A small anecdote for you to consider:

You are an inspired and prolific painter who spends the day mixing colours, defining lines and blending your thoughts and feelings into a tangible avenue on paper. By your own accounts, not only do you think your art is good, but it can enrich and help people. The only thing is, your art is locked in a room with no windows, no doors, no light.

This is the reality of slaving away at your business without any real strategy or even understanding of marketing and the crucial elements that either hurt or help you.

Essentially, marketing lets the world know you exist and you matter. It allows the connection with potential customers, and inform them of who you are and why they should care. Marketing builds brand recognition and facilitates healthy business competition, which results in better services and better products for the consumer.

The real beauty of effective marketing is creating a sound client base and leaving your mark on the world. But if it is non-existent or even bad marketing your using, the pains your business might feel could be longlasting.

Even if someone stumbles upon your business by pure chance and you have no marketing presence in this digital age, how would referring you to a friend play out?

Let us find out.

Friend 1: “I have this great new business you’d love!”

Friend 2: Oh cool! What’s their website?

Friend 1: “I’m not sure, and I can’t find it on Google.”

Friend 2: Oh, well let’s check their socials.”

Friend 1: “Wow, nothing. But this one that came up looks pretty good too, let’s check it out.”

Disaster…

Or best case scenario they assume you are digitally illiterate or just plain indifferent to how you are perceived by the public. Inversely, when you are firing on all cylinders in your marketing matters things get much more fruitful. People will celebrate your product and your brand if it helps them. They will refer you to friends who are also your target market, for free!

Think about how that works. Who refers others to those cool things that pop up in your every day online?

Everyone.

Fathers and mothers share with each other parenting hacks and products. Colleagues share with each other their thoughts on a new tv series on their break and even tagging your mates in a meme is referring them to a shared interest. People rarely keep the things they love to themselves. The trick is to be that love that joins them, in a manner of speaking.

This is your small business vibe.

However, it isn’t all smiles and rainbows when you need to market your venture. There must be a sacrifice, but thankfully it is not in blood. You need to invest in your marketing with either time or money. Invest more time internally or invest more money externally to someone more experienced and more efficient. Either way, consider that an investment must be made to shine light into your painter’s room and turn it into an art gallery. The former means you have to learn first and use the skills to then start marketing your business, growing pains and all.

This is a great long term as you can become more knowledgable and professional as a business owner, although it is worth mentioning that the time needed to learn is substantial and costly. You need to weigh up if you have the time to sacrifice and the money to invest here. The latter option is by far the most convenient and powerful of the two.

Investing in a relationship with an external marketing provider gets rid of the guesswork and will not cut into your time anywhere near as much as the burden of learning, growing pains and all.

In an all-inclusive package with a marketer, you could have your brand, content, copywriting, and presence consistently and congruently presented for your specific target market to connect with your business. Utilising external marketing can help customers find you and build on your referral base mentioned previously in an exponential sense. If you are constantly in touch with potential customers by being effectively on their radar, think of all the opportunities you now have for free marketing by word of mouth?

The potential for an emotional connection to your brand here is magnified many-fold and facilitates your ability to stand out from competitors. The process of external marketing will also drive leads, increase sales, even out the peaks and troughs of business seasons and in time will actually save you money. By using marketing experts to assess your brand and prospective customers, they can create customer personas and avatars to market to.

This means the efforts of your brand can be focussed to a particular goal or path and not just in the sales sense, but by creating greater customer service and experiences, designing more particular future products and navigating business opportunities and risks.

No matter which way you cut it, marketing your business is a must and will require an initial sacrifice of time and/or money, but the rewards are too prevalent and too worthwhile to ignore.