We often say to our clients: “Marketing is hard. Doing marketing well is harder.” That’s because there are so many options to choose from and so much to do — with only a limited amount of time to do it. And, any “artificial” barrier you as a small business put up in the course of doing your marketing will often hamper what you do decide to focus on even more. Sadly, in a practical sense, we see this all the time with small businesses.

Now, of course, the most obvious barrier to small business marketing is money. After all, access to money/capital means you can:

• • Pay to boost the visibility of your products and services
  • Use resources to develop content and other marketing assets
  • Buy the right tools
  • Take the time to build a brand, and acquire an audience
  • Pay someone else to help you run the marketing operations you need.[1]

The problem for most small businesses is that, by definition, many of them don’t have that kind of capital to start with. And outside of bank loans or investment in the business by others (which is a bigger question outside the scope of this particular article), realistically, many small businesses won’t be able to solve for that issue in any immediate-term operational capacity. The barrier here, in other words from a marketing standpoint, is more of an external one.   

That’s why we’ll set aside the question of access to capital and focus for our purposes here on companies that sometimes create their own barriers without understanding how it impacts marketing performance. Here are the five (self-inflicted ones) we often see:

• • Barrier No. 1: Unwillingness to take risks
  • Barrier No. 2: Insisting everything perform immediately
  • Barrier No. 3: Lack of attention to detail (especially in implementation)
  • Barrier No. 4: Not listening to expertise or investing in it
  • Barrier No. 5: Not coordinating all your marketing

Barrier No. 1: Unwillingness to Take Risks

There’s an old saying about Las Vegas. In order to make money, you have to risk money. And sometimes you have to bet big. Understanding what we said above about small businesses not having a lot of money, the principles do apply to marketing as well. You have to spend “some money” or expend some resources. Marketing, in that way, is a risk. There is no “slam dunk” or that approach that “works every time.” (If there were, we’d all use it.)

The problem we see is that companies sometimes do nothing, and end up not marketing themselves at all. That’s because either they’re frozen – due to the number of options out there[2] – or they’re just not sure how marketing efforts will help them due to the risk involved and fear of wasting money.

How to overcome this: For many small business owners, the mindset is focused on growth, which is great. However, where many get tripped up is that they want that growth with minimal cost. What happens is that this approach leads to inertia because there are few avenues for growth that don’t involve cost.

What we recommend for the risk-averse is to start by dedicating an amount to marketing and looking at it as a learning experience, a chance to test a few things, and try a few different promotional avenues. For example, boost a social post for a few hundred dollars, develop content (which you can do cheaply), invest in a marketing automation/email platform, and dedicate the resources to acquiring and engaging more individuals that way, or even try a few ads. Testing will allow you to see what works and what doesn’t and then you can decide on the best path that you see the performance with.

Barrier No. 2: Insisting Everything Perform Immediately

Every company we know wants results today. In some cases, yesterday. So, if you can find promotional efforts that help you quickly, that’s great. But that’s not how most things in marketing work. Consider SEO, for example. If you start an SEO initiative (either yourself or with an agency), it may take 6 to 12 months for you to start ranking (and that’s if you do it well and there’s only a little bit of competition). Ads similarly are often not great at converting from the ad itself but should be more focused on building awareness of that product or service. Yet, we’re all often impatient. We need the money now, so we think short-term, and if something doesn’t perform quickly, we stop it.

How to overcome this: One of the things we recommend is to think of marketing as an investment in brand building, but give it some time to pay off. We’ve started initiatives with clients where they stopped after one month because they weren’t seeing immediate returns on sales. Yet, their sales cycle was 6 to 12 months! That’s a really quick turnaround if the business or industry isn’t set up for impulse-type buys. Focusing on building the brand and gaining awareness is key because that’s really what drives anyone to make a purchase or do business with you. As the saying goes, brand trumps everything in marketing, and by giving yourself more time, you’ll see results, just maybe not as quickly as you thought.

Barrier No. 3: Lack of Attention to Detail

The hard part about marketing is that the success of any campaign you undertake might hinge on the smallest of details:

• • The wrong language or color of a call-to-action button
  • A headline that doesn’t entice
  • Copy that has typos or grammatical errors
  • An image that doesn’t fit the brand or promotion
  • An inconsistent narrative
  • Too many fields in a registration process
  • A poor user experience on the website

The list goes on and on. And that doesn’t even include the strength of the product, word of mouth, and or other factors. Let’s face it: Attention to detail matters. It’s what makes the difference between good marketing and great marketing.

How to overcome this: If you’re not a detail-oriented person or understand marketing principles, that’s OK. You need to hire someone who is detail-oriented. That could be an employee, a marketing agency, or anyone who can help you audit what you’re doing now and make those incremental improvements in what you do. The devil is in the details, as the saying goes, so make sure you have someone who can help you dig into the weeds.

Barrier No. 4: Not Listening to Expertise or Investing In It

One of the things that baffle us the most are those companies that hire individuals to help them, but then don’t listen to those experts when it comes to the advice or strategies they provide. It’s not just in marketing, it’s almost every industry where there are consultants, etc. And that’s not saying all the advice is good advice. But if you hire a marketing person, hopefully, they have some experience in that field that you don’t. Yes, you are an expert in your business, but you may not be when it comes to marketing your company.

Similarly, we often see companies go cheap when it comes to hiring for expertise. They go with the lowest price or look at Fiverr for help, where they might get overseas support at lower rates. That can certainly work out in some cases. But more often than not, you’ll get shoddy work. We’ve seen it happen too many times to small businesses.

How to overcome this: The bottom line: Invest in expertise and listen to it. Marketing should be driving your results. Period. If you get the right experts, they can help you do that – and give you good advice as to when you can expect performance and the steps to get there. You don’t always have to go with what they say but listening to them will help often you learn something new, which you might be able to apply to any number of other marketing situations you encounter going forward.

Barrier No. 5: Not Coordinating All Your Marketing

As mentioned above, there’s so much to do in marketing – literally, the possibilities are endless – that you can end up being overwhelmed. What we see happening is that small businesses, hence, become tunnel-visioned when they execute on marketing: They do social in one silo, email marketing in another, advertising in a third, etc. Because it takes time to think about how one is related to the other. Better to just get it done! The problem, of course, is that your marketing becomes disjointed and your overall narrative and brand get lost.

How to overcome this: Take a step back. And develop a marketing plan. It doesn’t have to be involved (we have a marketing template you can use here) but you should try at the very least to consider your buyer journey/marketing funnel and how each marketing channel you employ contributes to that. If you do that, you’ll at least start to understand how, for example, your content strategy drives your social media, how that drives your email acquisition, and eventually website traffic, etc.

Conclusion

If you need help out there, don’t hesitate to contact us for a free consultation. At the very least we can probably steer you in the right direction and get you on the path toward better marketing. As always, our mission is to help you excel in digital marketing.

[1] That said, just because you have money to spend doesn’t mean your marketing is automatically a slam dunk, either, but it never hurts to at least have it.

[2] We’ve identified 17 major advertising options alone. And that doesn’t even include all the other marketing channels.