Fine-tune your marketing message

Marketing and promotion are not two strengths that most small businesses can claim. My experience is that most small business owners think most marketing and promotion dollars are dollars wasted, and their goal is to minimize expenditures and hope for “word of mouth” to take over.

That is akin to being a junior high school student and planning what you will do with the money you will make from your NFL career. In other words, low probability of success.

Small businesses that want to grow and dominate their local markets understand that dedicating a certain amount of money — and not an insubstantial one (5% to 15% of revenues, depending on the industry) — to consistent advertising can help them achieve their goals. We have many local examples of businesses employing this strategy — Lewis Ford, Sam’s Furniture and Eureka Pizza, among others. It just takes faith and specific knowledge of probability theory.

I was lucky that during my MBA program in the late 1970s (believe it or not, there weren’t many of us back then), I got to be a graduate assistant in the marketing department of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. I worked for a professor, Dr. John Summey, who was a marketing research expert. I learned more about probability theory from him than anyone else, and that knowledge drove me to outspend all of our competitors on promotion in our own business.

It resulted in a 30%-plus annual growth rate for 13 years in a row between 1988 and 2001. We consistently spent 14% to 16% of total revenues on promotion, and the relationship between increasing expenses and having a nearly linear corresponding revenue growth convinced me that the odds work out when you have tens of thousands of independent events (the ad messages) that a potential customer (or past customer) can respond to.

How can you spend this money, you may ask? Again, it varies by business, but print advertising, sponsorships, radio advertising, cable television, billboards, e-marketing, direct mail, Google Adsense, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon and LinkedIn are all possible. Caution, however, that these “experiments” won’t always work out. It would be best if you did some experiments to see what you do best. That is part of where your money goes — to figure out what works best for you — and it is just part of the cost of being in business.

By understanding probabilities and fine-tuning your very business-specific “benefits of doing business with you” messages, you can take your business — be it one that serves individuals or B2B — to a new position of leadership and dominance over your local market.

Get smart, think creatively, reduce personal extractions from the business and make it happen. Nearly any company can use this strategy. Many owners will claim that they can’t afford it and that they don’t have adequate working capital.

You may be surprised at the results if you stick with it.

Mark Zweig is the founder of two Fayetteville-based Inc. 500/5000 companies. He is also entrepreneur-in-residence teaching entrepreneurship in the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas, and group chair for the Northwest Arkansas chapter of Vistage International. The opinions expressed are those of the author.