The Field of Dreams Myth in Small Business Growth

If you build a business, will your customers come?

No. 

What if you have a great concept, excellent staff, and your business has an attractive offer for your target market? Will your customers come then?

Still no. 

But why? You believe in your business. You know how to delight your customers. Why aren’t your customers beating down your door? 

Small business growth requires an ongoing marketing investment, marketing expertise, and an integrated marketing strategy designed around your specific, measurable growth goals. Add to this the ever increasing number of distractions, competitors, and media noise your target customer wades through on any single day. 

Now multiply all of the above by the barriers your prospective customers must overcome just to consider your brand: awareness, trust, interest, expectations, needs, benefits, value, willingness to pay, time and ease of converting into a customer, experience after the sale. 

What does your landscape look like now? Has your field of business growth dreams morphed into a mountain? That might feel overwhelming to a hard working and busy business owner like you, but don’t despair! You’re on the right track to reframing your marketing approach and building a better future for your business. 

Breaking down the myth of effortless or effort-little sales growth involves a few more concepts, but to summarize the way forward, envision a tranquil forest, not an imposing mountain. To flatten your vista and build a path for your customers, it’s important to refocus your marketing strategy around how to best use the marketing tools that best fit your business. 

Why Small Business Sales Growth Hacks and Myths are Attractive Lies

Even experienced small business owners can find the field of dreams myth is easy to believe. It’s especially deceptive and appealing after times of strong sales growth when you might have felt like customer demand was endless, your competitors seemed extra weak, and your brand dominated your target market. 

After an extended period of sales growth, you might even have felt like you had finally cracked some elusive code that would forever unlock future revenue potential. What’s worse about believing the myth of your customers just showing up with much ongoing effort from your business is that you may have pulled back on your marketing efforts or put them on auto-pilot.

Once your sales numbers stagnated or declined, your exuberance may have naturally turned to disbelief or confusion. After all, you had uncovered the secret formula to sales growth, hadn’t you? The reality is that you can let yourself off the hook about your code-breaking skills but do hold yourself accountable for your marketing decisions.

Why Your Consistent Marketing Investment is Critical to Growth

Whether in times of sales increases or decreases, small business marketers and business leaders who have weathered many challenges and successes alike know there are valuable lessons to be learned from both periods. 

One of the easiest ways to set your business up for decline is to think of marketing as purely an expense. Avoid the temptation to view your marketing investment only as an account would and instead imagine it as a living part of the heart and health of your business. 

This core understanding of how you treat your marketing efforts is essential to growing your business. By not investing consistently in smart marketing programs, you are actually costing your business much more than marketing dollars. What you don’t invest today cannot grow tomorrow. What you don’t invest and maintain on an ongoing basis has a direct impact on how much attention your customers give your business, how much opportunity you hand to your competitors, and how much harder you will have to work to catch up later.

To illustrate the importance of consistently investing in your marketing efforts, consider these questions when you look back at how sales increased and decreased over time:

1. Long Term Customer Loyalty: How is customer loyalty these days? What have you been doing throughout the peaks and valleys of your sales trends to maintain a healthy flow of repeat business?
2. The Power of Reviews: Similarly, how do past customers speak of your brand? Are they driving new customers to your company with referrals and honest reviews?
3. Increasing Competition: Who are your new competitors and what are they saying to your potential customers? What have your existing competitors been doing while you were ignoring them or pulling back on your marketing efforts?
4. Maintenance and Management Costs: Your website is the cornerstone of your digital marketing presence. How effectively does your website engage and convert customers? Have you kept up with the ever evolving technical needs of your site to ensure it is secure, protected, and easy to use for your customers?
5. Changing Customer Preferences: What do your customers expect of your brand and how has that changed over time? How have you adapted your business and marketing message to showcase how your business meets your customers’ needs, wants, and expectations?
6. Maintaining Visibility and Awareness: Where does your target audience spend their time online? What media do they like best? When they think about buying something you offer, how do they find your business? How do they know you exist? How does your marketing strategy drive a steady flow of new prospects, communicate value and benefits to interested potential customers, and generate more sales?

Just as long term business success doesn’t happen by simply opening your doors or launching a website, great marketing that drives business growth is an ongoing investment in the future of your business.

