Marketing...How Do You Know What You Do Not Know?

Accounting (1), Marketing (2), Product Knowledge (3)...Three Legs

Marketing is one of the three legs to your business model stool.  Many business owners have a tough time trying to figure out how to market their business model effectively.  In a lot of cases, owners get caught up doing the business daily work instead of taking the time to plan where they need to guide their business model to go.  Customers need to be captured.  Marketing is the best way to make that happen.  If the owner gets too wrapped up doing the daily business work, the time needed to do the planning and idea developing cannot take place.  The marketing plans get neglected.  The third leg of the business model stool becomes neglected.  The creative part of the marketing leg falls short of where it needs to be.  That part of the business stool becomes deficient.

How do we fix this challenge?  What does a busy owner do to correct this part of the missing leg?

Furthermore, what if the business owner is not really one of those who has a creative mind?  What if the business owner is not one of those people who can sense where his customers want to be?  What if the business owner is one of those people who has trouble knowing who his customer is and why they come to his business model?  These questions are sometimes very real.  Some owners have these kinds of challenges.  They may be business owners who struggle the most with these kinds of responsibilities.  Not every business owner has the capacity to know everything that needs to be done at all times.  Sometimes we just don't get it on some things.  That is not an insult.  In fact, it may be a very good thing to admit.  If I am not good at properly marketing my wares, admit it.  Once this admission hits the table we can now begin to go to work on making some improvements to those deficiencies.

How do we market our business model more effectively?  How do we come up with new and better ideas?  How do we develop a better working plan?  If we are deficient in this category, where do we begin?

I know a lot of people in the business world who have little knowledge on how to market what they do.  There are also a lot of those business owners who do not know how to market their business models well and at the same time, they also do not know they do not know.  I see them wander about in a lost format.  I see their ways of marketing unfold in terrible fashions.  When I discovered my first 'real' business mentor, he had been working with me for about six months.  He was constantly directing my thoughts into areas I had never examined before.  Most of where we worked to discover was new and exciting to me.  I actually found some things about my business style that was very deficient and lacked good vision.  One day I was leaving his home after a short discussion about some business ideas and he walked up to the drivers side window of my vehicle.  I rolled it down to see what he had to say.  I was already turned to the street and headed for home when he walked up.  He said, "How do you know what you do not know?"  Then he smiled at me with some very serious eyes, turned around and walked away.  I was left there to ponder what he walked over to me to say.  How do you know what you do not know?

That question resonated with me while I drove all the way home.  It was the most important lesson I received that day.  Event though the two of us had just spent a couple of hours discussing a ton of business stuff inside his house that afternoon, this was the most important lesson I gained.  A short quip at my vehicle window.  Go figure.

How do you know what you do not know?

Customers need marketing.  The world of business revolves around this concept.  The marketing world of business is spinning its wheel very fast.  Are you and your business model on this spinning wheel?  If you are not on this spinning wheel somewhere, you are trying to feed your business model the left over crumbs.  Your business model is trying to live healthy by receiving a limited amount of its necessary servings.  Your model is trying to build up its muscles from the limited crumbs that flip about your way.  If your marketing efforts are not your high focus, you have skipped the most important thing that will help your model grow.  You may be skipping out of the school of promote, promote and promote.  The world is a huge passing parade.  The business models who recognize this truth are also the ones who know how to capture the attention of the people in that parade.  They are the ones who have learned how to work their marketing efforts in constant ways that are created to help how they work to increase the traffic flows they know they need.  Some business owners struggle with this part of their business duties.

Get To Know More About Marketing Correctly

I can assure you that when I left that driveway that day I was not happy.  When he walked over to my vehicle window that day I expected to hear him say something more complimentary to me.  As I drove away, my thoughts were not good.  I was thinking to myself, "What gives him the right to think he knows what I do not know?"  I was a little bit irritated by his parting comment.  How do you know what you do not know?

