Take a look at the following article: Small Businesses Favor Tactics that Balance Customer Attraction, Retention.
Have you taken a look?
What is it suggesting? Are you doing all of the activities listed, some of them or only a few? How do you feel? Frustrated with another article telling you what you should be doing?
As the article suggests, many smaller businesses face a continual struggle for time and resources, when it comes to marketing their businesses.
Faced with that, many of them look to ‘experts’ and articles to help them better understand what they should and should not be doing.
But, much of the expert advice that gets doled out tends to be full of new ideas and new initiatives that small businesses should implementing in their businesses.
This doesn’t help. And, it only leaves small businesses frustrated and with long lists of things that they need to do but with little time do them.
More importantly, they find themselves in a catch-22 situation: not enough time to do the work themselves and not enough money to hire someone to help do the work.
So, they get stuck.
My take: do less to achieve more.
My two-penneth on this that I hope will help you prioritise and choose what things you should be doing and what you should be leaving til later:
Before doing anything new, be guided by your customers.
Why? Well, your customers are real and their custom is real and they and it comes as a result from what you are currently doing.
Therefore, if you want to focus your time and resources and not get distracted by ‘shiny objects’ and recommendations from ‘experts’ ask yourself this:
Where are you getting significant numbers of your customers from?
When you have identified these sources, work on how you can do more in this area to get more customers and serve your existing customers better.
Do that and you’ll build a better foundation for growth and not be continually spreading yourself too thin and getting frustrated with your lack of time and progress.
