You do marketing whether you want to or not…

• You choose what products and services you offer…
• You choose prices for those products and services…
• You choose how to promote them…
• You choose how your business will interact with your customers…

Each and every one of those decisions is a marketing decision. Your business may be doing well - heck you may even be satisfied with it, but that doesn’t mean that you’ve thought through your marketing plan correctly or that your business is all it could be.

I work better with concrete examples, so let’s make one up for this exercise shall we?

Mike’s Green-Thumb Lawn Service is a 5 man operation in the suburban Piedmont area of South Carolina. They’ve got two trucks with two sets of basic lawn mowing and trimming equipment. They charge $40 per cut on average depending on the size of the lot. Currently, they’re doing about 50 lawns per week. Mike’s happy with the pace of the business. He’s pulling in almost $4k per month in his pocket before taxes.

Maybe that’s all Mike wants out of his business, but could it be more?

Who’s your customer?

Sounds basic, but so few can immediately answer this question concretely. You need to target specific customers and you should be able to describe your typical customer. Give them a name, describe them, describe some specific demographics, wants, needs and wishes.

So, let’s imagine that Mike spends some time studying this question and he comes to find out that the majority of his customers have the following attributes:

• between .7 and 1.5 acre lots
• family size greater than 4
• mean family income of $70,000

After talking with several of his clients about what they like about his service and why they use it, he finds a couple of patterns that emerge. Most own a push mower but hate doing yard work. They’re typically busy professionals that would rather spend more time with their families than working out in the yard.

Who is your biggest competitor, right now?

Think about what it is that you are REALLY selling. McDonald’s doesn’t sell food, they’re selling convenience. A lawn service is selling property value and as Mike has discovered…more leisure time.

When you think in these terms…who’s your big competition? There are the obvious answers here, but we’re after total share of your customer’s wallet here. For Mike, the obvious answers are going to be HugeCo Lawn Care that operates in his turf. There are less obvious answers as well. Anything that his customer base spends money on that results in more leisure time is a threat to the share of his customer’s wallet.

How will you compete?

Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon.com recently said, (and I’m paraphrasing here) that there are only two strategies in business…you’re either working to lower your prices or you working to raise them. What he meant by that is that you either are going for volume by offering the lowest possible prices or you’re trying to maximize profit margin by increasing the perceived value of your offering in order to maintain relatively high prices.

Given the size of Mike’s operation, it’s unlikely that he’s going to have the economies of scale to pursue a low price strategy in the market to compete with HugeCo Lawn Care on price alone. So, he needs to find ways to add value in the eyes of his customers to secure his place in the market. Now that we understand who the customer is and what they value (time), he should be able to add those little extras to his service that make his customers more likely to stick with him.

Wrap-Up

This is a deep subject that entire texts could be written on. My goal was to give you a flavor of the process as opposed to an exhaustive instruction manual. That being said, where should you go to learn more? Well first off, feel free to contact me directly if you have a specific question about your business or you can leave a comment at the end of this post and I’ll answer it there. I’d also invite others to share their experiences and expertise at developing small business marketing plans in the comments below.

Some good books that you can turn to as well:

Duck Tape Marketing by John Jantsch is particularly suited for small business owners.

More loosely tied to this topic, I also think you should read:

All Marketer Are Liars by Seth Godin

and Made to Stick by the Heath Brothers.

Welcome back again!