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I was at a networking event the other day, explaining to someone what we did. In response, I received a smile back and the comment “well, marketing doesn’t really work anyway does it?” Interesting question! And I can completely understand why he said that. For a lot of small business owners, that’s exactly what they find – that marketing doesn’t work. The result is that many business owners feel frustrated with marketing and give up on the process, choosing to rely instead on referrals and word of mouth. But actually the answer to the question “Does marketing work?” is yes, absolutely. In order to make it work for you though, it’s important to understand why marketing doesn’t work. There are three main reasons why marketing doesn’t work for small businesses:

1. Whenever you do some marketing, it’s important to understand that not everything you do will get you business. What I mean by this is that most of the marketing methods you use will be great a making people aware of what you do and will also be good for building your reputation as an expert. However, there are very few marketing activities that are just good at getting you customers. There’s something else you need to do to accomplish this which I’ll come onto in a minute.

2. The second reason is that most business owners don’t follow up with people. They do a marketing activity just once and when they don’t get the results they’re looking for, they just drop that and move onto something else. Marketing though requires persistence and once you have contacted someone, you must follow-up in order to properly see results.

3. The final reason is just not doing marketing. Marketing can be very frustrating especially if you’re not seeing results. As a result, after a while, most small business owners just give up and rely on word of mouth and referrals so not doing marketing is another big reason why marketing doesn’t work.

So what do you do about these three reasons? Well, here’s how to make marketing work for you. The first thing we need to do is turn marketing activities into customers. To do this, whatever marketing activity you choose, you MUST find a way to capture the contact details of people. The easiest way to do this is to offer them something that’s free and of value to them. If people give you their contact details, what they’re telling you is that they’re interested in what you do. It’s now up to you to find out how interested they are. How we do this is to follow up with people. I’m not talking about hassling people here. I’m talking about building a relationship with them so that they feel comfortable buying from you. As they say, we do business with people that we know, like and trust, so the more people know you, the easier they will find it to work with you. Once you understand this basic principle of marketing and find that it does work for you, hopefully you’ll be more motivated to do marketing. This is absolutely vital if you want to get business from your marketing. Especially in these turbulent times, it’s not enough to sit back and wait for business to knock on your door. You have to go out there and generate it. So, marketing does work. You just have to know how to work the system to your advantage. Have a go and see if this difference works for you.