EVERYBODY KNOWS…

It’s a tough economy out there and most new businesses fail within the first couple years.

Being in business for yourself IS tough.

And getting the proper marketing for your business is more a matter of pure luck, rather than a precise and codified activity.

Now these are common things I’ve heard in business and in marketing those businesses. These sayings and other thoughts like them make up my Blacklist- The Things Every Body Just knows are True… but which really aren’t. Seriously, if you considered all the things you had heard in business which were posed as true or told to you as true, you might think that every new idea had already been thought up, all things really had an answer… somewhere else than where you were of course, and every problem which you had thought existed was actually solved by someone else at some other time. So, you would end up just doing what you usually did when things “got tough”, or “business was down” and hoped for the best. And you would always get what you get in the end.

I think if everyone knows about a problem such as tough economy or business, then it should be worked out by now as a lot of heads must have been thinking about this and it should not be a problem- there should be a workable technology to business, and a workable technology to marketing. So, if you hear an everyone-knows-type problem datum in business or marketing, and you do not get the solution in the same breath… it just brings you down as what can you do about it that everyone else hasn’t already tried?

Well, it’s common sense that two opposites can’t both be true, so somewhere something is off in the general “everybody already knows” category of things. If everyone knows it, it should be solved or be workable by now. If it isn’t, maybe we need to re-inspect what does everyone really already know.

I ran into a common example of this recently when consulting a client on their marketing. It was thought that since they were a franchise, the marketing directions and promotional pieces that they had been given from corporate were of course good and effective. That those pieces had been surveyed by the Mid West corporate office against its existing prospective market, and existing public but were then set up to hit the client’s new local demographic on the East Coast was never considered as an outpoint- wrong market surveyed. And these were the generic promotional items for all 90+ franchise over the entire US.

But of course the promo must be good, otherwise why would corporate have given it to them? Now, that’s a touch of the “everybody knows” attitude, and it’s quite common in everything from marketing, to sales, and even problem solving. It is a belief that it’s all taken care of, or “handled,” or reversely “unhandleable” without actually inspecting the scene and the results.

In marketing, it’s death to take something for granted. A successful campaign in one area might be sheer disaster in another. Thus in marketing one always tracks their results, stays with what has been successful in past and then when branching out into new things tries out pilots and again tracks those results. Marketing is nothing without tracked results. There is a saying- you cannot manage what you cannot monitor, so ALL PROFESSIONAL MARKETERS TRACK THEIR RESULTS. Amateurs and dilettantes do not.

Modern technology gives us effective low or no cost methods to track results examples: Google analytic, call tracking phone numbers with recorded lines etc. With these easy to set up and use services, you can track any marketing you do and really know for yourself what works.

Email me at shawn@xpresspromotion.com if you are interested in throwing out some of the “everybody knows,” and setting up successful marketing for your business.

Best,

Shawn Kimmel