Red, The Motorcycling Marketer - YBR Marketing | SEO, Online Advertising, Web Design, Social Media Marketing, Lead Generation

Big Business vs Small Business Marketing

by Red, The Motorcycling Marketer | Aug 11, 2021 | Advertising Wollongong, Customer experience wollongong, Digital marketing wollongong, direct response marketing, local seo, niche marketing, Online Advertising Wollongong, website design, website hosting, word of mouth marketing

Does Size Really Matter?

Well in marketing your small business, it most certainly does. In this article I’m going to show you one of the biggest marketing miscalculations made by small business when it comes to getting their message to their target market.

I can’t tell you how widespread this problem is, and it’s at the very core of why most small business marketing fails.

If you’re a small business owner, you’ve almost certainly given some thought to marketing and advertising, things like; What approach are you going to take? Where are you going to advertise? What are you going to say in your advertising?

The most common way most small business owners decide on doing this is by looking at large, successful competitors in their industry and copying what they’re doing.

This seems a pretty smart thing to do right? Copy what other successful businesses are doing and you will also become successful?

But honestly, this is one of the quickest ways to fail and I’m very certain it’s responsible for the bulk of small business failures. Here are the two major reasons why I think that is..

Large Companies Have A Different Agenda

Large companies have a very different agenda when it comes to marketing than small businesses do. Their strategies and priorities differ from yours significantly.

The marketing priorities of a large company looks something like this:

Pleasing The Board Of Directors
Appeasing Shareholders
Satisfying Superiors’ Biases
Satisfying Existing Clients’ Preconceptions
Winning Advertising And Creative Awards
Getting “Buy In” From Various Committees And Stakeholders
Making A Profit

The marketing priorities of a small business look something like this:

Making A Profit

As you can see there is a world of difference in the marketing priorities of small and large companies. So naturally there is a big difference in strategy and implementation.

Big Companies Have A VERY Different Budget

Strategy changes with scale. This is very important to understand.

Do you think, for example, a large property investment company has a different property investment strategy to the average small property investor? Of course they do..

The large company’s strategy simply won’t work on a small scale. You can’t just build one floor of of a skyscraper and leave it at that. You need them all.

If you have an advertising budget of millions and years to get a profitable result, then that’s going to be a very different strategy to needing to make a profit immediately with a $5000 to $10,000 budget.

Using a large company marketing strategy, your $10,000 is going to be a drop in the ocean. It will be totally wasted and ineffective because you’re using the wrong strategy for the scale that you’re operating at.

Branding and ego-based mass marketing is the domain of large companies. To achieve any kind of cut through requires an enormous budget and the use of expensive MASS media.

So What’s left For The Little Guy?

Direct response marketing gives small businesses a way to compete on a small budget. It’s designed to be accountable and ensure you get a return on investment that is measurable.

Following the path of other successful businesses is smart, but it’s vital that you understand the full strategy you’re following and that you’re able to implement it.

Strategy from an outside observer’s perspective can be very different to the reality. If you’re following a strategy that has different priorities to you or has a vastly different budget then it’s highly unlikely it will generate the kind of result you’re hoping for.

Yours In Market Success

John

Thanks go to Allan Dib from Successwise for his insights

Future of Marketing, What Skills You Will Need?

by Red, The Motorcycling Marketer | Jun 5, 2021 | Advertising Wollongong, AI Wollongong, Customer experience wollongong, CX Wollongong, data analysis wollongong, Digital marketing wollongong, Machine Learning Wollongong, Neuromarketing Wollongong, niche marketing, Online Advertising Wollongong, UX Wollongong

How will marketing change in the coming decade?

According to Adobe’s Marketo, “Niche marketing capabilities will become the most important skills. Current tasks performed by a marketing team will decline in importance or be automated into oblivion.”

Most In-demand

The marketer of 2025, will need skills that focus around analytics, data & insights, CX (customer experience)/UX (user experience), AI (Artificial Intelligence) & machine learning, Vanity metrics, which include impressions, “likes,” shares, comments, followers, open rates, views, traffic, time on site, bounce rate open rates etc.. digital marketing & media (though this is declining), and marketing technology & operations, marketing will essentially be a technology hub.

Sophisticated Data Analytics

In fact, only analytics remains a top priority from the current crop of top four skills. They includes digital marketing and media, Social media marketing will halve and content marketing.

