Challenges for small business when it comes to marketing

2. Attempt to get not just management, but the entire team on the same page (and buy in to the marketing strategy) in relation to sales and marketing because they want to grow.

3. Get advice--sometimes conflicting--from friends, clients, half-baked marketing practitioners, freelancers and marketing firms only to be left confused and end up going with the person they 'like' the look of instead of going with the right person for the job.

4. End up stuck in their ways, caught in a direction, without really understanding the changing dynamics of their customer base.

5. Put conducting a survey with customers and staff to the backend because management thinks they already know it all. (Guess what? We don't!)

6. Still believe in the last year's marketing plan that they got off the Internet, but cannot quite figure why it didn't work.

7. Think that they are too small to have marketing, but might try Facebook and Twitter this year.

8. Try cold calling (the secretary did it), advertising (the sales rep was nice and offered a discount), yellow pages (can't understand why it worked 10 years ago, but isn't achieving the same results today), public relations (found a blog on the web, so rang up a journalist who said they would think about writing a story and didn't), direct mail (a flier done by an adhoc agency known to the staff) and website building (no faith in it; no-one ever emails from the website asking for anything other than whether you want to buy cheap viagra or perhaps a wife online).

Funnily enough, this is probably 99% of small businesses. The other 1% drive their brands, dominate their market and create sales opportunities strategically achieving their company's goals.

Funny that!

This is why there will always be a market for 'Marketing Eye'. ;)

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