Abandon everything you have been taught about marketing before. Take a cold quantitative look at your marketing activity and start again. All marketing should bring a return on your investment. Break from the past and think about:

- Beginning again – I feel a truly clean sheet of paper works well

- Start solving the root cause of why your marketing is not working as well as it should

- Create a strategy, yes I know it’s dull, but it will help shape your marketing and keep you on track when it inevitably gets tough

- Put a budget aside, you are going to need it

- You don’t need ten goals, two will do. But make sure they are the ones you can over commit to. If you do this, how successful would your business be?

Don’t be fooled, changing the marketing of your business is not going to be easy. You need a new marketing framework that will help you make sense of a new business environment where success is judged less on complex, sophisticated, financially driven factors and more on humanised customer relationships and new ideas that not have been used in the past.

For further marketing rules go to www.clarityprojects.co.uk and download the Marketing Rule Book. Hope you find it useful!!

I recently had a great discussion with my delegates at a recent seminar I held. One of those challenging ones that shifts’ everyone’s thinking. As a group we talked about how we often fear customer rejection when, in fact, what we should really fear is customer indifference. A topic I’m inclined to get on my soapbox about!

In it’s most simplistic terms, there are two types of marketing…old school, traditional. It’s all about communications where we assume people are listening, we are comfortable telling the prospective customer, existing client, colleague, supplier how good we are. Commuication is all one way. Worst of all, your competitors are doing it too! And the practical examples of this; advertising in the local rag, glossy magazines, direct mail or dead tree media as it’s now called! Even basic websites are starting to fall into this category, where return on investment is disappearing quickly, if it ever existed at all?

The second is what I call conversational marketing, engaging with the market place, the customer. It’s about ideas generation, exploring future products and services together, provoking a positive, interactive reaction from customers whether old or new. Creating a marketing campaign that fires their imagination which in turn fires yours. Sounds far more vibrant, far more dynamic doesn’t it? Oh a little exciting too!

What do I mean by this? Well rather than allowing your customers indifference to your business being maintained, it’s about starting to think creatively about marketing campaigns that your customer finds appealing, where ideas not service are at the forefront. I’m talking about online marketing, viral marketing on the web, YouTube, a product/service with a true and I mean true differential advantage! Something where you revolutionise the customer experience in your industry! Or you package your offering in a new way like Radiohead did with their (only if your brand is well established) new album in late 2007, which allowed customers to chose what price they paid.

Radical stuff? Frightening? Uncomfortable? Expensive? Well, try this…imagine the way in which you have marketed in the past is denied to you. You can do anything with your previous budget. How would you engage in ‘marketing conversation’ with customers using non traditional marketing?

Blimey, further proof that marketing is radically changing. Just this week Google announced its latest advertising revenue figures that are set to overtake ITV’s, here in the UK, possibly within the next year - (www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology). Interesting times! Times that are giving opportunities for small businesses to engage with customers like never before. For me there are two types of opportunity, those that are missed and those that are taken! So why are small businesses still struggling to execute profitable marketing strategies?

I think there are a few harsh realities out there that we still haven’t got to grips with. As controversial as that might be here’s a few to get you started and stimulate debate:

We don’t think about marketing enough. I’ll explain. We go head long into a plan that usually takes the form of traditional marketing without planning or researching it thoroughly. Advertising, networking (the actually meeting people face to face variety) and direct mail are the most common. We spend lots of money and then wonder why it didn’t work. Plans that clearly state a return on investment for marketing activity are a must.

We develop marketing approaches that look like a weak universal appeal rather than niche focus and clearly communicating our offer! Even if our products are boring, it’s our job to make them exciting!

Lots of small businesses seem to think that they must sell price as the differentiating factor in their product/service offering. In fact, it’s about how you behave as a brand that’s now important. Brand is about trust (and so is the internet), the new business world is more about open and trusting relationships with customers and staff, which in itself means more transparency. Imagine that!

Marketing isn’t about telling people how good you are. The customers a lot more informed and sophisticated than that. We’ve gone beyond just communicating with customers and moved to having conversations with them. That’s about developing a dynamic relationship and above all getting them involved with what you are doing and developing.

Small businesses haven’t run out of ideas, they just struggle with executing them and don’t differentiate themselves enough! We all look too similar; the products are the same and we sell ‘quality’ too much. Creative marketing campaigns are too rare. Your market place will be typically crowded so it’s more important you stand out.

Traditional marketing has been dead for about 15 years. Some of us are slowly turning our back on the traditional advertising solution, however, many of us can’t see the wood for the trees or is it we’ve just lost sight of what’s in front of us? Those of us who run small businesses don’t have much choice nowadays. As a client of mine said recently “You have to grow really big or go niche.” Drifting along isn’t an option.

As Seth Godin www.sethgodin.co.uk (I like this guy a lot) says “Alternative approaches aren’t a novelty – they are all we’ve got left.”

The key question is what in your product/service portfolio is clearly different, unusual even curious in your market place? Do you provide it and if your answer isn’t convincing enough to you, you might have a problem.