Marketing Strategy: But Don't I Need to Brand Myself?

If you listen to the people selling advertisements, graphic design, or advertising agencies they always try to tell you how important branding is. Bunk! Branding is a way for them to help you to quickly part from your money with nothing to show for it. If you were a very big company like Coca-Cola or McDonalds you could worry about branding. If you don’t care how much money you spend on branding without getting a return from your investment you can worry about branding. But when you’re a small business owner of a professional service business like a financial advisor or insurance agency the last thing you need to worry about is branding. Branding isn’t a worthy purpose for your marketing efforts because it takes too long and too much saturation to get “brand name” recognition for you and your business.

Isn’t the whole reason you want to market yourself so you can fill your appointment calendar with the right people? If it isn’t now it sure should be. You need an immediate measurable return from the marketing dollars you spend. One of the reasons the people all hyped up on branding like to focus on branding is because there isn’t any way to measure if it’s working at all, or if it generates any business how much business it generates. And there’s no way to predict the response rate; that all adds up to a very poor investment for you and a great source of income for those selling you on the branding idea. You can worry about branding after you have marketing systems in place that consistently and predictably generate a direct response.

The marketing you want to focus on is direct response lead generation marketing. Wouldn’t you like to have people calling, emailing, faxing you to ask you about how you could work together? That’s the whole purpose of direct response lead generation marketing. You don’t need to dial for dollars calling people who would rather have their hand slammed in a car door than talk to you. You can be calling people who are interested in what you have to offer.

Now you may be thinking that sounds expensive and hard to do. Wrong! Direct response lead generation marketing is one of the lowest cost things you can ever do when you do it right. And it isn’t hard at all. In fact, you don’t even have to be all that good at it to get pretty good results because you competition is clueless and absolutely sticks at it. So, what you do positively gets the attention of the people you’re communicating with and gets them to reach out to you. One of the reasons this approach is so low cost is because you never do anything on a big scale until you’ve tracked your numbers and know exactly what works, how well it works in terms of response rate, your cost per lead, and your cost per customer. In other words, the right kind of marketing focuses entirely on your return on your investment plus it’s predictable.

Big scale is never big scale in comparison to the typical marketing approach. When you try to do things on a big scale you can’t properly do all the follow-up things you need to do to get the most value from your efforts, so you should never do anything on a bigger scale than you can handle. That also means you’re never risking more than a few dollars on a monthly basis to get all the leads you need coming into your sales funnel. Marketing done right is one of the smartest most effective things you can do. Marketing done wrong is one of the most expensive waste of time mistakes you can make, plus when you do it wrong you can actually alienate complete strangers so they will never ever do business with you.