Why Your Prospective Customers Need More from Your Brand

It takes more effort to stand out and capture customer attention today. There are numerous reasons behind this fact, including dwindling customer attention spans, the rise of digital marketing overall, the impact of social media in daily consumer habits, and increased competition. The two key takeaways across all these trends for your business and your marketing strategy are these:

1. No one wakes up in the morning thinking about your business except you.
2. The number of touchpoints your prospects need to become customers has and will continue to increase.

The journey your customers take starts with not knowing anything about your business, including why they should trust you, what you offer, and what value they will get from buying from you. 

Build your customers a map to get them from awareness to conversion. Guide them on a path through the forest of choices before them and help them navigate it with impactful marketing touchpoints at the right moments. 

Here’s how: 

1. To get your prospects thinking about your business, you first have to get their attention with well crafted marketing campaigns targeting your audience and communicating compelling, relevant messages that resonate with them. The more you know about your audience, the better your marketing programs can be tailored to match.
2. Once you have their attention, hold it! Motivate your audience to engage with your brand and learn more about why you are the best choice for their needs. Use content that is meaningful and helpful for your ideal customer to capture email newsletter subscribers, grow your social media following, increase searches for your brand, drive more website traffic, schedule calls, and more. Tell your prospects what their next step is with straightforward calls to action
3. Demonstrate consistency to establish authority, set expectations, and build trust in your brand. As your prospects learn more about your business, they are very likely comparing you to your competitors. This means they are moving down the path to purchase and considering their options. The more familiar they become with your brand, the more likely they are to convert. Your consistent marketing investment is crucial to keeping your brand top of mind.
4. Make it easy for them to choose your brand. Reinforce your efforts with marketing campaigns optimized to generate leads and drive actions on your website. Remind your prospects of your key selling points across all of your messaging by showcasing what makes your business unique and why those points are valuable for them.
5. Follow up with your potential customers all the way through the sales journey and beyond. Stay on their minds as they make their buying decisions and drive repeat business by cultivating strong relationships after the sale. Tune your marketing messaging to strengthen customer loyalty by continuing to provide relevant and useful content. Invite your customers to leave reviews about their experience with your company and influence future customers with referrals and recommendations. 

In order to break through and connect with your target audience, it is critical that your marketing strategy is built around an integrated approach that utilizes the power of multiple tools working together to provide multiple touchpoints and drive sales. 

Why You’ll See Better Performance with an Integrated Marketing Strategy

Could one great email or social media post push a spike in traffic to your website? Of course! But what happens after that? 

What do your customers do next after they click through to your website? 

What do you do with the few seconds of attention you’ve earned from them? 

What happens tomorrow when they’ve stopped thinking about your brand?

 One great day of website traffic is not a marketing strategy.

The power of an integrated marketing strategy can’t be overstated. Watch our webinar tutorial for a masterclass in how an integrated marketing strategy works. Here’s a summary and what it means for your business: 

• While it might sound easier to manage your marketing programs in a more ad hoc style, the only benefit you might gain from this approach is a very short lived time savings. The cost of maintaining siloed marketing campaigns is far greater in terms of wasted ad spend, inefficient time management in the long run, and ineffective marketing messaging that actually drives customers away.
• An integrated marketing strategy is rooted in the core concept that no single marketing tool is more powerful on its own compared to the sum of multiple tools working in harmony to turn prospects into customers. A well crafted strategy starts with your marketing goals, incorporates your business’s strengths, challenges, and competitive landscape, and then the best fitting combination of marketing tools is applied to achieve your growth goals.
• The end results of a successful integrated marketing strategy are improved sales, better return on marketing ad spend, and much greater efficiency in marketing programs that are built to scale.

If the idea of implementing an integrated marketing strategy sounds a little overwhelming, we’re here with expert small business marketing solutions for you.

 Also, take a moment to realize that you’ve already started! When you thought about the above 5 steps of mapping out more touchpoints for your prospects, you began thinking about your new strategy and how it could improve your business. 

Let’s Connect

Leave the field of dreams idea to great cinema. Instead, imagine your customer journey as a path paved in smart marketing campaigns working together like a map to lead your customers right to your door. We’ll help you design and build your marketing map, stand out in a crowded forest of competitors, increase sales, and boost business growth. Take the next step right now by scheduling a call with our team.

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