Entrepreneurship is always a big challenge, and our modern information explosion makes it seem more challenging than ever. There’s easy access to the marketplace, which is great—but that also means a bounty of competition to break through.
There are all kinds of avenues to reach your audience, but that means more decisions to make. The small business marketing challenges keep piling up, and finding an answer seems more difficult than ever.
What’s a poor entrepreneur to do?
The specific strategies and tactics will, naturally, be unique to each business, their circumstances and budget. The key is making smart decisions, which requires one very important prerequisite: eliminating the noise.
In an era of online marketing, anyone with access to the Internet and a modest amount of money to buy a domain and a content management system to set up a website.
But does that mean they’re really a competitor? Or that their strategies, from web design to social media, are worth imitating?
Let’s say you’re a lawyer and you run across a sharp-looking website with a vibrant social media presence.
How do you know the firm is generating clients and making an impact on the market?
You really don’t—unless you use some old-fashioned tools like personal networking and get a read on the market.
The same goes for marketing tactics.
There’s an array of tools, from pay-per-click to content marketing to social media to traditional forms of advertising. You can’t do them all. It would be foolish to try, and even more foolish to abruptly shift from one to another without giving any one particular method a chance to take hold.
Here again, some old-fashioned marketing strategy, like having a persona of your ideal client and then customizing your approach to find them, is where you can (and should) start.
The new forms of marketing are terrific; we love them and we’re glad they’re opening up new opportunities. But carefully analyze each opportunity before you engage, lest you go down a rabbit hole and simply replace one small business marketing challenge with another.
