busy.
Are You Busy Being Busy With Your Small Business Marketing?…
“Drive thy business or it will drive thee.” By Benjamin Franklin. How often do you reply to the question, “How is business” with “I am sooo busy”. If you gently probe a little more, busy being busy does not actually mean more customers or more business…
It is almost funny how true your “Symptoms” are. Those symptoms describe a lot of people that I know. There are also the people that use social media for clicking – instead of interaction.
Susan:
I do think the 80/20 rule – Pareto principle is in play here too. Not all the members of a community want to participate actively in a way that they share comments, vote on stuff, link back, etc. 20% of the readers / visitors will participate with 80% of the content. Hopefully you will have great challenge here, increasing the percentage over time…
I do think you could have different roles. I revert you to the Groundswell book and the six different profiles:
Creators
Critics
Collectors
Joiners
Spectators
Inactives
Hi Susan,
This is so true. I think some social media users are spectators, as Martin pointed out, and do not realize they are on social media with real business objectives. They let themselves stay in their personal mode and do not turn on the professional button. I think the big businesses must be tackling this issue. But I’m not sure about the smaller businesses that are active in social media. And it is critical to align your social media actions with your social media objectives.
Richard, Martin and Cindy you all make really good points. Regarding social media, perhaps people have they own interpretation of what interaction is, which can be different from what we think.