I got mad enough to begin my examinations.  Did you know what I found out?  I had a lot of really important things I still needed to learn about how to make my business world perform better.  I was really deficient in a lot of really important things.  One of my worst areas of attention was in my marketing plans.  I was not very good at marketing.  I was not very good at discovering where my customer wanted to be.  I was not very good at doing what my customers wanted me to do.  I was not very good at expressing how well I could do for them what they wanted me to do for them.  I had major gaps of knowledge in this area of my business life.  That is part of what I did not know then.  Keep in mind, he was far more successful in business at that time than I was.  This fact made it more difficult for me to complain about what he had said.  Instead, I went to work on trying to find out what I did not know.

There are a lot of business owners who wear this very same challenge in their business life, right now.  I know.  I have met a lot of them.  I have some business associates who I have worked with in the recent past who are troubled with this very same thing, as we speak.  They do not know what they do not know.  What's worse, they do not seem to care about doing anything about it.  I bumped into one of them just the other night in a large big box store.  My wife and I were out shopping and bumped into this owner who was there with his growing family.  We have not seen this business owner for a couple of years.  He was still struggling in his business developments.  He shared some of his woes and some of his new plans with us at that chance meeting.  While we were talking about life and its travels, he never once checked out how we were doing.  My wife and I were not part of the discussion at all.  All he could do was report to us what he was trying to do and why he felt it was not working before and why it will in the future.  He also wanted us to know how he was correcting his course.  He shared with us how his new methods of marketing were going to save the day.  He tried to encourage us to check it out for ourselves.  We spent about 20 minutes listening to his plans.  I do not think my wife ever said a word.  I think my list of words was limited to about 30 of them.  Some business owners do not get it.  They are too busy selling what they do not know.

I was polite and left him with some encouraging thoughts.  My wife quietly refrained from saying anything negative.  When I woke up the next day there he was, a continuation of the same sales pitch he was delivering the previous day at that big box store, now in my email.  Ladies and gentlemen...this is not good marketing.  This is not a good plan.

The thing he was trying to 'sell' us to discover was that he wanted me to know that maybe writing a business blog might help him and his business model find new customers.  We spent his time trying to describe to me how Google has developed this wonderful way to easily produce a business blog.  He wanted me to know how easy it is to produce a blog about business.  He wanted me to check it out.  He wanted me to become one of his supporters and to help him drive traffic to his sight so he could earn more money from the advertising clicks they offer.  He went on to describe how all of this new marketing plan works.  He spelled out to me how the clicks and tracking of the new online blog advertising world works.  He described to me how he plans to produce material that will attract the largest audiences and use their system of programmed advertisements to help him fund his other business model.  This whole discussion was coming from him at a high rate of speed.  He was excited.  This is what my wife and I heard at that big box store the night we crossed his path.  He never once examined how we were.  He was not interested in how we have been during the past couple of years.  He was too busy selling us to follow where he was trying to go.  If you are a salesperson, never forget to first qualify where your customer is located.  Before you begin your 'pitch', determine if the people you are seeing are truly interested in what you have to sell.  If you are selling ladders, make certain they do not own a ladder company.  It looks very foolish.  Now I know why my business mentor confidently said what he said to me many years ago as I was leaving his driveway, "How do you know what you do not know?"

Marketing.  Make sure you examine what the customer is interested in, first.  Then begin your pitch.  Then begin your move.  My wife and I were already doing what that old associate was trying to tell us to consider doing.  The problem he owned in that chance meeting was that he never gave us a moment of verbal rest to share that with him.  He did not truly care where we were in our life nor where we were headed to go.  He did not take the time to find out.  He did not qualify us very well.  He skipped that part of his sales methods.  My wife and I obviously recognized how shallow his concern was for where and who we were.  He was only concerned about how much we could help his online 'hits' increase.  Wow, how do you know what you do not know?  It still wicks me off a little bit.  Now I fully comprehend what my business mentor was trying to teach me.  How do you know what you do not know?  Guess what, I still do not know what I need to know.  I continue to search how to improve my marketing ways.  This little experience added more motivation to the work I still need to do.

Marketing...how do you know what you do not know?

Until next time...