The Single Most Important Aspect of Your Small Business Marketing Strategy

I realize that headline could be a little bit scary, but bear with me for a minute and I will explain to you why it’s both accurate and going to make your life easier rather than difficult.

You see, there are so many different directions you can go when creating your small business’s marketing strategy and what’s included in it, such as:

• Email marketing
• Video marketing
• Social media
• Webinars
• PR
• Trade shows
• Event sponsorships
• Blogging
• Advertising
• SEO
• SEM

After all, each of these is a full-time position in itself within larger organizations’ marketing departments. You, however, are heading up a small business. Maybe you have employees or maybe you’re doing it all on your own.

Either way, that’s a lot of hats to wear and a lot of responsibility that falls on you as a business owner. So let’s reframe the discussion a bit to make it easier to digest, particularly if you are not a full-time marketer.

Choosing the Right Marketing Tactics

Think of it like this:

Your marketing strategy is a road trip.

The list above is the different modes of transportation that’ll get you to your destination (aka marketing/lead goals.)

Depending on how far you need to travel, some will get you there faster and some won’t be realistic until you are ready to go further.

You wouldn’t need to take a fighter jet to go just 200 feet right? Yet a bicycle would be faster than using your feet to go that same distance.

Same applies here with marketing. It’s not a matter of one mode of transportation (aka marketing tactic) being better than another, but rather what is the right fit for your trip (aka business) and its goals.

The Foundation Marketing Principle

While you tactics may differ, they should all be be focused around one simple, overriding principle:

Know. Like. Trust.

This is something the big guys in Corporate America tend to know about, but isn’t always shared with those outside of a marketing department. Maybe you have a background in that world before you started your business, but just because you didn’t get a marketing education until you took that very faithful leap into entrepreneurship does not mean you can’t get in on this secret sauce.

Let me catch you up on what all of this means. In order for someone to buy from you they must first:

KNOW who you are. This is brand awareness. If they don’t know you existed, they cannot buy from you.)

LIKE you. Quite frankly, we buy from people and brands that we like. Nobody wants to buy from a person or company they think is 👎🏻.

TRUST you. Once someone knows who you are and they like you, the next thing that converts them from fan to customer is trusting you.

Trusting that your product is going to do what it says, or that your services will bring the results they are trying to get. Whichever way you slice it, trust is where the conversion happens. That is where they as the customer takes their leap of faith that you are the right solution for them.

How to Use the Principle

With that clearly focused marketing principle now at the forefront of all your decisions, what tactics do you think YOUR business needs to employ to move people through that cycle from Know to Like to Trust?

Let it simmer for a few days and make sure you’re on the VIP List so you know when Part 2 of this series is live where I’ll draw the clear lines for you between the tactics and each stage of the customer acquisition cycle.