Does Size Really Matter?

There is no excuse to treat marketing as a cost center. One of the main reasons that businesses cut corners on strategic planning is to keep investment spending within their budget. Businesses that invest heavily often do so because they don't understand the difference between strategic planning and strategic investing. There is an expense associated with strategic planning; however, there is no reason to think of strategic planning as an expense. When businesses invest in new products or services, they don't start by setting aside 5% of their revenue for strategic planning. Instead, they typically invest 10% or more, because research has shown that spending much more than 10% is probably not going to produce the return on investment (ROI) that they are looking for. The research did not include an investment for strategic planning for medium to large companies. In contrast, a 10% investment in strategic marketing is typically spent within one month, because companies buy services from local businesses and online marketers about whom they have read positive reports. Marketing is often thought of as an expense that is difficult to predict, because companies usually don't spend a lot of money on marketing initiatives until they feel that they understand the market enough to know what their target prospects want and what they have to offer them. But, there is nothing difficult about strategic marketing. As long as companies understand the fundamentals of their market and their market segmentation, they can be almost certain of one thing: no amount of money spent on marketing will help them outperform their competitors.

Because the fundamentals of strategic marketing are easy to understand, companies shouldn’t have to spend much time thinking about how to implement the tactics. When a company knows how to apply strategic marketing to their products or services, they should be able to spend small amounts of money quickly to make a positive difference to their bottom line. And the best way to do that is to use a small number of marketing tactics, which are tested consistently, and invest much more money on more diverse tactics. The bottom line is that companies shouldn’t spend a lot of time and do a lot of thinking before implementing a small amount of marketing. As the saying goes, “Just Do It!”. The basic idea is: companies need to make many decisions gradually so that they don't end up making a lot of mistakes. This means that they need to spend little or no money on testing, because testing almost always produces the best results. In the real world, this is much more difficult than it seems. But it is possible. Once companies have made a decision on the direction of their strategic marketing initiatives, they should continue in that path with small amounts of money being spent progressively on new decisions. Consistency is the key. Before implementing marketing carefully thought out marketing initiatives, business owners should ask themselves what if this path turns out to be wrong? What if spending less money does produce better results? What if my competitors moved ahead of me in the market? We aren’t arguing that spending money is always better. (It’s possible for companies to waste money and still make money!). However, there is a threshold of money beyond which a business owner may start seeing diminishing returns. It’s important to take the time to test and measure what could happen beyond this threshold. Companies have to be careful when crossing this line and understand how to use that line while keeping up the momentum of using their marketing budget wisely.

If you need assistance with strategic marketing, use the over 25 plus years’ experience of Promo Xpertz.to help you strategize what is working, what has worked and how to move your marketing forward. Contact Diane Carson at 636-399-7777, email diane@promoxpertz.com or visit the company’s website at http://www.gopromoxpertz.com