Sophisticated data analytics, will be the most important skill in the marketing.

To provide deeper, more advanced insight into patterns, trends, and themes that may be hidden within data. is a Data analysis that uses predictive modeling, machine learning algorithms, deep learning, business process automation.

Neuromarketing

Neuromarketing is the study of customer behavior and how it affects the buying pattern of a target audience. For example, researchers may find that a particular stimulus causes a response in the brains of test subjects that’s correlated with a desired behavior (e.g. the release of a ‘feel good’ hormone). Obviously, as a marketer, you’d want to know these cause-effect relationships so that you can apply the principles to your creative, and thereby drive improvements to your key conversion metrics.(Smart Insights)

The marketing team of tomorrow, may not be recognised by the marketing team of today. Artificial intelligence and advanced data analytics will be the key tech drivers. Neuromarketing, which barely exists today, will feature strongly.

The day-to-day functions of marketers will change greatly. For instance, there will be much less emphasis on decisions around email marketing or social media. Rather, those kinds of tasks will be more and more reliant on machines to make better decisions than people make today.

Yours In Marketing

John

Word Of Mouth Marketing for Your Small Business?

by Red, The Motorcycling Marketer | Apr 1, 2021 | referral marketing, word of mouth marketing

What’s The Plan?

When talking to business owners, the topic on top of their list is almost always marketing. And when ask what is the main type of marketing they are using to get their message out to potential customers, they almost always say “word of mouth“.

Word of mouth can be a powerful way to market any small business, but it can be slow. It can take an awful lot of time, to build success from this way alone, and that is assuming you do everything right, but for start-ups with a small budget, it can sometimes be the only way to build momentum and gather much need resources, AKA money..

My favourite analogy for word of mouth or referral marketing is, it’s a free lunch, but having said that, is there really such a thing?

By being solely reliant on word of mouth, you’re putting the fate of your business in the hands of others – hoping they both like you and remember you often enough to regularly send new business your way. Dangerous ground my friend.. If this is how you currently do business, then now’s the time to start thinking about making your marketing system a little stronger..

So, how do we go about doing just that?

Build a Strong Marketing System?

As eluded to in the previous paragraph, having a single source of generating new business, is a dangerous path to tread for any business. Being unable to control that source makes it doubly so.

Having at the very least 2 different sources for obtaining new leads and customers. AND that almost all of these sources be with paid media i.e. it will cost you to market yourself. There are 2 reasons why paid media is so important.

Firstly, reliability. If I pay a newspaper to run my ad, there’s an extremely high probability the ad will actually be run. It’s much harder to get such reliable and consistent lead flow from free marketing methods such as word of mouth

And secondly, using paid media will make you, to put it simply, focus on the money you spend against, the money you get back or ROI (Return On Investment). If a paid marketing method is not working, you cut it. You don’t waste further time or money on it. So, when the marketing method is organic (free) such as word of mouth, we are least inclined to “cut and run” if something isn’t working and wasting huge amounts of time, because we didn’t pay upfront.

Word of Mouth Reliability Boost

Word of Mouth can be a valuable tool in your marketing arsenal, and while you don’t want to rely on this solely, it is to your advantage to increase its power and reliability.

One the most often neglected ways of doing this is by asking for a referral from those customers that you have received a good experience or result. It’s amazing how many business owners hope for referrals yet rarely ask for them.

Something as simple as:

Valued customer, it’s been an absolute pleasure working with you. If you know anyone who’s in a similar situation as yourself we’d love you to give them one of these gift cards which entitles them to $100 off their first consultation with us. One of the reasons we’re able to keep the cost of our service low is because we get a lot of our business through referrals from people like you.”

Are you seeing what is happening?

We’re acknowledging them and appealing to their ego.
We’re not asking them for a favour but instead offering something valuable they can give to someone in their network.
We’re giving them a reason why they should give us referrals – a reason that directly benefits them.
By putting a system around generating referrals, we’ve dramatically increased the reliability of word of mouth marketing. And while not everyone will give you referrals, many will and it sure beats just silently hoping.

By creating multiple sources of new leads and increasing the reliability of word of mouth marketing, you take back control of your lead flow and build a solid foundation for rapid business growth.

Yours In Marketing

John

( I wish to acknowledge the wonderful insights of My Allan Dibb from Successwise)