Continuous Improvement - The Never Ending Process To Make Your Marketing Better.
Marketing Is An Ongoing Continuous Improvement Process.
Success in just about anything is a learning process. It's an ongoing process - a continual quest. And so it is with small business marketing.
If you believe that success is a learning process, then you must be willing to accept that you probably won't get it right the first time. You will make mistakes in your marketing. But if you're willing to learn from your mistakes, you can continue to make adjustments until you achieve success.
The Japanese have a term for continuous improvement called "kaizen." It focuses on small-step improvements instead of one huge improvement. It's a never ending effort to discover what's working and what's not to look for incremental improvement opportunities.
I hear it all the time from clients as well as other small business owners. "When I put this marketing piece out, it really has to be good. I really need to get it right."
Really? Why is that? I mean, if you weren't very good at marketing to begin with, then why does your next piece have to be so good?
What is wrong with making it as good as you think you can and putting it out there? Even if it's not a rousing success you should be able to learn from the experience. That is a big part of what continuous improvement is all about.
Deploy Your Marketing And Initiate Continuous Improvement
If you have diligently worked your way through the Analysis & Preparation previously covered in this site, then you're way ahead of 80 to 90% of the small businesses out there. It's time to start putting your lead generation and sales conversion tools out there. Just commit to tracking and monitoring everything you do to look for continuous improvement opportunities.
What if you simply thought of all of your marketing as a test? No, I'm not talking about like those tests back in school where you had to score 80% or higher to succeed. Let me illustrate with an example.
Let's say you've been going to Chamber of Commerce events on a somewhat regular basis. But it has never resulted in any new clients. Now let's say you've been working on a new and improved 30-second introduction of yourself.
So now you go to the next Chamber event and you don't really worry about trying to 'get' any new prospects. Instead, you go to try out your new introduction on 15 to 20 people you haven't met before to see if you can get the response you're looking for. Perhaps that's to see if people will ask you to send them some additional information. You're just testing.
If you try your new introduction out on 15 people and 13 of them don't give you the response you hope for, have you failed? Not at all. If you're paying attention to how those people are responding, you're learning so that you can improve what you say. That's the process of continuous improvement. Plus, if two people respond you're certainly no worse off than before your new introduction.
I'm not suggesting that you just throw stuff against the wall to see what sticks. Your marketing should be planned and part of an overall coordinated effort. If you've been reading through this web site, you know how important I believe analysis and preparation is.
No, what I'm suggesting is that continuous improvement allows you to put your marketing out there and test to see what happens. As long as you're willing to pay attention to (and accept) what works and what doesn't, you can learn what you are doing right and wrong. Then simply refine it and test it again.
Test and Test and Test Some More!
Thomas Edison was one of the greatest inventores that ever lived. He was reported to have once been asked how it felt to fail a thousand times when he was inventing the light bulb. His response was something to the effect of, "I have not failed a thousand times. I've learned a thousand things that don't work."
Like Edison, successful business owners understand that every test represents an opportunity to learn valuable lessons. By learning what you're doing wrong or what might be improved, you are able to refine your marketing and test it again.
Testing and tracking is really not as hard as you might think. It is important to take time to reflect on your failed experiences. What went right and wrong and where could you do things differently to garner different results next time?
What do you most want to happen? Determine and be clear about your objective when putting together any marketing piece, marketing tool, or marketing campaign. What is your most desired response?
So often business owners put something together, but they can't clearly articulate what they thought should happen as a result. There is no way to measure or monitor if it worked if you were not sure what was supposed to happen in the first place.
One last caution: Just because something doesn't work the first time, don't be too quick to junk it. You shouldn't simply assume that the marketing technique or tool doesn't work for your type of business.
Maybe your headline didn't compel the audience to read.
Maybe you didn't provide enough valuable information to maintain reader interest.
Maybe soft offers like a free report would have generated more response than hard offers like a free consultation.
Maybe you sent it to the wrong target audience.
Maybe your call to action was not stated clearly enough for the reader to know what to do next.
All of these things can be fairly easily tested and tracked. And doing so will help you identify where to make those small, incremental continuous improvements.
