Step 2: Overview of this Course
The biggest shift I've seen most small business owners have to adapt to, is moving off the spreadsheet, whiteboard or yellow pad and to finally accept the fact that they need to create a marketing system. Another major issue I see is committing what I call “Random Acts of Marketing”, which means they turn on and off their marketing in sporadic rhythms. They turn it on, get leads and then stop. I understand and there are lots of reasons for this. Seasonality of their business, production capabilities or company bandwidth. Here's the truth, the single most powerful action a local business owner can take is committing to advertising all year long. Why? Because when you leverage paid advertising your reaching tire kickers, researchers and potential buyers that may not be ready for an appointment, but could ready to enter at the Top, Middle or Bottom of your marketing funnels. When you develop a monthly content publishing cycle you can actually fortify and create an active growing list of prospects you will nurture into buyers using marketing automation. You can also answer many of the questions that the non-committed “tire kickers” (the group of non-buyers just doing research) and give them opportunities to actively engage in your content. Once we understand the dynamics of this, we found that we could still market in the slow months, when sales actually fell off and still benefit from the folks in “research mode” who would search out our solutions and then opt-in to our content offers which gave us a way to stay connected with them. Over time I began to see the true value of developing “Marketing Systems” rather than looking at my marketing as just paying for and buying leads. A prospect, custom branded to Heavenly Greens, thru our content was much more than a lead. Properly nurtured, a high percentage of these folks would eventually become buyers.