Never on a Sunday

Never on a Sunday

Imagine you are stuck in Napier, on a Sunday, with a flat tyre. Bad enough, but when you then discover you have no jack to change the tyre you have one option, find a tyre shop. Sounds simple, but this happened last weekend and turned into a lesson in business marketing.

Searching on Google brought up lots of companies, so I started clicking on AdWords for Tyre Shops and found company after company wasting money.

There were three main reasons why they were wasting money but the worst was running AdWord campaigns at times that they were closed and not going to be open soon.

AdWords work best because the people clicking on them have an immediate need or purchasing desire. For service based companies it is good to leave AdWords running when they are closed as people do conduct research when they have spare time and contact them when they can, there is no urgency, but for shops, like tyre shops, there is little point running AdWords when they are not going to be open, if they don’t have online sales. People searching for these kinds of companies have a pressing need.

This incident highlighted the situation that most companies do not have a business plan, let alone a marketing plan. It is sad to think that most business owners have an idea of where they want their business to go, but they don’t plan for it.

‘Sharpening the saw’, ‘working on the business not in it’, are a few phrases bandied around to make business owners realise that they need to plan, execute and measure the plan for their business. If not, how will they know if they are succeeding and growing, or reaching the stability many crave.

In a nutshell - a business plan helps you work out the numbers. Start with how much you as a business owner want to make to live the life you want to have. Second, by looking at your average profit margin work out what your turn over would need to be to make that much money. That in its rawest form is the core of your business plan.

Once you know where you want to go, you work out how you will get there. This is your marketing plan. Again - there are many people you can ask, remember every business is different, but be guided by other people’s successful activity, look at your competitors and what they do and formulate a loose plan. It doesn’t need to list every action, but it does need to spur your activity.

Planning doesn’t need to take all your time. Speak to your accountant about it, speak to your business bank manager about it, speak to friends you have that run businesses and ask them how to go about it.

Once you start using these two guides to help you monitor and grow your business you will probably stop wasting money advertising in places where the people aren’t.

In case you were still wondering, we found a tyre shop, via Facebook. It just happened to have an image on their timeline that showed their sign that said they were open 7 days, they got our business.



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